Talk:Consciousness

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Consciousness article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find medical sources: Source guidelines · PubMed · Cochrane · DOAJ · Gale · OpenMD · ScienceDirect · Springer · Trip · Wiley · TWL

Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5: 100 days

Consciousness has been listed as one of the Philosophy and religion good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
October 31, 2011	Good article nominee	Listed

Medicine Mid‑importance

	Medicine portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine, which recommends that medicine-related articles follow the Manual of Style for medicine-related articles and that biomedical information in any article use high-quality medical sources. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.MedicineWikipedia:WikiProject MedicineTemplate:WikiProject Medicinemedicine articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Neuroscience Top‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Neuroscience, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Neuroscience on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.NeuroscienceWikipedia:WikiProject NeuroscienceTemplate:WikiProject Neuroscienceneuroscience articles
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

Epilepsy Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Epilepsy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of epilepsy and epileptic seizures on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EpilepsyWikipedia:WikiProject EpilepsyTemplate:WikiProject EpilepsyEpilepsy articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Philosophy: Science / Mind / Analytic / Continental / Modern / Contemporary High‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Philosophy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of content related to philosophy on Wikipedia. If you would like to support the project, please visit the project page, where you can get more details on how you can help, and where you can join the general discussion about philosophy content on Wikipedia.PhilosophyWikipedia:WikiProject PhilosophyTemplate:WikiProject PhilosophyPhilosophy articles

High

This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Associated task forces:
/
	Philosophy of science
	Philosophy of mind
	Analytic philosophy
	Continental philosophy
	Modern philosophy
	Contemporary philosophy

Psychology Top‑importance

	Psychology portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Psychology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Psychology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PsychologyWikipedia:WikiProject PsychologyTemplate:WikiProject Psychologypsychology articles
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

Cognitive science (inactive)

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Cognitive science, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Cognitive scienceWikipedia:WikiProject Cognitive scienceTemplate:WikiProject Cognitive scienceCognitive science articles

Tip: Anchors are case-sensitive in most browsers.

This article links to one or more target anchors that no longer exist.

[[Philosophy#Western philosophy|Western philosophers]] Anchor Philosophy#Western philosophy links to a specific web page: Western philosophy. The anchor (#Western philosophy) is no longer available because it was deleted by a user before.

Please help fix the broken anchors. You can remove this template after fixing the problems. | Reporting errors

Untitled

Because of their length, the previous discussions on this page have been archived. If further archiving is needed, see Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page.

Any objections to re-structuring this page?

I think this page needs to be significantly re-organized. There are a lot of high quality sources and I think in general the page does a good job of covering lots of perspectives that researchers have put forward, but often not in a very systematic way. I'm planning to re-organize the page in a sandbox (without making any changes to the content) and then copy in my revised version here, but first I wanted to check if anyone objects to my overall plan. Here are the main problems I see and how I'm planning to fix them:

The lead currently only addresses how to define consciousness rather than summarizing the whole article. The material in the lead belongs in the "Problem of definition" section with just a shorter summary in the lead along with summaries of other sections.
The "Interdisciplinary perspectives" section is actually closer to a lead since it actually summarizes the sections for philosophy, science, and medicine below. A trimmed down version of that material and summaries of other sections can together form a new lead. The "Interdisciplinary perspectives" material doesn't need a section in the body, since it just covers what is said in later sections more briefly.
Three of the sub-sections in the "Philosophy of mind" section should be moved out: "Consciousness in children", "Animal consciousness", and "Artifact consciousness". As the material in these sub-sections demonstrates, these topics are not necessarily only philosophical ones but rather span various disciplines. These three could be the sub-sections of a new section further down. Maybe it could be called "Consciousness outside human adults", though hopefully I can think of a better section title.
Within the "Scientific study" section, there should be a sub-section for "Models of consciousness". Currently, there's already quite a bit about this crammed into the "Neural correlates" sub-section and for some reason "Entropic brain" has its own sub-section while no other model does.
The "Stream of consciousness" section should be broken up. The part from William James can be worked into the "Scientific study" section, while the part about Buddhist psychology can be added to the "Spiritual approaches" section. The "Narrative form" sub-section is off-topic and I think the material should be moved to a more appropriate article, but for now I would just leave it as a separate section to avoid combining content changes with my organizational changes.
The "Anasognosia" sub-section belongs within the "Disorders of consciousness" sub-section.

There may be a few other things to move around but that's basically my plan. Again, I won't bundle content changes together with my re-organization (though in the future a lot of these sources probably need updating). If anyone has objections/suggestions for this let me know. Otherwise I'll go ahead soon. Gazelle55 (talk) 19:59, 11 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've been a bit slow to get to this and I think it's better I implement the above piece by piece rather than all at once. Just fixed the organization regarding anosognosia. Let me know if any objections as I re-organize. Gazelle55 ^{Let's talk!} 21:08, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Quick note that I didn't finish all of these, but if someone else is working on the page and wants to discuss just ping me. Gazelle55 ^{Let's talk!} 20:27, 24 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Gazelle55: One thing that really strikes me about this article is that the lead section doesn't really inform the readers that consciousness isn't truly understood and that it's mechanics are a subject of research and scientific study.★Trekker (talk) 15:33, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Second paragraph of section 4.3

The phrasing from the second sentence onwards sounds unnatural. I find it difficult to understand. What do you guys think? Indochina2 (talk) 16:21, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Philosophy of mind

Removed uncitated sources saying default is historical one.added source citated showing dominant position in philosophy of mind is physicalism Orexin (talk) 05:51, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GA concerns

I am concerned that this article doesn't follow the good article criteria anymore. Some of my concerns are highlighted below:

There is a lot of uncited text throughout the article.
There are some sections that rely upon block quotes. This creates copyright concerns and increases the word count. This information might be better as summarised prose.
The article, at over 11,000 words, is above the recommended length at WP:TOOBIG. I think this might be a sign that this is too detailed. I think removing most of the block quotes will resolve this, but the article should be edited for too much detail.
The lead does not summarise all major aspects of the article.

Is anyone interested in fixing up this article or should this go to WP:GAR? Z1720 (talk) 18:52, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]