Consciousness

//ˈkɒnʃəsnəs// noun

noun ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The state of being conscious or aware; awareness. uncountable

    "Of course it’s natural to think twice about whether your cell phone truly “knows” a favorite number, your GPS is really “figuring out” the best route home, and your Roomba is genuinely “trying” to clean the floor. But as information-processing systems become more sophisticated—as their representations of the world become richer, their goals are arranged into hierarchies of subgoals within subgoals, and their actions for attaining the goals become more diverse and less predictable—it starts to look like hominid chauvinism to insist that they don’t. (Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I’ll turn to in the final chapter.)"

  2. 2
    an alert cognitive state in which you are aware of yourself and your situation wordnet
  3. 3
    The state of being conscious or aware; awareness.; The state or trait of having cognition and sensation; cognition and sensation themselves. countable, uncountable

    "To lose consciousness after striking one's head"

  4. 4
    having knowledge of wordnet
  5. 5
    The state of being conscious or aware; awareness.; The fact of having knowledge of a particular fact or matter; cognizance. countable, uncountable

    "Although the Celebrity was almost impervious to sarcasm, he was now beginning to exhibit visible signs of uneasiness, the consciousness dawning upon him that his eccentricity was not receiving the ovation it merited."

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  1. 6
    The state of being conscious or aware; awareness.; Acute awareness (of something) and belief in its communal relevance. countable, uncountable

    "the development of a feminist consciousness"

  2. 7
    A being with cognition. countable

    "The pantheistic mainstream asari religion is siari, which translates roughly as "All is one." The faithful agree on certain core truths: the universe is a consciousness, every life within it is an aspect of the greater whole, and death is a merging of one's spiritual energy back into the greater universal consciousness. Siarists don't specifically believe in reincarnation; they believe that spiritual energy returned to the universal consciousness upon death will eventually be used to fill new mortal vessels."

Example

More examples

"Indeed, some writers do not think the relation of brain to consciousness is a causal relation in the first place."

Etymology

From conscious + -ness.

Related phrases

More for "consciousness"

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.