what is the name of the highest summit of nilgiri hills

The Nilgiri Mountains (Sanskrit: नीलगिरि; Tamil: நீலகிரி; Malayalam: നീലഗിരി; Kannada: ನೀಲಗಿರಿ; Neelagiri, literally blue hills) form part of the Western Ghats in western Tamil Nadu of Southern India. At least 24 of the Nilgiri mountains' peaks are above 2,000 metres (6,600 ft), the highest peak being Doddabetta, at 2,637 metres (8,652 ft).

Nilgiri mountains

Coordinates: 11°22′30″N 76°45′30″E / 11.375°N 76.75833°E / 11.375; 76.75833

Nilgiri literally means blue hill in Sanskrit and all four major Dravidian languages. The usage of the name Nilgiri has been observed since at least 1117Â CE.[2][3] It is thought that the bluish flowers of kurinji shrubs gave rise to the name.[4]

The Nilgiri mountains span around 90 km in north-south direction and nearly 80 km from east to west. The area covered is about 3900 kmÂ². Clearly distinguished from the surrounding lowlands in the west, south and east, the area is bounded by the Moyar River to the northlying Karnataka plateau and merges into the Wayanad plateau of Kerala at the north west.

Parts of the mountains lie within the Nilgiris District of Tamil Nadu.

Kotas are an ethnic group who are indigenous to the Nilgiris mountain range in Tamil Nadu, India. They are one of the many tribal peoples indigenous to the region. Others are the Todas, Irulas and Kurumbas.

The Nilgiri Hills are part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (itself part of the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves.[5]), and form a part of the protected bio reserves in India.

The high steppes of the Nilgiri Hills have been inhabited since prehistoric times, demonstrated by a large number of artifacts unearthed by excavators. A particularly important collection from the region can be seen in the British Museum, including those assembled by colonial officers James Wilkinson Breeks, Major M. J. Walhouse and Sir Walter Elliot.[6]

The first recorded use of the word Nila applied to this region can be traced back to 1117 AD. In the report of a general of Vishnuvardhana, King of Hoysalas, who in reference to his enemies, claimed to have "frightened the Todas, driven the Kongas underground, slaughtered the Poluvas, put to death the Maleyalas, terrified Chieftain Kala Nirpala and then proceeded to offer the peak of Nila Mountain (presumably Doddabetta or Rangaswami peak of Peranganad in East Nilgiris) to Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth."[7]

A hero stone (Veeragallu) with a Kannada inscription at Vazhaithottam (Bale thota) in the Nilgiri District, dated to 10th century CE, has been discovered.[8] A Kannada inscription of Hoysala king Ballala III (or his subordinate Madhava Dannayaka's son) from the 14th century CE has been discovered at the Siva (or Vishnu) temple at Nilagiri Sadarana Kote (present day Dannayakana Kote), near the junction of Moyar and Bhavani rivers, but the temple has since been submerged by the Bhavani Sagar dam.[8][9]

In 1814, as part of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, a sub-assistant named Keys and an apprentice named McMahon ascended the hills by the Danaynkeucottah (Dannayakana Kote) Pass, penetrated into the remotest parts, made plans, and sent in reports of their discoveries. As a result of these accounts, Messrs. Whish and Kindersley, two young Madras civilians, ventured up in pursuit of some criminals taking refuge in the mountains, and proceeded to observe the interior. They soon saw and felt enough favorable climate and terrain to excite their own curiosity, and that of others.[10]

After the early 1820s, the hills were developed rapidly under the British Raj, because most of the land was already privately owned by British citizens. It was a popular summer and weekend getaway for the British during the colonial days. In 1827, Ooty became the official sanatorium and the summer capital of the Madras Presidency. Many winding hill roads were built. In 1899, the Nilgiri Mountain Railway was completed by influential and enterprising British citizens, with venture capital from the Madras government.[11][12]

In the 19th century, when the British Straits Settlement shipped Chinese convicts to be jailed in India, the Chinese men settled in the Nilgiri mountains near Naduvattam after their release and married Tamil Paraiyan women, having mixed Chinese-Tamil children with them. They were documented by Edgar Thurston.[13]

The highest point in the Nilgiris and the southern extent of the range is Doddabetta Peak (2,637 metres (8,652 ft)),[14] 4 km east southeast of Udhagamandalam, 11°24′10″N 76°44′14″E / 11.40278°N 76.73722°E / 11.40278; 76.73722 (Doddabetta Peak).

Closely linked peaks in the west of Doddabetta range and nearby Udhagamandalam include:[citation needed]

Snowdon (height: (2,530 metres (8,301 ft)) 11°26′N 76°46′E / 11.433°N 76.767°E / 11.433; 76.767 (Snowdon) is the northern extent of the range. Club Hill (2,448 metres (8,031 ft)) and Elk Hill (2,466 metres (8,091 ft)) 11°23′55″N 76°42′39″E / 11.39861°N 76.71083°E / 11.39861; 76.71083 (Elk Hill) are significant elevations in this range. Snowdon, Club Hill and Elk Hill with Doddabetta, form the impressive Udhagamandalam Valley.

Devashola (height: 2,261 metres (7,418Â ft)), notable for its blue gum trees, is in the south of Doddabetta range.

Kulakombai (1,707 metres (5,600Â ft)) is east of the Devashola. The Bhavani Valley and the Lambton's peak range of Coimbatore district stretch from here.

Hullikal Durg: (height: 562 metres (1,844 ft)), 11°19′N 76°53′E / 11.317°N 76.883°E / 11.317; 76.883 (Hullikal Durg) In the Kannada language, Hulikal Durg means Tiger Rock Fort. The Sanskrit name of his place is Bakasura Parvata. It is 3 km. southeast of Coonoor. Tropical pine forest flourishes at the base of this hill, while the valleys support green foliage.

Coonoor Betta (2,101 metres (6,893Â ft)) is also called Teneriffe. It is on the northern side of the gorge, accommodating the Nilgiri Mountain Railway to Coonoor.

Rallia Hill (height: 2,248 metres (7,375 ft))11°25′N 76°53′E / 11.417°N 76.883°E / 11.417; 76.883 (Rallia Hill) is in the midst of a reserved forest and almost equidistant from Udhagamandalam and Kotagiri.

Dimhatti Hill (height: 1,788 metres (5,866 ft)) 11°26′N 76°01′E / 11.433°N 76.017°E / 11.433; 76.017 (Dimhatti Hill) is above the Gajalahatti pass, which provided a short cut from Mysore to the Carnatic plains and was of much strategic importance in the eighteenth century. This peak, dedicated to the deity Rangaswamy, is considered holy by the people of the surrounding villages.

Avalanche hill of this range has the twin-peaks of Kudikkadu (height: 2,590 metres (8,497 ft)) and Kolaribetta (2,630 metres (8,629 ft)).

Derbetta (or Bear Hill) (height: 2,531 metres (8,304 ft)) and Kolibetta (height: 2,494 metres (8,182 ft)), south of the Ouchterlony valley, are a continuation of the Kundah range.

Mukurthi Peak 2,554 metres (8,379 ft)) 11°23′29″N 76°31′38″E / 11.39139°N 76.52722°E / 11.39139; 76.52722 (Mukurthi Peak), Pichalbetta (height: 2,544 metres (8,346 ft)) and Nilgiri Peak (2,474 metres (8,117 ft)) 11°24′0″N 76°30′4″E / 11.40000°N 76.50111°E / 11.40000; 76.50111 (Nilgiri Peak) are the important heights of this area. These three hills of the Wayanad district are generally low in relation to other heights of the district but are distinguished in relation to the generally uniform level of this area.

Muttunadu Betta (height: 2,323 metres (7,621 ft)) 11°27′N 76°43′E / 11.450°N 76.717°E / 11.450; 76.717 (Muttunadu Betta) is about 5 km, north northwest of Udhagamandalam. Tamrabetta (Coppery Hill) (height: 2,120 metres (6,955 ft)) 11°22′N 76°48′E / 11.367°N 76.800°E / 11.367; 76.800 (Tamrabetta) is about 8 km southeast of Udhagamandalam. Vellangiri (Silvery Hill) (2,120 metres (6,955 ft)) is 16 km west-northwest of Udhagamandalam.[15]

Anginda Peak (height:2,238 metres (7,343 ft)) and Sispara(height:2,206 metres (7,238 ft)) are the two important peaks in the Nilgiri Hills situated in the Silent Valley National Park of Kerala.

Chembra Peak (2,100 metres (6,890 ft)) connects Nilgiris with Wayanad hills (Banasuara hill:2,079 metres (6,821 ft)) and Vellarimala hills (Vavulmala:2,342 metres (7,684 ft)).

The highest waterfall, Kolakambai Fall, north of Kolakambai hill, has an unbroken fall of 400 ft (120 m). Nearby is the 150 ft (46 m) Halashana falls. The second highest is Catherine Falls, near Kotagiri, with a 250 ft (76 m) fall, named after the wife of M.D. Cockburn, believed to have introduced coffee plantations to the Nilgiri Hills. The Upper and Lower Pykara falls have falls of 180 ft (55 m), and 200 ft (61 m), respectively. The 170 ft (52 m) Kalhatti Falls is off the Segur Peak. The Karteri Fall, near Aruvankadu had the first power station which supplied the original Cordite Factory with electricity. Law's Fall, near Coonoor, is interesting due to its association with the engineer Major G. C. Law who supervised building of the Coonoor Ghat road.[16]

Over 2,700 species of flowering plants, 160 species of fern and fern allies, countless types of flowerless plants, mosses, fungi, algae, and land lichens are found in the sholas of the Nilgiris. No other hill station has so many exotic species.[17]

The Nilgiri tahr can be found in the hills.[18]

Much of the Nilgiris' natural montane grasslands and shrublands interspersed with sholas has been much disturbed or destroyed by extensive tea plantations, easy motor-vehicle access, extensive commercial planting and harvesting of non-native eucalyptus and wattle (Acacia dealbata, Acacia mearnsii) plantations, and cattle grazing.[19] The area also features one large and several smaller hydro-electric impoundments.[20] Scotch broom has become an ecologically damaging invasive species.[21]

Threatened plants of the Nilgiris include:

Wild horse in pine forest

Vestalis submontana, endemic to Nilgiri

An adult Nilgiri langur in the Periyar National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary


who sings the song lets get it on

"Let's Get It On" is a song and hit single by soul musician Marvin Gaye, released June 15, 1973, on Motown-subsidiary label Tamla Records. The song was recorded on March 22, 1973, at Hitsville West in Los Angeles, California. The song features romantic and sexual lyricism and funk instrumentation by The Funk Brothers. The title track of Gaye's landmark 1973 album of the same name, it was written by Marvin Gaye and producer Ed Townsend. "Let's Get It On" became Gaye's most successful single for Motown and one of his most well-known songs. With the help of the song's sexually explicit content, "Let's Get It On" helped give Gaye a reputation as a sex icon during its initial popularity.

Let's Get It On (song)

Co-written with producer Ed Townsend, "Let's Get It On" was Gaye's plea for sexual liberation. When originally conceived by Townsend, who was released from a rehab facility for alcoholism, it was written with a religious theme. Gaye confidante Kenneth Stover changed some of the words around as a political song and Gaye recorded the version as it was written, but Townsend protested that the song wasn't a politically conscious song but a song dedicated to love and sex.[1] Gaye and Townsend then collaborated on new lyrics and using the original backing tracks as recorded, Gaye transformed the song into an emotional centerpiece. The album version of "Let's Get It On" features soulful and emotional singing by Gaye that is backed by multi-tracked background vocals, also provided by Gaye, along with the song's signature, and most notable, funky guitar arrangements. In an article for Rolling Stone magazine, music critic Jon Landau wrote of the song:

"Let's Get It On" is a classic Motown single, endlessly repeatable and always enjoyable. It begins with three great wah-wah notes that herald the arrival of a vintage Fifties melody. But while the song centers around classically simple chord changes, the arrangement centers around a slightly eccentric rhythm pattern that deepens the song's power while covering it with a contemporary veneer. Above all, it has Marvin Gaye's best singing at its center, fine background voices on the side, and a long, moody fade-out that challenges you not to play the cut again.[2]

The song was reprised on the fourth track of Let's Get It On as "Keep Gettin' It On", which was a sequel and continuation of the original. The recording of the title track also inspired Gaye to revive previous recordings from his earlier 1970 sessions at the Hitsville U.S.A. Studio, which would consist of the rest of the album's material.

In 2001, when the album Let's Get It On was reissued by Motown as a two-disc deluxe edition release, the original demo that Gaye had recorded with lyrics by Kenneth Stover was included. It has a running time of 5:12.

During the time of the recording of the song and its subsequent album of the same name, Marvin had befriended the family of jazz guitarist Slim Gaillard and had become smitten with Gaillard's seventeen-year-old daughter, Janis Hunter. A widely reported story has been told that Hunter was in the studio when Gaye recorded the song at the recording booth. Gaye and Hunter were said to be smitten with each other and, within months, Gaye and Hunter began dating. Hunter would become Gaye's live-in lover by 1974. Their relationship would produce two children and a 1977 marriage.[3]

"Let's Get It On" became, and remains to this day, one of Gaye's most successful singles, as it reached #1 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart on September 8, 1973.[4] The single remained at #1 for two weeks, while also remaining at the top of the Billboard Soul Singles chart for eight weeks.[5] In its first week at the top of the chart, "Let's Get It On" replaced "Brother Louie" by Stories, and was replaced by "Delta Dawn" by Helen Reddy; it later replaced "Delta Dawn" and was finally knocked off the top of the chart by Grand Funk Railroad's "We're an American Band". The single stayed inside the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 for 13 weeks, 10 of those weeks inside the top five. Billboard ranked it as the No. 4 song for 1973.[6]

The song became the biggest selling Motown release in the United States at the time, selling over two-million copies within the first six weeks of following its release. "Let's Get It On" also became the second best-selling single of 1973, only surpassed in sales by Tony Orlando & Dawn's "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree". At the time, the single was Motown's largest-selling recording ever, selling over three-million copies between 1973 and 1975.[7] The single has gone on to sell over 1Â million copies, and, on June 25, 2007, was certified platinum in sales by the RIAA.[8]

A bluegrass version of the song was later recorded by Shannon Lawson on his 2002 album Chase the Sun.[9] "Let's Get It On" was given a remix in 2004, when producers mixed Gaye's vocals with a different musical production labeled as "stepper's music". Released in 2005 as a single, "Let's Get it On (The Producers Mix)" returned the song to the Billboard R&B charts, thirty years after its original release. The re-released version of "Let's Get It On" was certified as a gold single with sales in excess of 500,000 copies in 2005 by the RIAA. In 2004, the song was ranked number 167 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time;[10] in a revised 2012 list, the song was ranked at number 168.[11] In 2008, "Let's Get It On" was ranked #32 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs list.[4]

The song appeared in a 2005 TV commercial for the Chevrolet Malibu Maxx. [12]

It has appeared in ads for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and the Starz app.

These are the formats and track listings of the major single releases of "Let's Get It On":

Original US vinyl release, T-54234F.[13]

B-side

Collectables 7-inch reissue single from the Back To Back Hit Series, COL-563.[14]

B-side


where does the last name askew come from

Askew is an English surname. Notable people with the surname include:

Askew


the type of consciousness we experience when we are conscious of external sensations

The most extensive study of the characteristics of altered states of consciousness was made by psychologist Charles Tart in the 1960s and 1970s.  Tart analyzed a state of consciousness as made up of a number of component processes, including exteroception (sensing the external world); interoception (sensing the body); input-processing (seeing meaning); emotions; memory; time sense; sense of identity; evaluation and cognitive processing; motor output; and interaction with the environment.[133]  Each of these, in his view, could be altered in multiple ways by drugs or other manipulations.  The components that Tart identified have not, however, been validated by empirical studies.  Research in this area has not yet reached firm conclusions, but a recent questionnaire-based study identified eleven significant factors contributing to drug-induced states of consciousness:  experience of unity; spiritual experience; blissful state; insightfulness; disembodiment; impaired control and cognition; anxiety; complex imagery; elementary imagery; audio-visual synesthesia; and changed meaning of percepts.[134]

Consciousness

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.[1][2] It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to  feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it,  and the executive control system of the mind.[3] Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[4] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."[5]

Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and identify its essential properties.  Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how can it be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious, a topic studied in the field of artificial intelligence.

