Consciousness & Conscience

Consciousness is often used to describe the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings, or awareness by the mind of itself and the world. Consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain.The word “consciousness” comes from the French conscience, and originally meant what we now consider “having a conscience”: the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do. It’s a person’s notion of the rightness and wrongness of their actions.You could say that conscience is consciousness of others’ opinions. The difference between consciousness and conscience lies in the Brain vs. Mind distinction.Social consciousness is consciousness shared by individuals within a society. People develop various relationships which lead to a general idea of the state of society.From this viewpoint, social consciousness denotes conscious awareness of being part of an interrelated community of others. The “we feeling” or the “sense of us” may be experienced in members of various cultures and social groups.By the experience of collectively shared social identity, individuals may experience social unity.A social conscience is “a sense of responsibility or concern for the problems and injustices of society.”While our conscience is related to our moral conduct in our day-to-day lives with respect to individuals, social conscience is concerned with the broader institutions of society and the gap that we may perceive between the sort of society that should exist and the real society that does exist.Instead of being about a person’s concept of society’s expectations of them, social conscience has to do with a person’s expectations of society. Those expectations can be based on s person’s values, moral judgments, and other internal responses to events they experience.


What is your Driving Force?