Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. How does the conscious differ from the conscience? These two terms are sometimes confused in common everyday usage due to the fact that they sound quite similar. They also both derive from the same Latin origins conscire , which means "to be aware of guilt". However, they actually mean very different things within the field of psychology.
Let's take a closer look at what each term means and how you can distinguish between the two concepts. Your conscience is the part of your personality that helps you determine between right and wrong and keeps you from acting upon your most basic urges and desires. It is what makes you feel guilty when you do something bad and good when you do something kind. Your conscience is the moral basis that helps guide prosocial behavior and leads you to behave in socially acceptable and even altruistic ways.
In Freudian theory , the conscience is part of the superego that contains information about what is viewed as bad or negative by your parents and by society—all the values you learned and absorbed during your upbringing. The conscience emerges over time as you absorb information about what is considered right and wrong by your caregivers, your peers, and the culture in which you live. Your conscious is your awareness of yourself and the world around you.
In the most general terms, it means being awake and aware. Some experts suggest that you are considered conscious of something if you are able to put it into words. According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality , which likens the mind to an iceberg.
The part of the iceberg that can be seen above the surface of the water represents conscious awareness. It is what we are aware of and can describe and articulate clearly. The largest part of the iceberg actually lies below the surface of the water, which Freud compared to the unconscious mind , or all the thoughts, memories, and urges that are outside of our conscious awareness.
Your consciousness refers to your conscious experiences, your individual awareness of your own internal thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations.
Consciousness is often thought of as a stream, constantly shifting according to the ebb and flow of your thoughts and experiences of the world around you. In psychology, the conscious mind includes everything inside of your awareness including:.
Bernstein, Louis A. Penner, and Edward Roy. For example, memories can be conscious, but consciousness is not just memory. Perceptions can be conscious, but consciousness is not just perception. The conscious and consciousness can be difficult to pin down.
Beyond the neurological descriptions of consciousness that consider that consciousness is generated at the neuronal level is the quantum physics approach, governed by classical physics, which confers a more dynamical vision but which also gives rise to several controversies [ 15 ].
According to the quantum physics view, consciousness depends on self-observation. It is continuously self-creating by unconscious processes that are constantly coming into existence through self-awareness, such as the act of observing an electron, which concretizes that electron by collapsing the wave function [ 16 ].
Neuroplasticity and consciousness are bi-directionally connected: with consciousness, on the one hand, being the result of the growing complexity of the connection of some activity and, on the other hand, reorganizing brain connections through learning activities [ 18 ]. The conscious brain is in a perpetual state of learning. It learns how to describe and re-describe its own activity to itself, developing complex systems of metarepresentations [ 19 ]. Also, the dynamic impact of consciousness upon brain connectivity continues beyond wakefulness, with dreaming also having an important impact upon neuronal networks [3,20].
Another important aspect of neuroplasticity in consciousness is represented by the modified state of consciousness during mindfulness process. From the neuroscience point of view, focusing attention practice produces measurable changes in spontaneous brain activity by increasing gamma frequencies [21,22]. These electromagnetic changes are substantiated by imaging studies that demonstrated both dynamic white matter changes like increased myelination and connectivity [ 23 ] and increased cortical thickness [ 24 ].
Consequently, conscience ranks higher than consciousness and, in addition, has the ability and the authority to decide how information will be used, either for good or for evil.
In other words, conscience determines our final decisions for action after evaluating, in a split second, all of the above parameters [ 7 ]. This whole process information-consciousness-awareness-conscience should be understood in its entirety as a complex, continuous and integrated set of functions in all healthy human beings. If any part of these functions is defective or ceases to exist, the whole system will suffer or may even collapse. We can decide to act in accordance with or against our conscience at any given moment.
Indeed, those are our only options. Such is the effort of all truly spiritual people. Eventually, anxieties and phobias manifest, and they are the prodromal symptoms of a harassed health state.
This happens in our contemporary societies, in which many initially healthy individuals who have become prominent figures, such as politicians, journalists, police officers and judges—those who have power over others in their hands but not enough moral strength—succumb to the widespread corruption of our times. Instead of using their power for the benefit of the people, they use it only for their own personal gain.
