Investigating the world

As part of our consciousness’s investigation in Philosophy of Mind, we have written 6 little posts in this blog, 4 more related to philosophy and 2 bringing scientific topics. So, let´s take an overview of them, starting by science and following by philosophy. 1.                   Unconscious Cerebellum ( Human Brain Project ) This post explores the actual stage of HBP researches  saying that they have a lot of information, data and good people on the matters of consciousness, neurons, skull, etc., that need to be put together. So, our time is like the time before Darwin joined the things in the theory of evolution meaning that we are a few steps of great discoveries. https://www.investigatingtheworld.com/2018/03/unconscious-cerebellumi.html 2.                   Technology to study the brain (TED: John Bor...

Epicurus, born in Greek year of 341BC, asked a different question the oldest did at that time: what makes us happy instead of “good”? Studying happiness, he concluded some remarkable things: 1) The friendship is better than the romantic or sexuality because many people are jealous or fight a lot in this type of relationships, 2) Working alone or in small groups improving the world and felling we help others is more satisfying that working long hours to make money and 3) Changing luxury by a calm and pure mind and a simple way of life. So, we need three things to be happy in our life: to have the friends around, to stop working to other people and take care of our own staffs and become calm being alone reflecting, reading and meditating. These insights spreaded and motivated the creation of a lot of communities in Mediterranean that were later transformed in monasteries by Christians. For SoL, even Karl Marx with his concept of communism, can be considered a version o...

The main aspect of this interview is the Alva´s argument that the consciousness does not reside entirely inside of us. If one thinks in consciousness, he thinks in a straightforward relationship between the consciousness and the brain, one to one. So, a feeling would have an electrical pulse associated in the brain. However, Alva argues that is more than that. We can say the brain performs a difficult job, but we are interacting with the world outside as well. He makes an analogy with the value of a 25 cents coin. Where is this value? Is it produced by whom? There is a complex system behind this. We have feelings and sensations represented in the brain, we have contents from outside but there is a substrate inside of us and it is beyond our brain. So, is the brain by itself sufficient? No, only part of it, but there is interaction between brain, body, environment and other people[i]. Otherwise it would be very hard to explain how am I apprehending the content outside? The brain is ...

We are living in the “big data” era. The popularization of the smart phones and other smart devices enabled plenty of applications that collect data and send to the cloud. More than that, the evolution of microprocessors and low price of storage  contributed to support the growth of those applications. In the digital era an entity called “The Cloud” (from now TC) comes up residing somewhere and doing “magic” things like to control so many aspects of our life. Over this technological apparat, we can exchange all kind of information in many formats like text, image, voice, video and so on and so forth. Everything we share feeds TC that then knows about us and the world more and more. TC is our best friend today because it gives us many advises and alerts that we need to take care and that suggests what to do. Eating everything that is "on the air", this entity is the fattiest and smartest one, even able to retire god. With the big data of all of us, TC always tells us where ...

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 ...

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...

Basically we have 6 big ideas that can help us live better. Big idea 1 is to realize that we have 2 ways of thinking: system 1, fast and automatic and system 2, slow and logical. Sometimes we should choose one or the other but we need to avoid swapping them. Big idea 2 is the anchoring. Sometimes we need to figure out an anchor, a reference to lead us to make a decision. Also we should avoid anchors that are not real and this can help us to best guess. Big idea 3 is the science of availability. We need to pay attention to the possibility of something happen to us or not and avoid suffering about something that has no chance at all to happen. This means we need to avoid seeing the mainstream media. Big idea 4 is about loss aversion. In a situation we need to choose between things that will be good in a way and negative in another, we should argue using the negative way to convince the other person. You would prefer to make a decision avoiding something negative. Big idea 5 is...