“Consciousness is knowing together with — Latin conscientia combined con (together) and scientia (knowledge), naming the state of being aware with oneself, of having inner knowledge.”
Latin conscientia combined con (together, with) and scientia (knowledge, from scire — to know). Conscientia meant knowing together with someone — shared knowledge, mutual awareness. But it also meant knowing together with oneself: inner awareness, the intimate self-knowledge that is the basis of both conscience and consciousness. Roman writers used conscientia for both the moral awareness of right and wrong and the general state of inner knowing.
English consciousness derived from Latin via French conscient, and was used first for moral awareness — knowing one's own guilt or innocence — before it expanded to describe awareness generally. The philosophical question of consciousness as a philosophical problem — what is the relationship between physical processes and inner experience? — became central in the 17th century with Descartes's radical dualism of mind and body.
John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) used consciousness to mean awareness of one's own mental states — self-awareness as a constitutive feature of personal identity. Locke argued that personal identity was constituted by continuity of consciousness rather than by continuity of soul or body. You are the same person as your past self because you remember being that person.
Today the hard problem of consciousness — explaining why physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience at all — is considered one of the deepest unsolved problems in philosophy and science. We have neural correlates of consciousness, computational models of consciousness, and philosophical theories of consciousness. But the question of why there is something it is like to be a brain remains open.
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The hard problem of consciousness is hard because it crosses the is-ought gap of explanation. We can fully describe the neural correlates of the experience of seeing red — which neurons fire, which pathways activate, which brain regions are involved. What we cannot explain is why those physical events are accompanied by the subjective experience of redness. The explanatory gap between objective description and subjective experience remains unbridged.
The Latin knowing-together-with-oneself was honest about the structure of the problem: consciousness is precisely the fact that there is an inner perspective, a self that knows. That there should be such a thing, given that matter apparently has no inner perspective, is the mystery. The Latin root did not solve it, but it named it correctly.
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