Word.ws English Dictionary

pseudoconscious

pseudoconscious adjective: seemingly or nearly conscious but not truly so; said of processes within the human mind, of people, of software, or of machines running software.

Adjective

pseudoconscious (not comparable)

  1. Seemingly or nearly conscious but not truly so; said of processes within the human mind, of people, of software, or of machines running software.
    • investigating unconscious or pseudoconscious processes in psychology
    • The great problem with differentiating pseudoconscious from conscious machines is that operational definitions of criteria for "true" consciousness are elusively difficult to achieve, as Erik Hoel, one of various experts in that field, has explored expositorily for nonexperts.

Examples of pseudoconscious in a sentence

  • "Are you all right?" I ask my pseudoconscious neighbor.2000 July 26, Emma Trelles, “I want a new drug. Orlando area news”, in Orlando Weekly, retrieved 21 May 2023:
  • This fentanyl/N2O combination created a pseudoconscious level of metabolism (Åkeson et al, 1992).2006, KM Tichauer, JA Hadway, TY Lee, KS St Lawrence, “Measurement of cerebral oxidative metabolism with near-infrared spectroscopy: a...
  • This can be an unconscious or pseudoconscious process.2008, William A. Hewlett, “Chapter 21: Obsessive–compulsive disorder”, in Michael H. Ebert, Peter T. Loosen, Barry Nurcombe, James F....

Forms of pseudoconscious

alternative formpseudo-conscious

Origin of pseudoconscious

From pseudo- + conscious.

Questions about pseudoconscious

What does pseudoconscious mean?
Pseudoconscious means seemingly or nearly conscious but not truly so; said of processes within the human mind, of people, of software, or of machines running software.
How do you use pseudoconscious in a sentence?
"Are you all right?" I ask my pseudoconscious neighbor.
What part of speech is pseudoconscious?
Pseudoconscious is an adjective.

Words near pseudoconscious in the dictionary

  1. pseudoconoid
  2. pseudoconoids
  3. pseudoconopea
  4. pseudoconopeum
  5. pseudoconscience
  6. pseudoconscious
  7. pseudoconsciousness
  8. pseudoconsensus
  9. pseudoconservative
  10. pseudocontact
  11. pseudocontacts

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudoconscious (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-pseudo-conscious.wav.

Cite this entry: “pseudoconscious.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pseudoconscious. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.