Thanks to developments in technology over the past few decades, consciousness has become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, with significant contributions from fields such as psychology, anthropology,[6][7] neuropsychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousnessâ€”that is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness.  The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., "tell me if you notice anything when I do this").  Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and other drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques.

In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli.[8]  Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted.[9] The degree of consciousness is measured by standardized behavior observation scales such as the Glasgow Coma Scale.

The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.[10]  Locke defined consciousness as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind".[11] His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary (1755).[12]
"Consciousness" (French: conscience) is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, as "the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do." [13]

The earliest English language uses of "conscious" and "consciousness" date back, however, to the 1500s.  The English word "conscious" originally derived from the Latin conscius (con- "together" and scio "to know"), but the Latin word did not have the same meaning as our wordâ€”it meant "knowing with", in other words "having joint or common knowledge with another".[14]  There were, however, many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase conscius sibi, which translates literally as "knowing with oneself", or in other words "sharing knowledge with oneself about something".  This phrase had the figurative meaning of "knowing that one knows", as the modern English word "conscious" does.  In its earliest uses in the 1500s, the English word "conscious" retained the meaning of the Latin conscius.  For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan wrote: "Where two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another."[15]  The Latin phrase conscius sibi, whose meaning was more closely related to the current concept of consciousness, was rendered in English as "conscious to oneself" or "conscious unto oneself".  For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of "being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness".[16]  Locke's definition from 1690 illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place.

A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by writers such as Cicero.[17] Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else.[18] René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning.[19] Descartes used conscientia the way modern speakers would use "conscience".  In Search after Truth (Regulæ ad directionem ingenii ut et inquisitio veritatis per lumen naturale, Amsterdam 1701) he says "conscience or internal testimony" (conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio).[20][21]

The dictionary meaning of the word consciousness extends through several centuries and associated cognate meanings which have ranged from formal definitions to somewhat more skeptical definitions. One formal definition indicating the range of these cognate meanings is given in Webster's Third New International Dictionary stating that consciousness is:

The philosophy of mind has given rise to many stances regarding consciousness. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 1998 defines consciousness as follows:

Consciousnessâ€”Philosophers have used the term 'consciousness' for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection (and the knowledge it specifically generates) and phenomenal experience... Something within one's mind is 'introspectively conscious' just in case one introspects it (or is poised to do so). Introspection is often thought to deliver one's primary knowledge of one's mental life. An experience or other mental entity is 'phenomenally conscious' just in case there is'something it is like' for one to have it. The clearest examples are: perceptual experience, such as tastings and seeings; bodily-sensational experiences, such as those of pains, tickles and itches; imaginative experiences, such as those of one's own actions or perceptions; and streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking 'in words' or 'in images'. Introspection and phenomenality seem independent, or dissociable, although this is controversial.[22]

In a more skeptical definition of consciousness, Stuart Sutherland has exemplified some of the difficulties in fully ascertaining all of its cognate meanings in his entry for the 1989 version of the Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology:

Consciousness—The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means.  Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.[23]

Most writers on the philosophy of consciousness have been concerned with defending a particular point of view, and have organized their material accordingly.  For surveys, the most common approach is to follow a historical path by associating stances with the philosophers who are most strongly associated with them, for example Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc. An alternative is to organize philosophical stances according to basic issues.

Philosophers and non-philosophers differ in their intuitions about what consciousness is.[24] While most people have a strong intuition for the existence of what they refer to as consciousness,[25] skeptics argue that this intuition is false, either because the concept of consciousness is intrinsically incoherent, or because our intuitions about it are based in illusions.  Gilbert Ryle, for example, argued that traditional understanding of consciousness depends on a Cartesian dualist outlook that improperly distinguishes between mind and body, or between mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world, but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world. Thus, by speaking of "consciousness" we end up misleading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings.[26]  More generally, many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or fuzziness.[23]

Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood intuitively by the majority of people in spite of the difficulty in defining it.[25]  Others, though, have argued that the level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people (for instance, the objective versus subjective aspects of consciousness), or else is an umbrella term encompassing a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common.[27]

Ned Block proposed a distinction between two types of consciousness that he called phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access (A-consciousness).[28]  P-consciousness, according to Block, is simply raw experience:  it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies' and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia.  A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we perceive is access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past is access conscious, and so on.  Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this distinction,[29] others have broadly accepted it.  David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness is much more challenging:  he calls this the hard problem of consciousness.[30]

Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of consciousness are not the end of the story.  William Lycan, for example, argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness of; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)â€”and that even this list omits several more obscure forms.[31]

There is also debate over whether or not a-consciousness and p-consciousness always co-exist or if they can exist separately.  Although p-consciousness without a-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block for instance suggests the case of a “zombie” that is computationally identical to a person but without any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I don’t know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, but I hope I have illustrated their conceptual possibility." [32]

Mental processes (such as consciousness) and physical processes (such as brain events) seem to be correlated: but what is the basis of this connection and correlation between what seem to be two very different kinds of processes?

The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes, and the answer he gave is known as Cartesian dualism.  Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things, which he called res extensa (the realm of extension).[33]  He suggested that the interaction between these two domains occurs inside the brain, perhaps in a small midline structure called the pineal gland.[34]

Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed.[35]  However, no alternative solution has gained general acceptance.  Proposed solutions can be divided broadly into two categories:  dualist solutions that maintain Descartes' rigid distinction between the realm of consciousness and the realm of matter but give different answers for how the two realms relate to each other; and monist solutions that maintain that there is really only one realm of being, of which consciousness and matter are both aspects.  Each of these categories itself contains numerous variants.  The two main types of dualism are substance dualism (which holds that the mind is formed of a distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics) and property dualism (which holds that the laws of physics are universally valid but cannot be used to explain the mind).  The three main types of monism are physicalism (which holds that the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way), idealism (which holds that only thought or experience truly exists, and matter is merely an illusion), and neutral monism (which holds that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them).  There are also, however, a large number of idiosyncratic theories that cannot cleanly be assigned to any of these schools of thought.[36]

Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by the idea that consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms. The first influential writer to propose such an idea explicitly was Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book Man a Machine (L'homme machine).  His arguments, however, were very abstract.[37]  The most influential modern physical theories of consciousness are based on psychology and neuroscience. Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman[38] and Antonio Damasio,[39] and by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett,[40] seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within the brain. Many other neuroscientists, such as Christof Koch,[41] have explored the neural basis of consciousness without attempting to frame all-encompassing global theories. At the same time, computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence have pursued the goal of creating digital computer programs that can simulate or embody consciousness.[42]

A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory may provide the missing ingredients. Several theorists have therefore proposed quantum mind (QM) theories of consciousness.[43] Notable theories falling into this category include the holonomic brain theory of Karl Pribram and David Bohm, and the Orch-OR theory formulated by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of the quantum mechanical theories has been confirmed by experiment. Recent publications by G. Guerreshi, J. Cia, S. Popescu, and H. Briegel[44] could falsify proposals such as those of Hameroff, which rely on quantum entanglement in protein. At the present time many scientists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be unconvincing.[45]

Apart from the general question of the "hard problem" of consciousness, roughly speaking, the question of how mental experience arises from a physical basis,[46] a more specialized question is how to square the subjective notion that we are in control of our decisions (at least in some small measure) with the customary view of causality that subsequent events are caused by prior events. The topic of free will is the philosophical and scientific examination of this conundrum.

Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from the inside, subjectively.  But if consciousness is subjective and not visible from the outside, why do the vast majority of people believe that other people are conscious, but rocks and trees are not?[47]  This is called the problem of other minds.[48]  It is particularly acute for people who believe in the possibility of philosophical zombies, that is, people who think it is possible in principle to have an entity that is physically indistinguishable from a human being and behaves like a human being in every way but nevertheless lacks consciousness.[49] Related issues have also been studied extensively by Greg Littmann of the University of Illinois.[50] and Colin Allen a professor at Indiana University regarding the literature and research studying artificial intelligence in androids.[51]

The most commonly given answer is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior; we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do.[52]  There are, however, a variety of problems with that explanation.  For one thing, it seems to violate the principle of parsimony, by postulating an invisible entity that is not necessary to explain what we observe.[52]  Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in an essay titled The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying.[53]  More broadly, philosophers who do not accept the possibility of zombies generally believe that consciousness is reflected in behavior (including verbal behavior), and that we attribute consciousness on the basis of behavior.  A more straightforward way of saying this is that we attribute experiences to people because of what they can do, including the fact that they can tell us about their experiences.[54]

The topic of animal consciousness is beset by a number of difficulties.  It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form, because non-human animals, lacking the ability to express human language, cannot tell us about their experiences.[55]  Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong.  Descartes, for example, has sometimes been blamed for mistreatment of animals due to the fact that he believed only humans have a non-physical mind.[56]  Most people have a strong intuition that some animals, such as cats and dogs, are conscious, while others, such as insects, are not; but the sources of this intuition are not obvious, and are often based on personal interactions with pets and other animals they have observed.[55]

Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known. Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled What Is it Like to Be a Bat?.  He said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism"; and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it does itself.[57]  Other thinkers, such as Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.[58]  Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive — Donald Griffin's 2001 book Animal Minds reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.[59]

On July 7, 2012, eminent scientists from different branches of neuroscience gathered at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, which deals with consciousness in humans and pre-linguistic consciousness in nonhuman animals. After the conference, they signed in the presence of Stephen Hawking, the 'Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness', which summarizes the most important findings of the survey:

"We decided to reach a consensus and make a statement directed to the public that is not scientific. It's obvious to everyone in this room that animals have consciousness, but it is not obvious to the rest of the world. It is not obvious to the rest of the Western world or the Far East. It is not obvious to the society."[60]

"Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals [...], including all mammals and birds, and other creatures, [...] have the necessary neural substrates of consciousness and the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."[61]

The idea of an artifact made conscious is an ancient theme of mythology, appearing for example in the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who carved a statue that was magically brought to life, and in medieval Jewish stories of the Golem, a magically animated homunculus built of clay.[62] However, the possibility of actually constructing a conscious machine was probably first discussed by Ada Lovelace, in a set of notes written in 1842 about the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, a precursor (never built) to modern electronic computers.  Lovelace was essentially dismissive of the idea that a machine such as the Analytical Engine could think in a humanlike way.  She wrote:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine.Â ... The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.[63]

One of the most influential contributions to this question was an essay written in 1950 by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence.  Turing disavowed any interest in terminology, saying that even "Can machines think?" is too loaded with spurious connotations to be meaningful; but he proposed to replace all such questions with a specific operational test, which has become known as the Turing test.[64]  To pass the test, a computer must be able to imitate a human well enough to fool interrogators. In his essay Turing discussed a variety of possible objections, and presented a counterargument to each of them.  The Turing test is commonly cited in discussions of artificial intelligence as a proposed criterion for machine consciousness; it has provoked a great deal of philosophical debate. For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious,[65] while David Chalmers argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.[66] A third group of scholars have argued that with technological growth once machines begin to display any substantial signs of human-like behavior then the dichotomy (of human consciousness compared to human-like consciousness) becomes passé and issues of machine autonomy begin to prevail even as observed in its nascent form within contemporary industry and technology.[50][51] Jürgen Schmidhuber argues that consciousness is simply the result of compression.[67] As an agent sees representation of itself recurring in the environment, the compression of this representation can be called consciousness.

In a lively exchange over what has come to be referred to as "the Chinese room argument", John Searle sought to refute the claim of proponents of what he calls "strong artificial intelligence (AI)" that a computer program can be conscious, though he does agree with advocates of "weak AI" that computer programs can be formatted to "simulate" conscious states.  His own view is that consciousness has subjective, first-person causal powers by being essentially intentional due simply to the way human brains function biologically; conscious persons can perform computations, but consciousness is not inherently computational the way computer programs are.  To make a Turing machine that speaks Chinese, Searle imagines a room with one monolingual English speaker (Searle himself, in fact), a book that designates a combination of Chinese symbols to be output paired with Chinese symbol input, and boxes filled with Chinese symbols.  In this case, the English speaker is acting as a computer and the rulebook as a program.  Searle argues that with such a machine, he would be able to process the inputs to outputs perfectly without having any understanding of Chinese, nor having any idea what the questions and answers could possibly mean.  If the experiment were done in English, since Searle knows English, he would be able to take questions and give answers without any algorithms for English questions, and he would be effectively aware of what was being said and the purposes it might serve.  Searle would pass the Turing test of answering the questions in both languages, but he is only conscious of what he is doing when he speaks English.  Another way of putting the argument is to say that computer programs can pass the Turing test for processing the syntax of a language, but that the syntax cannot lead to semantic meaning in the way strong AI advocates hoped.[68][69]

In the literature concerning artificial intelligence, Searle's essay has been second only to Turing's in the volume of debate it has generated.[70]  Searle himself was vague about what extra ingredients it would take to make a machine conscious: all he proposed was that what was needed was "causal powers" of the sort that the brain has and that computers lack. But other thinkers sympathetic to his basic argument have suggested that the necessary (though perhaps still not sufficient) extra conditions may include the ability to pass not just the verbal version of the Turing test, but the robotic version,[71] which requires grounding the robot's words in the robot's sensorimotor capacity to categorize and interact with the things in the world that its words are about, Turing-indistinguishably from a real person. Turing-scale robotics is an empirical branch of research on embodied cognition and situated cognition.[72]

In 2014, Victor Argonov has suggested a non-Turing test for machine consciousness based on machine's ability to produce philosophical judgments.[73] He argues that a deterministic machine must be regarded as conscious if it is able to produces judgments on all problematic properties of consciousness (such as qualia or binding) having no innate (preloaded) philosophical knowledge on these issues, no philosophical discussions while learning, and no informational models of other creatures in its memory (such models may implicitly or explicitly contain knowledge about these creatures’ consciousness). However, this test can be used only to detect, but not refute the existence of consciousness. A positive result proves that machine is conscious but a negative result proves nothing. For example, absence of philosophical judgments may be
caused by lack of the machine’s intellect, not by absence of consciousness.

For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods.[74]  In 1975 George Mandler published an influential psychological study which distinguished between slow, serial, and limited conscious processes and fast, parallel and extensive unconscious ones.[75] Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies, giving rise to a stream of experimental work published in books,[76] journals such as Consciousness and Cognition, Frontiers in Consciousness Research, Psyche, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.[77]

Modern medical and psychological investigations into consciousness are based on psychological experiments (including, for example, the investigation of priming effects using subliminal stimuli), and on case studies of alterations in consciousness produced by trauma, illness, or drugs.  Broadly viewed, scientific approaches are based on two core concepts.  The first identifies the content of consciousness with the experiences that are reported by human subjects; the second makes use of the concept of consciousness that has been developed by neurologists and other medical professionals who deal with patients whose behavior is impaired.  In either case, the ultimate goals are to develop techniques for assessing consciousness objectively in humans as well as other animals, and to understand the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie it.[41]

Experimental research on consciousness presents special difficulties, due to the lack of a universally accepted operational definition. In the majority of experiments that are specifically about consciousness, the subjects are human, and the criterion used is verbal report:  in other words, subjects are asked to describe their experiences, and their descriptions are treated as observations of the contents of consciousness.[78]  For example, subjects who stare continuously at a Necker cube usually report that they experience it "flipping" between two 3D configurations, even though the stimulus itself remains the same.[79]  The objective is to understand the relationship between the conscious awareness of stimuli (as indicated by verbal report) and the effects the stimuli have on brain activity and behavior. In several paradigms, such as the technique of response priming, the behavior of subjects is clearly influenced by stimuli for which they report no awareness, and suitable experimental manipulations can lead to increasing priming effects despite decreasing prime identification (double dissociation).[80]

