The subtitle to the topic "consciousness" here on researchgate reads "Sense of awareness of self and of the environment"
This raises a number of questions. Is consciousness a sense? Obviously not, unless... let us see for that later. The obvious thing is that consciousness uses our senses in order to consciously see etc. opposing seeing something and responding to it, but being unaware of it.
Consciousness and awareness mean about the same, but while we are aware of ourselves (self may not be a scientific term) and our environment there may be something important missing: our thoughts and our emotions - in one word our mind.
Getting back to the above (unless...) we could say that human consciousness is (among other properties) a kind of sense that witnesses and is aware of inner goings on such as thoughts and emotions. Clearly even though "self" is a problematic term, we can see that thoughts and emotions may just almost be the opposite to what we really are, what our self is, our personality as some would put it. I prefer to distinguish between personality and "nature" because personality involves education processes, manipulation and shortly put: conditioning. Thus someone may have a personality that is conflicting his own nature. This is a difficult aspect, so let me leave it like that.
When we focus on awareness of the mind, we already see that the mind is not the same thing as consciousness because via consciousness we are aware of the mind. When we go one step further, we can say the mind provides possible percepts. One though, especially if that is a verbal thought, can be clearly experienced, remembered and reported. We can say word by word what we thought if we want to (obviously this is sometimes not that easy).
I will save a few arguments for later and just want to claim that the subtitle needs to be expanded and we must add the awareness of our mind as one of the most important properties of human consciousness.
What do you think?
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."
The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.[8] Locke defined consciousness as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind".[9] His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary (1755).[10] "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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
I personally uses these words: awareness, Mind, and Consciousness as synonymous. We also use the term: phenomenal consciousness. I take the hard problem of consciousness to be the old Mind Body problem or the Mind Matter Problem.
Awareness/consciousness has different aspects: emotion (more basic) , sensory-motor awareness, thinking and language aspect, empathy or perception of other MInd, attention,
etc.
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