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Consciousness: States
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Consciousness is an spectrum. There are several states between a fully conscious state and a fully unconscious state. In medicine, the degree of loss of consciousness is measured by using Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS); a score between 3 and 15 is given to each person at any time, to show how conscious he or she is. Higher scores show more conscious states.
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From the beginning Freud treated consciousness and perception as indissolubly linked, indeed, so much so that throughout his work he deemed them to constitute a single structure, the perception-consciousness system. Freud ... drew a distinction, within nonconscious phenomena, between latent states susceptible of becoming conscious at any moment and repressed psychic processes inaccessible to consciousness. This led him to differentiate the unconscious system proper from a preconscious system, cut off from consciousness by censorship but also controlling access to consciousness. In this sense, the preconscious and the conscious are very close: both are governed by secondary processes and both draw on a bound form of psychic energy. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud spoke of the preconscious-conscious system, and in "The Unconscious" (1915e), he described the preconscious as "conscious knowledge" (p. 167), even though it provides access to unconscious contents and processes, provided that they have been transformed.
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Woolf’s probing into the human consciousness in TTL is not so simplistic that it can be attributed to any particular narrative technique. What really distinguishes her novel is the aesthetic effect of her exploration of the minds of her characters. Only an artist of Woolf’s stature can present the mental worlds of her characters with an unprecedented depth and intensity. By virtue of her depth and intensity, Woolf creates a novel both with an unconventional "plot", and an unconventional prose. In fact, the imaginative power of her language tunneling the minds of her characters translates her novel to the level of poetry. Therefore, TTL emerges not as a typical prosaic presentation of events.
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The following is a graphic presentation of reported states of consciousness as viewed from the upper quadrants of Ken Wilber's 4-Quadrant Model. The right half of the graphic is the Upper Right (UR - Individual Exterior), while the left half is the Upper Left (UL - Individual Interior). Whereas the UR represents the scientific, objective, third-personview of such states, the UL represents the subjective, phenomenological, first-person experience ofvarious states of consciousness.
In Erich Auerbach’s influential essay, "The Brown Stocking," Virginia Woolf’s distinguishing technical features of stream of consciousness are examined in relation to devices used by many contemporary writers. Auerbach states that terms such as, "erlebte Rede, stream of consciousness, and monologue interieur" have been employed, but reflect the "author’s attitude toward the reality of the world he represents." Woolf’s uniqueness begins with an "attempt to render the flow and the play of consciousness adrift in the current of changing impressions." Auerbach states that Woolf’s technique is achieved through "[t]he design of a close approach to objective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions received by various individuals (and at various times)is important in the modern technique." Woolf’s use of the "multipersonal representation of consciousness" is unique through its combination with "treatment of time." This relation is not new to modern literature; ... narration is not devoted to an external occurrence, rather internal processes. "In Virginia Woolf’s case the external events have lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events, whereas before her time… inner movements preponderantly function to prepare and motivate significant external happenings." Although there is no temporal relation between external framing and internal impressions, each share a common element. The important aspect to remember regarding the uniqueness of Woolf’s representation of consciousness is that "insignificant external occurrence releases ideas and chains of ideas which cut loose from the present of the external occurrence and range freely through the depths of time" (Auerbach 45-50).
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Functionalist theories of phenomenal consciousness that rely on more elaborately structured cognitive capacities can be less accommodating to the belief that animals do have conscious mental states. For example, some twentieth century philosophers, while rejecting Cartesian dualism, have turned his epistemological reliance upon language as an indicator of consciousness into an ontological point about the essential involvement of linguistic processing in human consciousness. Such insistence on the importance of language for consciousness underwrites the tendency of philosophers such as Dennett (1969, 1995, 1997) to deny that animals are conscious in anything like the same sense that humans are (see ... Carruthers 1996).
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