Verbal report is widely considered to be the most reliable indicator of consciousness, but it raises a number of issues.[81]  For one thing, if verbal reports are treated as observations, akin to observations in other branches of science, then the possibility arises that they may contain errorsâ€”but it is difficult to make sense of the idea that subjects could be wrong about their own experiences, and even more difficult to see how such an error could be detected.[82] Daniel Dennett has argued for an approach he calls heterophenomenology, which means treating verbal reports as stories that may or may not be true, but his ideas about how to do this have not been widely adopted.[83]  Another issue with verbal report as a criterion is that it restricts the field of study to humans who have language:  this approach cannot be used to study consciousness in other species, pre-linguistic children, or people with types of brain damage that impair language.  As a third issue, philosophers who dispute the validity of the Turing test may feel that it is possible, at least in principle, for verbal report to be dissociated from consciousness entirely:  a philosophical zombie may give detailed verbal reports of awareness in the absence of any genuine awareness.[84]

Although verbal report is in practice the "gold standard" for ascribing consciousness, it is not the only possible criterion.[81]  In medicine, consciousness is assessed as a combination of verbal behavior, arousal, brain activity and purposeful movement.  The last three of these can be used as indicators of consciousness when verbal behavior is absent.[85]  The scientific literature regarding the neural bases of arousal and purposeful movement is very extensive.  Their reliability as indicators of consciousness is disputed, however, due to numerous studies showing that alert human subjects can be induced to behave purposefully in a variety of ways in spite of reporting a complete lack of awareness.[80]  Studies of the neuroscience of free will have also shown that the experiences that people report when they behave purposefully sometimes do not correspond to their actual behaviors or to the patterns of electrical activity recorded from their brains.[86]

Another approach applies specifically to the study of self-awareness, that is, the ability to distinguish oneself from others.  In the 1970s Gordon Gallup developed an operational test for self-awareness, known as the mirror test.  The test examines whether animals are able to differentiate between seeing themselves in a mirror versus seeing other animals. The classic example involves placing a spot of coloring on the skin or fur near the individual's forehead and seeing if they attempt to remove it or at least touch the spot, thus indicating that they recognize that the individual they are seeing in the mirror is themselves.[87]  Humans (older than 18 months) and other great apes, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, pigeons, European magpies and elephants have all been observed to pass this test.[88]

A major part of the scientific literature on consciousness consists of studies that examine the relationship between the experiences reported by subjects and the activity that simultaneously takes place in their brainsâ€”that is, studies of the neural correlates of consciousness.  The hope is to find that activity in a particular part of the brain, or a particular pattern of global brain activity, which will be strongly predictive of conscious awareness.  Several brain imaging techniques, such as EEG and fMRI, have been used for physical measures of brain activity in these studies.[89]

Another idea that has drawn attention for several decades is that consciousness is associated with high-frequency (gamma band) oscillations in brain activity.  This idea arose from proposals in the 1980s, by Christof von der Malsburg and Wolf Singer, that gamma oscillations could solve the so-called binding problem, by linking information represented in different parts of the brain into a unified experience.[90] Rodolfo Llinás, for example, proposed that consciousness results from recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance where the specific thalamocortical systems (content) and the non-specific (centromedial thalamus) thalamocortical systems (context) interact in the gamma band frequency via synchronous oscillations.[91]

A number of studies have shown that activity in primary sensory areas of the brain is not sufficient to produce consciousness:  it is possible for subjects to report a lack of awareness even when areas such as the primary visual cortex show clear electrical responses to a stimulus.[92]  Higher brain areas are seen as more promising, especially the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in a range of higher cognitive functions collectively known as executive functions.  There is substantial evidence that a "top-down" flow of neural activity (i.e., activity propagating from the frontal cortex to sensory areas) is more predictive of conscious awareness than a "bottom-up" flow of activity.[93]  The prefrontal cortex is not the only candidate area, however:  studies by Nikos Logothetis and his colleagues have shown, for example, that visually responsive neurons in parts of the temporal lobe reflect the visual perception in the situation when conflicting visual images are presented to different eyes (i.e., bistable percepts during binocular rivalry).[94]

Modulation of neural responses may correlate with phenomenal experiences. In contrast to the raw electrical responses that do not correlate with consciousness, the modulation of these responses by other stimuli correlates surprisingly well with an important aspect of consciousness: namely with the phenomenal experience of stimulus intensity (brightness, contrast). In the research group of Danko Nikolić it has been shown that some of the changes in the subjectively perceived brightness correlated with the modulation of firing rates while others correlated with the modulation of neural synchrony.[95] An fMRI investigation suggested that these findings were strictly limited to the primary visual areas.[96] This indicates that, in the primary visual areas, changes in firing rates and synchrony can be considered as neural correlates of qualia—at least for some type of qualia.

In 2011, Graziano and Kastner[97] proposed the "attention schema" theory of awareness. In that theory, specific cortical areas, notably in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporo-parietal junction, are used to build the construct of awareness and attribute it to other people. The same cortical machinery is also used to attribute awareness to oneself. Damage to these cortical regions can lead to deficits in consciousness such as hemispatial neglect. In the attention schema theory, the value of explaining the feature of awareness and attributing it to a person is to gain a useful predictive model of that person's attentional processing. Attention is a style of information processing in which a brain focuses its resources on a limited set of interrelated signals. Awareness, in this theory, is a useful, simplified schema that represents attentional states. To be aware of X is explained by constructing a model of one's attentional focus on X.

In the 2013, the perturbational complexity index (PCI) was proposed, a measure of the algorithmic complexity of the electrophysiological response of the cortex to transcranial magnetic stimulation. This measure was shown to be higher in individuals that are awake, in REM sleep or in a locked-in state than in those who are in deep sleep or in a vegetative state,[98] making it potentially useful as a quantitative assessment of consciousness states.

Assuming that not only humans but even some non-mammalian species are conscious, a number of evolutionary approaches to the problem of neural correlates of consciousness open up. For example, assuming that birds are conscious — a common assumption among neuroscientists and ethologists due to the extensive cognitive repertoire of birds — there are comparative neuroanatomical ways to validate some of the principal, currently competing, mammalian consciousness–brain theories. The rationale for such a comparative study is that the avian brain deviates structurally from the mammalian brain. So how similar are they? What homologues can be identified? The general conclusion from the study by Butler, et al.,[99] is that some of the major theories for the mammalian brain [100][101][102] also appear to be valid for the avian brain. The structures assumed to be critical for consciousness in mammalian brains have homologous counterparts in avian brains. Thus the main portions of the theories of Crick and Koch,[100] Edelman and Tononi,[101] and Cotterill [102] seem  to be compatible with the assumption that birds are conscious. Edelman also differentiates between what he calls primary consciousness (which is a trait shared by humans and non-human animals) and higher-order consciousness as it appears in humans alone along with human language capacity.[101] Certain aspects of the three theories, however, seem less easy to apply to the hypothesis of avian consciousness. For instance, the suggestion by Crick and Koch that layer 5 neurons of the mammalian brain have a special role, seems difficult to apply to the avian brain, since the avian homologues have a different morphology. Likewise, the theory of Eccles[103][104] seems incompatible, since a structural homologue/analogue to the dendron has not been found in avian brains. The assumption of an avian consciousness also brings the reptilian brain into focus. The reason is the structural continuity between avian and reptilian brains, meaning that the phylogenetic origin of consciousness may be earlier than suggested by many leading neuroscientists.

Joaquin Fuster of UCLA has advocated the position of the importance of the prefrontal cortex in humans, along with the areas of Wernicke and Broca, as being of particular importance to the development of human language capacities neuro-anatomically necessary for the emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans.[105]

Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolution consciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value. Some argue that consciousness is a byproduct of evolution. It has been argued that consciousness emerged (i) exclusively with the first humans, (ii) exclusively with the first mammals, (iii) independently in mammals and birds, or (iv) with the first reptiles.[106] Other authors date the origins of consciousness to the first animals with nervous systems or early vertebrates in the Cambrian over 500 million years ago.[107] Donald Griffin suggests in his book Animal Minds a gradual evolution of consciousness.[59] Each of these scenarios raises the question of the possible survival value of consciousness.

