What’s the difference between conscience and conscious?  They stem from the same Latin root, but their usage is distinct.  Writers occasionally confuse the two words, but if you remain conscious, you’ll likely be able to say with a clear conscience that you know the difference.  

             Conscience and Conscious both come form the Latin word conscious; the word elements mean “with” and “to know”.  (Yes, the- science in conscience means the same thing as science itself.)

Conscience is a noun meaning “sense of the quality of one’s character and conduct,” “adherence to moral principles,” and “consideration of fairness and justice.”  Confusion between conscience and conscious occurs because the latter word is sometimes used as a noun synonymous with consciousness, meaning “mental awareness,” though the longer form is usually employed. 

            More often, however, conscious appears as an adjective meaning “aware” or “awake,” or “involving perception or thought.”  It also appears in combination with a noun in phrasal adjectives such as “budget conscious” to refer to someone who is concerned, sensitive, or vigilant about something. 

            Conscience and Conscious can be distinguished because the former word is qualitative-people have various degrees of moral strength-while conscious as its antonym, unconscious, indicates, is quantitative: You’re either one or the other, whether the word is used as a noun or an adjective.

            However, consciousness, as the word is usually applied, like conscious refers to a continuum: We speak of raising one’s consciousness and of higher consciousness, because this quality can be improved or increased.  Like the noun conscious, though, consciousness has a quantitative sense as well, referring to a state of mental activity, as opposed to unconsciousness caused by illness or injury. 

John Searle, the American philosopher was the one who came up with the famous Chinese room experiment and has done much work on consciousness, artificial intelligence and rationality.  In this talk, he urges more research on consciousness, for he asks, “What does art or science matter if one is in coma? So consciousness is everything and the work done on it has been abysmally low and slow.”

The reason for this, says the professor emphatically, “…is a combination of two features of our intellectual culture that like to think they are opposing each other but in fact share a common set of assumptions…”

Both religion and science say consciousness is not part of the physical world.  “But,” says Searle, I have only one message in this lecture and that is, consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis…once you accept that, most of the hard problems about consciousness simply evaporate.”

Saying so, Searle goes on to recount all the misunderstandings about consciousness…it is as ephemeral as sunset and rainbows, it is a computer programme running in the brain, only thing that exists is behavior, consciousness makes no difference to the world…”

“Peop1e always say consciousness is hard to define.  I think it is rather easy to define.. We’re not ready for a scientific definition.  Consciousness consists of all those states of feeling or sentience or awareness.  It begins in the morning when you wake up from a dreamless sleep and it goes in all day until you fall asleep or die or become unconscious otherwise.  Dreams are a form of consciousness on this definition.  All our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower-level neuron-biological processes in the brain and they are realised in the brain as higher-level or systems features.  It is about as mysterious as the liquid of water.  The liquidity is not extra juice squirted out by H2O molecules.  It is a condition that the system is in.  And just as the jar full of water can go from a liquid to solid state depending on the behavior of the molecules, your brain can go form a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious depending on the behavior of the molecules.  The famous body-mind problem is that simple,” says Searle.

Searle goes on to specify some exact features of consciousness.  It is real and irreducible.  You can’t get rid of it…Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes but he was right about this…you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness.  The second feature is that all of our conscious states have a qualitative character to them.  This qualitative feel automatically generates a third feature, namely conscious states are by definition subjective, in the sense that they only exist as experienced by some human or animal subject, some self that experiences them.  Maybe we will build a conscious machine, but since we don’t know how our brains do it, we’re not in a position, so far, to build a conscious machine.”

The fourth feature, “…it comes in unified conscious fields.  So I don’t just have the sight of the people in front of me and the sound of my voice and the weight of my shoes against the floor, but they occur to me as part of one single great conscious field that stretches forward and backward.  That is the key to understanding the enormous power of the consciousness.. the disappointment of robotics derives from the fact that we do not know how to make a conscious robot...”

Searle goes on, “The next feature of consciousness is that it function causally in our behavior.”  Searle demonstrates that a thought in the brain cause actions to happen.  “…one and the same event has a level of description where it is neurobiological and another level where it is mental…the human consciousness has something more than syntax…it has got semantics.”

Searle demolishes the subjectivity-objectivity objection by asking, are doctors not dealing with pain which is subjective?

“Consciousness has to become accepted as a genuine biological phenomenon…” says Searle.

     The other words descended from form Latin word are self conscious, which literally means “selfaware,” but has acquired a connotation of “preoccupied with how one is perceived by others” an attitude that leads to shyness and stress.  The other word derived from conscious is conscientious which means “scrupulous” or “careful”; a conscientious objector is some one who objects to a requirement on religious or sentimental grounds like objecting to mandatory vaccination or military conscription on religions or sentimental grounds.


                                                                                                      Pavan Kumar Sharma
                                                                                       Chief Commissioner of Income-tax,
                                                                                                        Hubli - Karnataka