Consciousness

Full Title or Meme

A simple idea of "self aware" well-know by most people, yet raised to a religion by philosophers,

Context

• Descartes declared "I think therefore I am" as his first principle. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist. From this Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist."
• John Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.[13] This is now known as empiricism.
• Alan Turning proved to have the best definition while claiming not to address the definition of it at all. He described an interrogator, who is given the task of trying to determine which of two players: A or B on the other end of teletypewriter links is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to typed in questions to make the determination. Turing proposed his test in 1950 to help answer the question "can machines think?" See the wiki page on the context of knowledge.