How is the Concept of Consciousness in Psychology Related to the parallel Buddhism concepts?

From my understanding as a Buddhist, the worldview is that only 6 things truly can be said to truly, truly, exist.

These 6 things are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking.

Anything beyond these 6 things such as "the body" "the brain" "the economy" "the world" "the internet", is a mental construct, a thought.

All these mental constructs we make are for the sake of convenience, or comes from misunderstanding.

This understanding goes against the grain of the world, goes against the view of the status quo that "we" exist, that the outer world really exists.

Modern Psychology comes up with data through using these 6 senses. In order to gather data through these 6 senses, these 6 senses must be accurate and reliable. According to Buddhism these 6 senses, the idea of these 6 senses, is deceptive. There is no real 6 senses, it is just a mental construct, a thought. Anything besides seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, is not "real".

I use the medical definition of consciousness as quoted by ChrisW “as a ‘level’ ranging from coma and brain death at the low end to full alertness and purposeful responsiveness at the high end.” This definition has been successfully operationalized as a checklist helping any emergency physician to determine the severity of a brain injury. On the basis of this definition neurologists identified certain brain areas necessary to create conscious brain processes: neocortex and thalamus.

Today we can go beyond cognitive psychology to investigate the question ‘What characterizes conscious brain processes?’ First on a physiological basis and secondly, even on a basis from information theory.

Apparently, consciousness is an emergent property – if we call a system property emergent if it is not owned by any of its separate parts. A current approach tries to quantify consciousness by the amount of integrated information. Integrated information is the excess of information created by the system in comparison to the information created by its parts [Tononi, G.: Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto. Biol. Bull. 215, 216-242 (December 2008)]. Tononi’s approach is one of the first attempts to formalize the vague concept of consciousness by a mathematical model from information theory.

All these findings, from the brain areas involved up to the concept of integrated information, are independent from any statements of mainstream Buddhism. Instead, these results have been detected by using the scientific methods and techniques developed during the last two centuries. At most, Buddhist monks act as probands for introspection and meditation, its refined variant.

Insofar, nothing of these theories/hypothesis comes from Buddhist theses.

A second meaning of your question asks how these results fit to Buddhist theses, which have been formulated independently. In my opinion, the Buddhist core thesis hits the point: Consciousness should not be considered a permanent substance but a property of impermanent brain processes. Up to the best of my knowledge, this point of view has not been emphasized in Western philosophy earlier than David Hume in the 18. century.

The earliest Buddhist teachings consider consciousness (vijnana) under the heading of the fifth aggregate as the mental capability to make analysis, judgement and cognition in general. That seems to me a correct, but not comprehensive description of consciousness. It remains on the level of folk psychology. Notably, I do not see that it contributes much to solve the question: How to explain the phenomenon of consciousness?

"Consciousness" is a word or concept which is not well-defined, for example:

• Pholosophy of mind

  Philosophers have used the term 'consciousness' for four main topics: etc.

  Philosophers and non-philosophers differ in their intuitions about what consciousness is

• Scientific study

  • Measurement

    Experimental research on consciousness presents special difficulties, due to the lack of a universally accepted operational definition.

  • Biological function and evolution

    Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolution consciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value. It has been argued that consciousness emerged (etc.)

• Medical aspects

  Whereas the philosophical approach to consciousness focuses on its fundamental nature and its contents, the medical approach focuses on the amount of consciousness a person has: in medicine, consciousness is assessed as a "level" ranging from coma and brain death at the low end, to full alertness and purposeful responsiveness at the high end.

• Stream of consciousness

  In the west, the primary impact of the idea has been on literature rather than science etc.

IMO "modern psychology" will describe consciousness as an "emergent" property: for example, a home is not a brick; nor is a home two bricks; but with enough bricks put together in the right way you can construct a house.

I think that "consciousness" does exist in (at least some) Buddhist metaphysics, which calls it "sentience":

Sentient beings is a technical term in Buddhist discourse. Broadly speaking, it denotes beings with consciousness or sentience or, in some contexts, life itself.

Because it's such a broad (not well-defined) concept I think the question is too broad to be answered in more detail.