Self-awareness in the context of "Corvidae"

Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness. Using their intelligence, humans are able to learn, form concepts, understand, and apply logic and reason. Human intelligence is also thought to encompass their capacities to recognize patterns, plan, innovate, solve problems, make decisions, retain information, and use language to communicate.

There are conflicting ideas about how intelligence should be conceptualized and measured. In psychometrics, human intelligence is commonly assessed by intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, although the validity of these tests is disputed. Several subcategories of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence and social intelligence, have been proposed, and there remains significant debate as to whether these represent distinct forms of intelligence.

Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of states or objects either internal to one's self or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied, or can even be considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with mind, and at other times, an aspect of it.

In the past, consciousness meant one's "inner life": the world of introspection, private thought, imagination, and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition, or self-awareness, either continuously changing or not. There is also a medical definition that helps, for example, to discern "coma" from other states. The disparate range of research, notions, and speculations raises some curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.

The lord–bondsman dialectic (German: Herrschaft und Knechtschaft; also translated master–servant dialectic) is a famous passage in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. It is widely considered a key element in Hegel's philosophical system, and it has heavily influenced many subsequent philosophers.

The passage describes, in narrative form, the development of self-consciousness as such in an encounter between what are thereby (i.e., emerging only from this encounter) two distinct, self-conscious beings. The essence of the dialectic is the movement or motion of recognizing, in which the two self-consciousnesses are constituted in each being recognized as self-conscious by the other. This movement, inexorably taken to its extreme, takes the form of a "struggle to the death" in which one masters [beherrscht] the other, only to find that such lordship makes the very recognition he had sought impossible, since the bondsman, in this state, is not free to offer it.

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

The term rose to prominence during the early 1900s. Most psychologists believe that intelligence can be divided into various domains or competencies.

An emotional expression is a behavior that communicates an emotional state or attitude. It can be verbal or nonverbal, and can occur with or without self-awareness. Emotional expressions include facial movements like smiling or scowling, simple behaviors like crying, laughing, or saying "thank you," and more complex behaviors like writing a letter or giving a gift. Individuals have some conscious control of their emotional expressions; however, they need not have conscious awareness of their emotional or affective state in order to express emotion.

Researchers in psychology have proposed many different and often competing theoretical models to explain emotions and emotional expression, going as far back as Charles Darwin's discussion of emotion as an evolved capacity. Though there is no universally accepted theory of emotion, theorists in emotion agree that experience of emotions and expression of them in a variety of ways, such as with voices, faces, and bodies, is key to human communication. The cultural norms and beliefs of a society also affect and shape the emotional expressions of its members, and expressions appropriate and important in one culture may be taboo in another.

In the psychology of self, one's self-concept (also called self-construction, self-identity, self-perspective or self-structure) is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally, self-concept embodies the answer to the question "Who am I?".

The self-concept is distinguishable from self-awareness, which is the extent to which self-knowledge is defined, consistent, and currently applicable to one's attitudes and dispositions. Self-concept also differs from self-esteem: self-concept is a cognitive or descriptive component of one's self (e.g., "I am a fast runner"), while self-esteem is evaluative and opinionated (e.g., "I feel good about being a fast runner").

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814) was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant.

Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Fichte was also the originator of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, an idea that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel.