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

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