Psychology is an academic and
applied discipline that involves the
scientific study of
mental functions and
behaviors. Psychology has the immediate goal of understanding individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases, and by many accounts it ultimately aims to benefit society. In this field, a professional
practitioner or researcher is called a
psychologist and can be classified as a
social,
behavioral, or
cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and
social behavior, while also exploring the
physiological and
biological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors.
Psychologists explore concepts such as perception, cognition, attention, emotion, phenomenology, motivation, brain functioning, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships, including psychological resilience, family resilience, and other areas. Psychologists of diverse orientations also consider the unconscious mind. Psychologists employ empirical methods to infer causal and correlational relationships between psychosocial variables. In addition, or in opposition, to employing empirical and deductive methods, some—especially clinical and counseling psychologists—at times rely upon symbolic interpretation and other inductive techniques. Psychology has been described as a "hub science", with psychological findings linking to research and perspectives from the social sciences, natural sciences, medicine, and the humanities, such as philosophy. (Full article...)
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Consciousness is the
quality or state of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as:
sentience,
awareness,
subjectivity, the ability to
experience or to
feel,
wakefulness, having a sense of
selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. 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."
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Quotes
- "The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man." — B. F. Skinner