Thomas Henry Huxley defends in an essay titled On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History an epiphenomenalist theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is a causally inert effect of neural activity — “as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery”.[108] To this William James objects in his essay Are We Automata? by stating an evolutionary argument for mind-brain interaction implying that if the preservation and development of consciousness in the biological evolution is a result of natural selection, it is plausible that consciousness has not only been influenced by neural processes, but has had a survival value itself; and it could only have had this if it had been efficacious.[109][110] Karl Popper develops in the book The Self and Its Brain a similar evolutionary argument.[111]

Regarding the primary function of conscious processing, a recurring idea in recent theories is that phenomenal states somehow integrate neural activities and information-processing that would otherwise be independent.[112] This has been called the integration consensus. Another example has been proposed by Gerald Edelman called dynamic core hypothesis which puts emphasis on reentrant connections that reciprocally link areas of the brain in a massively parallel manner.[113] Edelman also stresses the importance of the evolutionary emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans from the historically older trait of primary consciousness which humans share with non-human animals (see Neural correlates section above). These theories of integrative function present solutions to two classic problems associated with consciousness: differentiation and unity. They show how our conscious experience can discriminate between a virtually unlimited number of different possible scenes and details (differentiation) because it integrates those details from our sensory systems, while the integrative nature of consciousness in this view easily explains how our experience can seem unified as one whole despite all of these individual parts. However, it remains unspecified which kinds of information are integrated in a conscious manner and which kinds can be integrated without consciousness. Nor is it explained what specific causal role conscious integration plays, nor why the same functionality cannot be achieved without consciousness. Obviously not all kinds of information are capable of being disseminated consciously (e.g., neural activity related to vegetative functions, reflexes, unconscious motor programs, low-level perceptual analyses, etc.) and many kinds of information can be disseminated and combined with other kinds without consciousness, as in intersensory interactions such as the ventriloquism effect.[114] Hence it remains unclear why any of it is conscious. For a review of the differences between conscious and unconscious integrations, see the article of E. Morsella.[114]

As noted earlier, even among writers who consider consciousness to be a well-defined thing, there is widespread dispute about which animals other than humans can be said to possess it.[115] Edelman has described this distinction as that of humans possessing higher-order consciousness while sharing the trait of primary consciousness with non-human animals (see previous paragraph). Thus, any examination of the evolution of consciousness is faced with great difficulties.  Nevertheless, some writers have argued that consciousness can be viewed from the standpoint of  evolutionary biology as an adaptation in the sense of a trait that increases fitness.[116]  In his article "Evolution of consciousness", John Eccles argued that special anatomical and physical properties of the mammalian cerebral cortex gave rise to consciousness ("[a] psychon... linked to [a] dendron through quantum physics").[117]  Bernard Baars proposed that once in place, this "recursive" circuitry may have provided a basis for the subsequent development of many of the functions that consciousness facilitates in higher organisms.[118] Peter Carruthers has put forth one such potential adaptive advantage gained by conscious creatures by suggesting that consciousness allows an individual to make distinctions between appearance and reality.[119] This ability would enable a creature to recognize the likelihood that their perceptions are deceiving them (e.g. that water in the distance may be a mirage) and behave accordingly, and it could also facilitate the manipulation of others by recognizing how things appear to them for both cooperative and devious ends.

Other philosophers, however, have suggested that consciousness would not be necessary for any functional advantage in evolutionary processes.[120][121] No one has given a causal explanation, they argue, of why it would not be possible for a functionally equivalent non-conscious organism (i.e., a philosophical zombie) to achieve the very same survival advantages as a conscious organism. If evolutionary processes are blind to the difference between function F being performed by conscious organism O and non-conscious organism O*, it is unclear what adaptive advantage consciousness could provide.[122] As a result, an exaptive explanation of consciousness has gained favor with some theorists that posit consciousness did not evolve as an adaptation but was an exaptation arising as a consequence of other developments such as increases in brain size or cortical rearrangement.[107] Consciousness in this sense has been compared to the blind spot in the retina where it is not an adaption of the retina, but instead just a by-product of the way the retinal axons were wired.[123]  Several scholars including Pinker, Chomsky, Edelman, and Luria have indicated the importance of the emergence of human language as an important regulative mechanism of learning and memory in the context of the development of higher-order consciousness (see Neural correlates section above).

There are some brain states in which consciousness seems to be absent, including dreamless sleep, coma, and death.  There are also a variety of circumstances that can change the relationship between the mind and the world in less drastic ways, producing what are known as altered states of consciousness.  Some altered states occur naturally; others can be produced by drugs or brain damage.[124] Altered states can be accompanied by changes in thinking, disturbances in the sense of time, feelings of loss of control, changes in emotional expression, alternations in body image and changes in meaning or significance.[125]

The two most widely accepted altered states are sleep and dreaming.  Although dream sleep and non-dream sleep appear very similar to an outside observer, each is associated with a distinct pattern of brain activity, metabolic activity, and eye movement;  each is also associated with a distinct pattern of experience and cognition.  During ordinary non-dream sleep, people who are awakened report only vague and sketchy thoughts, and their experiences do not cohere into a continuous narrative.  During dream sleep, in contrast, people who are awakened report rich and detailed experiences in which events form a continuous progression, which may however be interrupted by bizarre or fantastic intrusions.[126]  Thought processes during the dream state frequently show a high level of irrationality.  Both dream and non-dream states are associated with severe disruption of memory:  it usually disappears in seconds during the non-dream state, and in minutes after awakening from a dream unless actively refreshed.[127]

Research conducted on the effects of partial epileptic seizures on consciousness found that patients who suffer from partial epileptic seizures experience altered states of consciousness.[128][129] In partial epileptic seizures, consciousness is impaired or lost while some aspects of consciousness, often automated behaviors, remain intact. Studies found that when measuring the qualitative features during partial epileptic seizures, patients exhibited an increase in arousal and became absorbed in the experience of the seizure, followed by difficulty in focusing and shifting attention.

A variety of psychoactive drugs, including alcohol, have notable effects on consciousness.[130] These range from a simple dulling of awareness produced by sedatives, to increases in the intensity of sensory qualities produced by stimulants, cannabis, empathogensâ€“entactogens such as MDMA ("Ecstasy"), or most notably by the class of drugs known as psychedelics.[124] LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, Dimethyltryptamine, and others in this group can produce major distortions of perception, including hallucinations; some users even describe their drug-induced experiences as mystical or spiritual in quality. The brain mechanisms underlying these effects are not as well understood as those induced by use of alcohol,[130] but there is substantial evidence that alterations in the brain system that uses the chemical neurotransmitter serotonin play an essential role.[131]

There has been some research into physiological changes in yogis and people who practise various techniques of meditation.  Some research with brain waves during meditation has reported differences between those corresponding to ordinary relaxation and those corresponding to meditation.  It has been disputed, however, whether there is enough evidence to count these as physiologically distinct states of consciousness.[132]

Phenomenology is a method of inquiry that attempts to examine the structure of consciousness in its own right, putting aside problems regarding the relationship of consciousness to the physical world. This approach was first proposed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, and later elaborated by other philosophers and scientists.[135] Husserl's original concept gave rise to two distinct lines of inquiry, in philosophy and psychology. In philosophy, phenomenology has largely been devoted to fundamental metaphysical questions, such as the nature of intentionality ("aboutness"). In psychology, phenomenology largely has meant attempting to investigate consciousness using the method of introspection, which means looking into one's own mind and reporting what one observes. This method fell into disrepute in the early twentieth century because of grave doubts about its reliability, but has been rehabilitated to some degree, especially when used in combination with techniques for examining brain activity.[136]

