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Showing posts from September, 2018

Uniqueness of consciousness[i]

John Searle refutes both dualism and materialism to bring biological naturalism where mind, as a biological phenomenon, is part of the nature. He says, both, dualism and materialism have true and false arguments so he focus on what he considers true. He preserves the two main ways: everything is physical and a part of it is mental. The biological naturalism follows the steps: 1.       We cannot deny that consciousness exists. Materialism says consciousness is an illusion but when one thinks in consciousness he knows he is conscious. Therefore, consciousness is real and it even can be irreducible. 2.       We don’t know all the events that happen in our brain yet; either our vision or why we feel pain. However, we can track our vision processes in the brain and find out the nervous that can cause a vision. Similarly, the consciousness can be a process that is caused somewhere in the neurons such as the function of the "high level brain system" [ii] . John Searle uses

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 i