ABSTRACT
Consciousness and awareness are similar, but they are not the same. Consciousness seems to be something to do with ideas, representations, beliefs, attitudes and motivations. It is also used in a psychoanalytical context to describe those drives and motivations that we are aware of. The philosophy of consciousness starts (and ends) with an apparently insurmountable problem: consciousness is almost impossible to define. Generally, it seems to be something to do with having perceptions, thoughts or feelings. It is also something to do with being aware. The alternative to a ‘dualist’ philosophy of consciousness is the ‘monist’ approach, which suggests that mind and body are the same thing. Monist approaches can be divided broadly into physicalism, idealism and neutral monism. The ‘sensing’ happens at the same instant as the ‘conceptualising’, in the same place (the brain) to the same person. Therefore, dualisms such as mind/body, internal/external, subject/object, and perception/conception are probably inherently misrepresentative and misleading.