Introspectively, the world of conscious experience seems to have considerable structure.  Immanuel Kant asserted that the world as we perceive it is organized according to a set of fundamental "intuitions", which include 'object' (we perceive the world as a set of distinct things);'shape'; 'quality' (color, warmth, etc.);'space' (distance, direction, and location); and 'time'.[137] Some of these constructs, such as space and time, correspond to the way the world is structured by the laws of physics; for others the correspondence is not as clear. Understanding the physical basis of qualities, such as redness or pain, has been particularly challenging. David Chalmers has called this the hard problem of consciousness.[30] Some philosophers have argued that it is intrinsically unsolvable, because qualities ("qualia") are ineffable; that is, they are "raw feels", incapable of being analyzed into component processes.[138] Other psychologists and neuroscientists reject these arguments. For example, research on ideasthesia shows that qualia are organised into a semantic-like network. Nevertheless, it is clear that the relationship between a physical entity such as light and a perceptual quality such as color is extraordinarily complex and indirect, as demonstrated by a variety of optical illusions such as neon color spreading.[139]

In neuroscience, a great deal of effort has gone into investigating how the perceived world of conscious awareness is constructed inside the brain. The process is generally thought to involve two primary mechanisms: (1) hierarchical processing of sensory inputs, and (2) memory. Signals arising from sensory organs are transmitted to the brain and then processed in a series of stages, which extract multiple types of information from the raw input. In the visual system, for example, sensory signals from the eyes are transmitted to the thalamus and then to the primary visual cortex; inside the cerebral cortex they are sent to areas that extract features such as three-dimensional structure, shape, color, and motion.[140] Memory comes into play in at least two ways. First, it allows sensory information to be evaluated in the context of previous experience. Second, and even more importantly, working memory allows information to be integrated over time so that it can generate a stable representation of the worldâ€”Gerald Edelman expressed this point vividly by titling one of his books about consciousness The Remembered Present.[141] In computational neuroscience, Bayesian approaches to brain function have been used to understand both the evaluation of sensory information in light of previous experience, and the integration of information over time. Bayesian models of the brain are probabilistic inference models, in which the brain takes advantage of prior knowledge to interpret uncertain sensory inputs in order to formulate a conscious percept; Bayesian models have successfully predicted many perceptual phenomena in vision and the nonvisual senses.[142][143][144]

Despite the large amount of information available, many important aspects of perception remain mysterious. A great deal is known about low-level signal processing in sensory systems. However, how sensory systems, action systems, and language systems interact are poorly understood. At a deeper level, there are still basic conceptual issues that remain unresolved.[140]  Many scientists have found it difficult to reconcile the fact that information is distributed across multiple brain areas with the apparent unity of consciousness: this is one aspect of the so-called binding problem.[145] There are also some scientists who have expressed grave reservations about the idea that the brain forms representations of the outside world at all: influential members of this group include psychologist J. J. Gibson and roboticist Rodney Brooks, who both argued in favor of "intelligence without representation".[146]

The medical approach to consciousness is practically oriented.   It derives from a need to treat people whose brain function has been impaired as a result of disease, brain damage, toxins, or drugs.  In medicine, conceptual distinctions are considered useful to the degree that they can help to guide treatments.   Whereas the philosophical approach to consciousness focuses on its fundamental nature and its contents, the medical approach focuses on the amount of consciousness a person has:  in medicine, consciousness is assessed as a "level" ranging from coma and brain death at the low end, to full alertness and purposeful responsiveness at the high end.[147]

Consciousness is of concern to patients and physicians, especially neurologists and anesthesiologists. Patients may suffer from disorders of consciousness, or may need to be anesthetized for a surgical procedure.  Physicians may perform consciousness-related interventions such as instructing the patient to sleep, administering general anesthesia, or inducing medical coma.[147] Also, bioethicists may be concerned with the ethical implications of consciousness in medical cases of patients such as the Karen Ann Quinlan case,[148] while neuroscientists may study patients with impaired consciousness in hopes of gaining information about how the brain works.[149]

In medicine, consciousness is examined using a set of procedures known as neuropsychological assessment.[85]  There are two commonly used methods for assessing the level of consciousness of a patient: a simple procedure that requires minimal training, and a more complex procedure that requires substantial expertise.  The simple procedure begins by asking whether the patient is able to move and react to physical stimuli.  If so, the next question is whether the patient can respond in a meaningful way to questions and commands.  If so, the patient is asked for name, current location, and current day and time.  A patient who can answer all of these questions is said to be "alert and oriented times four" (sometimes denoted "A&Ox4" on a medical chart), and is usually considered fully conscious.[150]

The more complex procedure is known as a neurological examination, and is usually carried out by a neurologist in a hospital setting.  A formal neurological examination runs through a precisely delineated series of tests, beginning with tests for basic sensorimotor reflexes, and culminating with tests for sophisticated use of language.  The outcome may be summarized using the Glasgow Coma Scale, which yields a number in the range 3â€”15, with a score of 3 to 8 indicating coma, and 15 indicating full consciousness.  The Glasgow Coma Scale has three subscales, measuring the best motor response (ranging from "no motor response" to "obeys commands"), the best eye response (ranging from "no eye opening" to "eyes opening spontaneously") and the best verbal response (ranging from "no verbal response" to "fully oriented").  There is also a simpler pediatric version of the scale, for children too young to be able to use language.[147]

In 2013, an experimental procedure was developed to measure degrees of consciousness, the procedure involving stimulating the brain with a magnetic pulse, measuring resulting waves of electrical activity, and developing a consciousness score based on the complexity of the brain activity.[151]

Medical conditions that inhibit consciousness are considered disorders of consciousness.[152] This category generally includes minimally conscious state and persistent vegetative state, but sometimes also includes the less severe locked-in syndrome and more severe chronic coma.[152][153] Differential diagnosis of these disorders is an active area of biomedical research.[154][155][156] Finally, brain death results in an irreversible disruption of consciousness.[152] While other conditions may cause a moderate deterioration (e.g., dementia and delirium) or transient interruption (e.g., grand mal and petit mal seizures) of consciousness, they are not included in this category.

One of the most striking disorders of consciousness goes by the name anosognosia, a Greek-derived term meaning 'unawareness of disease'.  This is a condition in which patients are disabled in some way, most commonly as a result of a stroke, but either misunderstand the nature of the problem or deny that there is anything wrong with them.[157]  The most frequently occurring form is seen in people who have experienced a stroke damaging the parietal lobe in the right hemisphere of the brain, giving rise to a syndrome known as hemispatial neglect, characterized by an inability to direct action or attention toward objects located to the left with respect to their bodies.  Patients with hemispatial neglect are often paralyzed on the right side of the body, but sometimes deny being unable to move.  When questioned about the obvious problem, the patient may avoid giving a direct answer, or may give an explanation that doesn't make sense.  Patients with hemispatial neglect may also fail to recognize paralyzed parts of their bodies:  one frequently mentioned case is of a man who repeatedly tried to throw his own paralyzed right leg out of the bed he was lying in, and when asked what he was doing, complained that somebody had put a dead leg into the bed with him.  An even more striking type of anosognosia is Anton–Babinski syndrome, a rarely occurring condition in which patients become blind but claim to be able to see normally, and persist in this claim in spite of all evidence to the contrary.[158]

William James is usually credited with popularizing the idea that human consciousness flows like a stream, in his Principles of Psychology of 1890.  According to James, the "stream of thought" is governed by five characteristics:  "(1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. (2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. (3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. (4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. (5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others".[159]  A similar concept appears in Buddhist philosophy, expressed by the Sanskrit term Citta-saṃtāna, which is usually translated as mindstream or "mental continuum". Buddhist teachings describe that consciousness manifests moment to moment as sense impressions and mental phenomena that are continuously changing.[160] The teachings list six triggers that can result in the generation of different mental events.[160] These triggers are input from the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or touch sensations), or a thought (relating to the past, present or the future) that happen to arise in the mind. The mental events generated as a result of these triggers are: feelings, perceptions and intentions/behaviour.  The moment-by-moment manifestation of the mind-stream is said to happen in every person all the time. It even happens in a scientist who analyses various phenomena in the world, or analyses the material body including the organ brain.[160] The manifestation of the mindstream is also described as being influenced by physical laws, biological laws, psychological laws, volitional laws, and universal laws.[160] The purpose of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is to understand the inherent nature of the consciousness and its characteristics.[161]

In the west, the primary impact of the idea has been on literature rather than science:  stream of consciousness as a narrative mode means writing in a way that attempts to portray the moment-to-moment thoughts and experiences of a character.  This technique perhaps had its beginnings in the monologues of Shakespeare's plays, and reached its fullest development in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, although it has also been used by many other noted writers.[162]

Here for example is a passage from Joyce's Ulysses about the thoughts of Molly Bloom:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her.[163]

Consciousness may have a determinative role in quantum mechanics.  Since consciousness is the primary aspect of an observer, and observation is viewed as a primary reason for wave function collapse,[164] consciousness may account for aspects of the  measurement problem exemplified by the Schrödinger's cat paradox. This area has been an area of lively debate for decades,[165] with recent efforts to substitute randomly caused decoherence as the source of wave function collapse.[166]
[167]

Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler provided a useful survey[168] of some of the issues.

