Conscious in NLP is that of which we are currently aware.
Consciousness means many different things to different factions. It can mean the underlying awareness of the environment, an invisible intelligence, or the degree that we, as a species have developed ourselves as beings knowingly. To be conscious is to have an awareness of one’s environment and one’s own existence, sensations, and thoughts. It is having present knowledge or perception of oneself, one’s acts and surroundings.
“Consciousness” derives from Latin: “Conscientia” which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, “Conscientia” means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. Also from the Latin ‘conscius’; con and ‘scire’; to know.
It can mean possessing the faculty of knowing one’s own thoughts or mental operations, or possessing knowledge, whether by internal, conscious experience or by external observation. It is to be aware; apprised; sensible; felt; known.
In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the conscious mind includes everything that is inside of our awareness. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about in a rational way.
René Descartes has been said to be the first philosopher to use “Conscientia” in a way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning, and, as a consequence, the translators of his writings in other languages like French and English coined new words in order to denote merely psychological consciousness. Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience itself, and access consciousness, which refers to the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain.
An understanding of necessary preconditions for consciousness in the human brain may allow us to address important ethical questions. For instance, how is the presence of consciousness to be assessed in severely ill or disabled individuals? To what extent are non-human animals conscious? At what point in fetal development does consciousness begin? Can machines achieve conscious states? Are today’s autonome and intelligent machines already conscious? In common parlance, consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to one’s environment; this contrasts with being asleep or being in a coma.
