are you conscious?*

Does existence mean consciousness? If so, what to say about who consider the consciousness an illusion? For Chalmers, the consciousness is the thing we better know directly. Chalmers, following Descartes that doubted about everything in the world but didn’t doubt his thoughts, quoted: “I am conscious therefore I am”. No matter if consciousness emerges from the brain, that’s a second question. No matter whether the others are conscious, the most important and what we cannot deny is that we are conscious.
To support his arguments Chalmers works with two important concepts in Philosophy of Mind. The first one is the zombies. A zombie can act as we act or can answer us as we answer, however they are not conscious but we are and we know they aren’t. We know our world hasn't only zombies without consciousness, it has humans and humans are conscious. The second is the qualia. Chalmers explains that the sound of music or a color or a taste, all are the quality of our experience, that is, the qualia. We can say our feeling of eating banana to the ones that have never eaten banana – they only would know when they eat banana.
He concludes saying that the consciousness is more than physical processes in the brain. We could know everything about the brain but we wouldn’t know the consciousness. Using another well known argument, he describes the easy problem as the explanation and description of our behavior and the mechanism used by our brain during the experience (this is really complex!!!) and the hard problem as the explanation of why a conscious experience follows these chemical-physical processes. Why do we have this movie into our brain? That question will not be solved by neuroscientists because they only can explain objective things… and we have consciousness!


* Some points of ”Why is consciousness so mysterious?”: https://youtu.be/NK1Yo6VbRoo?t=5

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Free will and determinism*

          According to SoL (School of Life), the debate between free will and determinism has been crossing the Philosophy History since the beginning until our time reaching even the neuroscientists. It concerns about whether the human being is able to dominate their actions by themselves or they are determined by forces beyond their control, like fate and politics. SoL argues that the long running arguments in favor or against both sides are not conclusive because they are based on objective variables when they should be thought as what is relevant to me (to me… to me?). Also, they vary from person to person guided by two psychological aspects: defeatism and aspiration.           Does the course of our life belong to the others, like our parents, bosses and so on or can we change our life and our relationships based on our strenght and free will? The second should be even better but more difficult, of course. So moving far from the old and objective discussion and changing the para
Read more

The soul is just a function*

Image
Putman talks about the contribution of Computer Science to Philosophy of Mind in terms of thinking the mind as a kind of function rather than physical or chemistry. He says that the rise of computers could result in everything being explained in terms of machines but the paradox is that it didn´t contribute for this kind of reductionism . Generally, according to Putman, when we work with computer we think in its programs, instructions, rules, etc., and we ignore the hardware. Ironically, he says that there is an emergency (not violating the laws of physics) where we work in a high level of the organization, in the program level. So we can think in the mind the same way: instead of thinking we are spirit inboded would be better think in the relation between the mind and the body in terms of functions. * Short digest of short interisting vídeo: https://youtu.be/m0YIm8p30aU . Acessed in Jan, 28 th . Hilary Putnam on Functionalism.
Read more

Technology to study the brain[i]

The brain is a complex and sophisticated organ made by a lot of layers and billions of cells that is able to study itself. It is not simple, but today, scientists have three main ways to investigate a live brain safely, which is, not being harmful to someone and thus they try to relate our behavior with brain areas. The first method is electroencephalography (EGG), which was invented 100 years ago and it measures electrical waves that happen when the brain cells communicate with each other. It provides us information to identify precisely when electric signals occur during activities like learning or paying attention and registering them in just milliseconds and from that we can extract patterns to study diseases such as epilepsy. fMRI (functional magnetic resonant images), the second way to analyze how the brains work, is a technique to measure how quickly oxygen is consumed by brain cells showing which regions are involved during a cognitive or behavior activity. With thes
Read more