ConsciousnessConsciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguists, and scientists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition.
Artificial consciousnessArtificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness (the ability to feel qualia).
Animal consciousnessAnimal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within a animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, 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 there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
Hard problem of consciousnessThe hard problem of consciousness is a philosophical problem concerning why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give humans and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information, perform behavioural functions, or provide behavioural reports, and so forth.
Neural correlates of consciousnessThe neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) refer to the relationships between mental states and neural states and constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience.
Stream of consciousnessIn literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. The term was coined by Daniel Oliver in 1840 in First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine, when he wrote, If we separate from this mingled and moving stream of consciousness, our sensations and volitions, which are constantly giving it a new direction, and suffer it to pursue its own spontaneous course, it will appear, upon examination, that this, instead of being wholly fortuitous and uncertain, is determined by certain fixed laws of thought, which are collectively termed the association of ideas.
ExperienceExperience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams.
Share (finance)In financial markets, a share (sometimes referred to as stock) is a unit of equity ownership in the capital stock of a corporation, and can refer to units of mutual funds, limited partnerships, and real estate investment trusts. Share capital refers to all of the shares of an enterprise. The owner of shares in a company is a shareholder (or stockholder) of the corporation. A share is an indivisible unit of capital, expressing the ownership relationship between the company and the shareholder.
Share priceA share price is the price of a single share of a number of saleable equity shares of a company. In layman's terms, the stock price is the highest amount someone is willing to pay for the stock, or the lowest amount that it can be bought for. In economics and financial theory, analysts use random walk techniques to model behavior of asset prices, in particular share prices on stock markets. This practice has its basis in the presumption that investors act rationally and without biases, and that at any moment they estimate the value of an asset based on future expectations.
Knapsack problemThe knapsack problem is the following problem in combinatorial optimization: Given a set of items, each with a weight and a value, determine which items to include in the collection so that the total weight is less than or equal to a given limit and the total value is as large as possible. It derives its name from the problem faced by someone who is constrained by a fixed-size knapsack and must fill it with the most valuable items.
