Main Topics Notes
1. What's the problem? - consciousness is an explanandum itself. your subjective experience (other than the objective
world); how does one arise from the other? What makes you you?
dualism - Descartes: Cartesian dualism, I think therefore I am, mind (unextended, thinking) + body
(physical) → substance dualism, both way interaction, via pineal gland
- Ryle: dualism as the dogma of the ghost in the machine, philosophical problems caused by
misuse of language, middle way between dualism-behaviorism: mental states as dispositions
to behave; mind as what the brain does rather than what the brain is
- Karl Popper: dualist interactionism: synapses of the brain are tuned to be influenced by a
self that thinks and feels
- Libet: non-physical conscious mental field is responsible for the unity and continuity of
subjective experience and free will, emerges from brain activity
- Dennett: Cartesian materialism: an identifiable time and place in the brain where
everything comes together and consciousness happens
monism - monism: mentalist/ idealist (Berkeley: all is sensations in the mind); or materialists (what
about the way it feels?): also consciousness might supervene on physical properties (difference
in consciousness accompanied by difference in the brain)
- epiphenomenalism: mental states are produced by physical events, but have no causal role
to play; animals as 'conscious automata' > methodological behaviorism: consciousness exists
but has no effects that can be scientifically investigated
- William James: neutral monism: world is made of one kind of stuff, not physical nor
mental; a world of possible and actual sense-data, the presence is 'pure experience'
- panpsychism: all material things have awareness and mental properties (but up to which
level? Also the molecules of the stone?) - a synthesis for dualism and materialism
in psychology - William James 1800s: psych. as 'the science that investigates and explains the phenomena of
the mind, or the inner world of our conscious experience', but also consider physiology,
experiments on attention, memory, etc… an integrated science
- psychophysics: study of events and experience (sensation - intensity of stimuli…)
- empiricism > phenomenology: subjective experiences first, subjective experience as an act
of reference (not objective physical object) with intentionality (about something)
- Wundt: used introspection to study subjective experience; systematic, rigorous; studied
attention and sensation; conscious experience depends on 2 psychical elements: sensory and
affective > combine into complex compounds (atomistic approach to consciousness)
- Watson: behaviorism: objective, experimental, no consciousness, Pavlov, Skinner; faded
away w/ growing interest in hypnosis, drug-induced states, mental illness, spirituality,
transpersonal psychology
- cognitive psychology: 1st as cognition + intentionality (as digital PCs) then cognition +
consciousness (connectionist approach, as neural network)
- predictive processing: brain as a prediction machine, matching expectations w/ sensory
input; perceptions are guesses about the world
- explanatory (metaphysical) gap: the mysterious gap (we don't know how to think about it
yet), between physical phenomena and conscious experience; easy problems of consciousness
can be scientifically answered (attention, sleep-wake cycles, etc), but hard problem: how
physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience
2. What is it like to be…? - consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable
- being conscious = having experience and point of view, there is something it is like to be
that organism (as in identity, not comparison), how is it to be from the inside?
- phenomenal consciousness = experience, there is something it is like to be in that state
- access consciousness = availability for use in reasoning & rationally guiding speech and
action (ability to say smth about the experience, cognitive accessibility of reportability) → big
emphasis on language; are these reportable contents all there is to consciousness?? - any kid
of access leaves us w/ impression we are only describing the surface...
subjectivity & qualia - experiences are private, ineffable, has a quality of its own → the qualities = qualia =
fundamental blocks of sensory experience, what smth is like (what you can't get from the bat
, - conscious states are qualitative states, so the problem of qualia is the same problem of
consciousness (how does objective brains produce subjective qualia??)
- many versions of what qualia is → some philosophers deny the existence of qualia, but as in
the version of ineffable, intrinsic directly apprehensible 'raw feels'
- Dennet: intuition pumps = thought experiments used to drawn intuition to the surface
- decide whether qualia exists w/ thought experiments (= to clarify thinking)
Mary - Mary the colour scientist: lived in black and white room, specialized and knows all there is
to know about physical facts of colour; then sees 'red' for the first time, would she be
surprised? if yes: there is qualia, a raw feel of experiencing in addition to the physical facts/
or still materialism, she connected old facts in new ways, or acquired a new skill
(epiphenomenalism/ dualism); if no: no qualia, the physical facts are all there is to know
- but: have we fallen into Philosopher's Syndrome?: mistaking a failure of imagination for an
insight into necessity? → maybe we haven't followed the instructions, knowing absolutely
everything there is to know about color could be enough to know how it feels like, without
ever feeling it?
Zombie - Chalmers: the philosopher's zombie: something physically and behaviorally identical to the
philosopher, but which has no conscious experience at all (nothing it is like to be him) →
logically or physically possible??