This is not the case for all of them, of course, but those who want to go against such a trend find themselves eventually isolated and powerless. If conscience comes under pressure from the basic instincts and becomes dulled, then the human being will descend more and more into an animal-like state and will then be forced to exclusively serve his own lower instincts.
If any of the basic functions, like imagination, reason or memory, are diminished or lost due to some illness or injury, then the process of awareness suffers, and the whole system may eventually collapse.
In such a case, conscience can no longer function. This leads us to the conclusion that the overall functional ability of the brain information-consciousness—conscience leads to decision and to actions.
It has a unique character due to its infinite complexity, it is integrated if a part collapses, the whole system may suffer or collapse , and it is continuously changing new information is constantly absorbed, affecting and differentiating levels of conscience. The hierarchical capacity of the human brain to make final and meaningful decisions is responsible for whether a person decides to commit himself to the quest for God, as do the monks, adepts and mystics, or to the quest for Truth, as do the philosophers and scientists, or to deceiving others, as do the criminals.
In this way, conscience formulates every level of experience, from the lowest to the highest, even to the transcendental and sublime. These transcendental, extramundane experiences of spiritual people can take place while the person is still in relatively good health and, at the same time, can understand and realize the ever-complex incoming information and thus make decisions and actions in split seconds.
It is through such a process that a new quality of conscience eventually emerges to sacrifice self-interest for the common good. Experience has shown that those individuals who were raised in families with strong moral attitudes can very seldom bypass the dictates of their conscience.
Conscience, being the noblest function of our existence, constitutes the thread that keeps us in contact with our universal nature or with the objective Truth or with God or whatever one wants to call it [ 9 ].
Realistically speaking, humans cannot reach the absolute. They can only come closer to or go further from the absolute depending on the quality of their conscience. Unfortunately, this relative approaching of the Truth can change within the same person, sometimes in dramatic way. The degree of conscience, or how close the awareness of the person is to the Truth, depends, unfortunately, on two factors:.
This happens in an almost deterministic way. Examples of high conscience are the adepts of all times, with their transcendental experiences, and all those who managed to tame their passions and pursue the search for Truth or all those who sacrificed their lives for the societies in which they lived. Examples of low conscience are those who managed to deceive, oppress and take advantage of not only a few people but of whole societies or nations for their own personal benefit.
Such individuals are primarily the corrupted politicians whose actions may affect the whole nation. We, the common people, are somewhere between these two categories, and we fight tooth and nail to keep a somewhat balanced condition and not to shut down our conscience completely.
It is a daily struggle, and we usually lose many battles; consequently, our health decreases until death completes the picture. Here, it should be noted that the action that brings the greatest catharsis and inner release is confession in a kind of public situation. The effects of psychological and psychotherapeutic treatments are based in this reality, whether it is admitted or not.
The same fact has given power to all religions that have in their practices the act of confession. After an honest and deep confession, people have admitted that they felt rejuvenated and in better health. The decisions of people in positions of authority of all kinds depend on this individual state of conscience, whether their decisions will be destructive or constructive, affecting sometimes a whole nation or the whole of the planet.
The dulling of their conscience is necessary for those in authority to find excuses for promoting their destructive measures as needful and constructive. Many aggressive wars, especially within the last 50 years, have been executed in the name of democratic ideals, while their victims included millions of people and they have caused innumerable others to suffer.
This shows how unhealthy our leaders have become. An impressive book written by Prof. Illness in heads of Government in the last years", depicts this idea exactly, as does the speech of Prof. Consequently, the more human beings tame their passions by distancing themselves from their basic instincts, the more their conscience evolves, reaching its highest level and giving the sense to the individual that they are living in a state of bliss. This evolution of conscience is an endless effort, one that goes on for as long as one lives; thus, in my opinion, conscience will never be defined as belonging to a certain part of the brain or as a chemically complex compound because the brain changes and evolves exactly because of those processes.
However, all cultures know and agree on some basic concepts regarding morality. It was formulated through a complicated process of observation, experience in general, and suffering in particular. Learn More About conscience. Time Traveler for conscience The first known use of conscience was in the 13th century See more words from the same century. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Style: MLA. Kids Definition of conscience. Medical Definition of conscience.
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