To most philosophers, the word "consciousness" connotes the relationship between the mind and the world. To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world.  Krishna consciousness, for example, is a term used to mean an intimate linkage between the mind of a worshipper and the god Krishna.[169]  The mystical psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke distinguished between three types of consciousness:  'Simple Consciousness', awareness of the body, possessed by many animals; 'Self Consciousness', awareness of being aware, possessed only by humans; and 'Cosmic Consciousness', awareness of the life and order of the universe, possessed only by humans who are enlightened.[170]  Many more examples could be given, such as the various levels of spiritual consciousness presented by Prem Saran Satsangi and Stuart Hameroff.[171] The most thorough account of the spiritual approach may be Ken Wilber's book The Spectrum of Consciousness, a comparison of western and eastern ways of thinking about the mind. Wilber described consciousness as a spectrum with ordinary awareness at one end, and more profound types of awareness at higher levels.[172]


when do pamela and chase get back together

Throughout the first seasons, Pamela struggles with the constant absences of Chase due to his commitments to Delta Force and the secrecy of his deployments. This comes to a high when she asks him to quit Delta Force because he always prioritizes his career over their family. Since he refuses, they divorce in the fourth season. This causes her to move away from the post and she returns to her original occupation as a police officer to provide for her children. At the end of the fourth season, Chase announces to Pamela that he is ready to quit Delta Force and tells her that he wants to be with her again. Also she receives a job offer as detective in Atlanta. In the beginning of the fifth season, Pamela is really struggling to make a decision, her partner invites her on a date and later kisses her. Pamela rekindles her relationship with Chase later in the fifth season and they later remarry in the Hump Bar. At the end of the season, Chase receives a job offer in California which promises a better pay than his and Pamela's current salaries combined. Chase accepts the offer and moves there alone so that the children can finish their school year in Charleston. However, after their house gets damaged by a hurricane and because the children miss Chase, she decides to go to California.

Pamela Moran

Pamela Kathleen Moran is a fictional character from the television series Army Wives, which airs on Lifetime in the United States. The character was created by series' producer Katherine Fugate and is portrayed by actress Brigid Brannagh from the first through sixth seasons.

Pamela comes from a family of police officers and firefighters and was a cop with Boston PD for three years. She left it to marry Chase and became a full-time housewife. The couple have two children Katie and Lucas, who was born while Chase was deployed. It is stated in Season 4 that they have been married for thirteen years.

Due to an ever amounting debt, Pamela becomes a paid surrogate mother, for which she received $50,000. Much of the surrogacy is kept a secret between Pamela and Chase due to pride. However, because of a premature birth of the twins, the secret comes out to an additional few, which leads to a bond between fellow military spouses Claudia Joy Holden, Roxy LeBlanc, Dr. Roland Burton and Denise Sherwood. Pamela later becomes more comfortable talking about it and reveals the surrogacy to her children and to the rest of the post.

Pamela is offered a job for the radio of the post but is later victim of stalking when a listener becomes obsessed with her. She also becomes the football coach.

Describing her character, Brannagh said "Pamela is an ex cop married to a sergeant in Delta force. Which is definitely different than my life. But Pamela is a very straight forward person, and I would say that am very much straight forward, and she certainly follows her conscience and so do I, but we have a few differences as well. I love to cook – she does not. And I like a very clean house, and if you saw the set this is clearly not Pamela’s priority."[1] and that "she’s really down to earth and a little acerbic".[2] Reflecting on her character's development, she said: "Pamela started out a little more cranky and dry but has softened as a byproduct of her friendship with the other women.[3]

Baseguide, a military spouse magazine, wrote: "Brannagh brings to the role a deep-felt appreciation and growing empathy for the nationâ€™s military members and their families."[4]


was iowa a state during the civil war

Iowa had become the 29th state in the Union on December 28, 1846, and the state continued to attract many settlers, both native and foreign-born. Only the extreme northwestern part of the state remained a frontier area. With the development in the 1850s of the Illinois Central and the Chicago and North Western Railway, Iowa's fertile fields were linked with Eastern supply depots as the Civil War began. Manufacturing companies in the eastern part of the state, as well as farmers, could readily get their products to the Union army.

Iowa in the American Civil War

The state of Iowa played a role during the American Civil War in providing food, supplies, and troops for the Union army, though its contributions were overshadowed by larger and more populated eastern states.

The Civil War era brought considerable change to Iowa's politics. During the 1850s, the state's dominant Democratic Party developed serious internal problems, as well as being unsuccessful in getting the national Democratic Party to respond to their local needs. Iowans soon turned to the newly emerging Republican Party. The new party opposed slavery and promoted land ownership, banking, and railroads, and Iowa voted heavily for Abraham Lincoln and other Republican politicians in 1860 and throughout the war, though there was a strong antiwar "Copperhead" movement among recent settlers of Southern origins. The Democratic party remained particularly in places around the Mississippi River such as Dubuque that had been heavily settled by German immigrants.

As the Civil War erupted, Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood led efforts to raise and equip volunteer troops for the Federal service. The 1st Iowa Infantry was raised for three-months duty from May until August 1861. It helped secure the strategic Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad in northern Missouri, then endured a series of forced marches across the state, finally fighting with distinction in the Battle of Wilson's Creek, a task rewarded by the official Thanks of Congress, and two Iowans would later be awarded the Medal of Honor for their efforts in the fighting.

There were no significant battles in Iowa, but the state sent large supplies of food to the armies and the eastern cities. 76,242 Iowa men (out of a total population of 674,913 in 1860) served in the military, many in combat units attached to the western armies. 13,001 died of wounds or disease (two-thirds of the total). 8,500 Iowa men were wounded. Cemeteries throughout the South contain the remains of Iowa soldiers that fell during the war, with the largest concentration at Vicksburg National Cemetery. A number also died in Confederate prison camps, including Andersonville prison. Though the total number of Iowans who served in the military during the Civil War seems small compared to the more heavily populated eastern and southern states, no other state, north or south, had a higher percentage of its male population between the ages of 15 and 40 serve in the military during the course of the war.

Iowa contributed 48 regiments of state infantry, 1 regiment of black infantry (the 1st Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment (African Descent)), 9 regiments of cavalry, and 4 artillery batteries. In addition to these Federally mustered troops, the state also raised a number of home guard or militia units, including the Northern Border Brigade and Southern Border Brigade, primarily for defense of the borders. Other local units included the Sioux City Cavalry.

Sporadically, Confederate partisans and bushwhackers raided Iowa. One such incursion in the fall of 1864 was designed to disrupt the reelection of Abraham Lincoln. Near the Missouri border, many Iowans were pro-slavery, anti-Lincoln Confederate sympathizers, and they provided a safe haven for guerrillas. On October 12, 1864, a dozen raiders disguised as Union soldiers terrorized Davis County, where they looted residences and kidnapped and murdered three Iowans near Bloomfield.

The Keokuk National Cemetery was established as a final resting place for bodies from five local U.S. Army hospitals in Keokuk. It holds over 600 Union soldiers, and 8 Confederate prisoners of war.

Following the war, a number of veterans organizations, and in particular the Grand Army of the Republic, played a prominent role in providing social functions, financial support, and memorialization of the former soldiers. The G.A.R. provided the funds and impetus for the construction of the Iowa Soldiers' Home in Marshalltown and other similar homes and hospitals, as well as orphanages.