- in zombie Earth, philosophy would be different (no discussion on consciousness), and
therefore zombies wouldn't be possible → this goes to the heart of how we perform thought
experiments and why: can we step from conceivability to possibility or necessity?
- if zombies are possible: consciousness is superfluous, an epiphenomenon that exists but
does nothing → epiphenomenalism, conscious inessentialism
- if not: any creature like us will need to be conscious, necessarily; then what is it for??
- Churchland: imagination doesn't inform, counts for nothing; Dennet: if you add
self-monitoring to zombie (=zimbo), you get full package
responses to the hard 1. it's insoluble: the problem of subjectivity is intractable, we don't even have a conception of
problem what a physical explanation of a mental phenomenon would be, we are cognitively closed to
this problem, new mysterianism: challenges the belief that science will eventually explain
everything of the natural world
2. try to solve it: redefines the problem as 'how does the brain create qualia?'; the solution
requires fundamental new understanding of the universe; dualism, quantum physics
3. tackle the easy problems: attempting ot the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) to
make the problem of qualia clearer - just fashionable scientific research?
4. identify more hard problems: Miller, not every neural constitution of a conscious state is
necessarily constitutive of that state; splitting the problem into other hard problems
5. there is no hard problem: we should start w/ the easy problems, they might change our
understanding of the hard one; physical activity = the experience (language made it
complicated, materialism) - recognise that feelings exist in nature (brain); Churchland:
zombies demonstrate the feebleness of thought experiments, and how do we know explaining
the hard problems are much harder?, we have the false intuition that there is something
other than perception, attention, etc - a theorist's illusion; also w/ Dennet
3. The grand illusion - illusion = something that is not what it appears to be, declaring that the old thing does not
exist
- we understand the world mostly via vision and hearing, language is full of metaphors about
vision being equivalent to knowing - 'I see what you mean'
- 'grand illusion' emerged from research on change blindness and inattentional blindness →
our visual experience might not be how it first seems, we may be wrong about the nature of
seeing itself!; processing is blocked during visual saccades
- assumptions in theories on what vision seems:
1) visual experience is richly detailed; 2) at any time there are contents in and others 'outside'
of consciousness; 3) seeing means having internal pictures (world represented in our head)
- Descartes: pictures in the head → such theories need to answer: what are the pictures for?
Homunculus problem?
the magic difference - what creates the magic difference? (= some representations are conscious and others not)
- approach the question by looking for neural correlates (but still not finding the NCs of
1. What's the problem? - consciousness is an explanandum itself. your subjective experience (other than the objective
world); how does one arise from the other? What makes you you?
dualism - Descartes: Cartesian dualism, I think therefore I am, mind (unextended, thinking) + body
(physical) → substance dualism, both way interaction, via pineal gland
- Ryle: dualism as the dogma of the ghost in the machine, philosophical problems caused by
misuse of language, middle way between dualism-behaviorism: mental states as dispositions
to behave; mind as what the brain does rather than what the brain is
- Karl Popper: dualist interactionism: synapses of the brain are tuned to be influenced by a
self that thinks and feels
- Libet: non-physical conscious mental field is responsible for the unity and continuity of
subjective experience and free will, emerges from brain activity
- Dennett: Cartesian materialism: an identifiable time and place in the brain where
everything comes together and consciousness happens
monism - monism: mentalist/ idealist (Berkeley: all is sensations in the mind); or materialists (what
about the way it feels?): also consciousness might supervene on physical properties (difference
in consciousness accompanied by difference in the brain)
- epiphenomenalism: mental states are produced by physical events, but have no causal role
to play; animals as 'conscious automata' > methodological behaviorism: consciousness exists
but has no effects that can be scientifically investigated
- William James: neutral monism: world is made of one kind of stuff, not physical nor
mental; a world of possible and actual sense-data, the presence is 'pure experience'
- panpsychism: all material things have awareness and mental properties (but up to which
level? Also the molecules of the stone?) - a synthesis for dualism and materialism
in psychology - William James 1800s: psych. as 'the science that investigates and explains the phenomena of
the mind, or the inner world of our conscious experience', but also consider physiology,
experiments on attention, memory, etc… an integrated science
- psychophysics: study of events and experience (sensation - intensity of stimuli…)
- empiricism > phenomenology: subjective experiences first, subjective experience as an act
of reference (not objective physical object) with intentionality (about something)
- Wundt: used introspection to study subjective experience; systematic, rigorous; studied
attention and sensation; conscious experience depends on 2 psychical elements: sensory and
affective > combine into complex compounds (atomistic approach to consciousness)
- Watson: behaviorism: objective, experimental, no consciousness, Pavlov, Skinner; faded
away w/ growing interest in hypnosis, drug-induced states, mental illness, spirituality,
transpersonal psychology
- cognitive psychology: 1st as cognition + intentionality (as digital PCs) then cognition +
consciousness (connectionist approach, as neural network)
- predictive processing: brain as a prediction machine, matching expectations w/ sensory
input; perceptions are guesses about the world
- explanatory (metaphysical) gap: the mysterious gap (we don't know how to think about it
yet), between physical phenomena and conscious experience; easy problems of consciousness
can be scientifically answered (attention, sleep-wake cycles, etc), but hard problem: how
physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience
2. What is it like to be…? - consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable
- being conscious = having experience and point of view, there is something it is like to be
that organism (as in identity, not comparison), how is it to be from the inside?
- phenomenal consciousness = experience, there is something it is like to be in that state
- access consciousness = availability for use in reasoning & rationally guiding speech and
action (ability to say smth about the experience, cognitive accessibility of reportability) → big
emphasis on language; are these reportable contents all there is to consciousness?? - any kid
of access leaves us w/ impression we are only describing the surface...
subjectivity & qualia - experiences are private, ineffable, has a quality of its own → the qualities = qualia =
fundamental blocks of sensory experience, what smth is like (what you can't get from the bat
, - conscious states are qualitative states, so the problem of qualia is the same problem of
consciousness (how does objective brains produce subjective qualia??)
- many versions of what qualia is → some philosophers deny the existence of qualia, but as in
the version of ineffable, intrinsic directly apprehensible 'raw feels'
- Dennet: intuition pumps = thought experiments used to drawn intuition to the surface
- decide whether qualia exists w/ thought experiments (= to clarify thinking)
Mary - Mary the colour scientist: lived in black and white room, specialized and knows all there is
to know about physical facts of colour; then sees 'red' for the first time, would she be
surprised? if yes: there is qualia, a raw feel of experiencing in addition to the physical facts/
or still materialism, she connected old facts in new ways, or acquired a new skill
(epiphenomenalism/ dualism); if no: no qualia, the physical facts are all there is to know
- but: have we fallen into Philosopher's Syndrome?: mistaking a failure of imagination for an
insight into necessity? → maybe we haven't followed the instructions, knowing absolutely
everything there is to know about color could be enough to know how it feels like, without
ever feeling it?
Zombie - Chalmers: the philosopher's zombie: something physically and behaviorally identical to the
philosopher, but which has no conscious experience at all (nothing it is like to be him) →
logically or physically possible??
- in zombie Earth, philosophy would be different (no discussion on consciousness), and
therefore zombies wouldn't be possible → this goes to the heart of how we perform thought
experiments and why: can we step from conceivability to possibility or necessity?
- if zombies are possible: consciousness is superfluous, an epiphenomenon that exists but
does nothing → epiphenomenalism, conscious inessentialism
- if not: any creature like us will need to be conscious, necessarily; then what is it for??
- Churchland: imagination doesn't inform, counts for nothing; Dennet: if you add
self-monitoring to zombie (=zimbo), you get full package
responses to the hard 1. it's insoluble: the problem of subjectivity is intractable, we don't even have a conception of
problem what a physical explanation of a mental phenomenon would be, we are cognitively closed to
this problem, new mysterianism: challenges the belief that science will eventually explain
everything of the natural world
2. try to solve it: redefines the problem as 'how does the brain create qualia?'; the solution
requires fundamental new understanding of the universe; dualism, quantum physics
3. tackle the easy problems: attempting ot the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) to
make the problem of qualia clearer - just fashionable scientific research?
4. identify more hard problems: Miller, not every neural constitution of a conscious state is
necessarily constitutive of that state; splitting the problem into other hard problems
5. there is no hard problem: we should start w/ the easy problems, they might change our
understanding of the hard one; physical activity = the experience (language made it
complicated, materialism) - recognise that feelings exist in nature (brain); Churchland:
zombies demonstrate the feebleness of thought experiments, and how do we know explaining
the hard problems are much harder?, we have the false intuition that there is something
other than perception, attention, etc - a theorist's illusion; also w/ Dennet
3. The grand illusion - illusion = something that is not what it appears to be, declaring that the old thing does not
exist
- we understand the world mostly via vision and hearing, language is full of metaphors about
vision being equivalent to knowing - 'I see what you mean'
- 'grand illusion' emerged from research on change blindness and inattentional blindness →
our visual experience might not be how it first seems, we may be wrong about the nature of
seeing itself!; processing is blocked during visual saccades
- assumptions in theories on what vision seems:
1) visual experience is richly detailed; 2) at any time there are contents in and others 'outside'
of consciousness; 3) seeing means having internal pictures (world represented in our head)
- Descartes: pictures in the head → such theories need to answer: what are the pictures for?
Homunculus problem?
the magic difference - what creates the magic difference? (= some representations are conscious and others not)
- approach the question by looking for neural correlates (but still not finding the NCs of
