Section 1: The problem
Chapter 1: What is the problem?
Mind-body problem: what is the relationship between the physical and the mental?
Consciousness is your private experience, no one can see and feel stuff the way you do.
A monist theory is that there is only one kind of stuff in the world, and dualist theory proposes of two
kinds of stuff.
The doctrine of epiphenomenalism i s the idea that mental states are produced by physical events but
have no causal role to play. In other words, physical events cause or give rise to mental events, but
mental events have no effect on physical events; Problem with this is if conscious experiences can
have no effect on anything whatsoever, then we should never know about or be able to speak about
them since this would mean they had had an effect. Also makes it a dualist perspective, if mind is a
by-product or side effect of the physical world but it is not actually physical self. Accepts the
existence of consciousness but denies that it has any effects.
Neutral monism: the world is all made of one kind of stuff but a stuff that cannot be classified as
either mental or physical.
Panpsychism: the view that all material things have associated awareness or mental properties,
however primitive. In some versions this means that everything in the universe is conscious, including
clouds, rivers and cockroaches. In other versions everything has mental properties but this can
include both conscious and unconscious minds.
Descartes: I think, therefore I am. In his view the world consists of two different kinds of stuff, the
extended stuff of which physical bodies are made, and the unextended, thinking stuff of which minds
are made.
Descartes’ theory is a form of substance dualism, which can be contrasted with property dualism or
dual aspect theory. According to property dualism, the same thing (e.g. a human being) can be
described using mental terms or physical terms, but one description cannot be reduced to the other.
For example when you are in pain, this can be described in mental terms and physical terms.
Weber-Fechner law: relating sensation to the intensity of a stimulus.
Cognitive unconsciousness: being capable of many types of thinking, learning and memory without
awareness, and then what is sometimes called the ‘new unconscious’ which expands this notion to
emphasize emotions, motivation and control.
Phenomenology: both a philosophy and psychology based on putting subjective experience first.
Conscious experiences are about objects or events, while physical objects are not about anything.
Introspection: Self reflection. Wilhelm Wundt studied psychology from the inside. This study had to
be systematic and rigorous and so he trained people to make precise and reliable observations of
their inner experience. He claimed that there were 2 kinds of physical elements: the objective
elements or sensations such as tones, heat or light. And the subjective elements or simple feelings.
Behaviorism: ‘recognizes no dividing line between man and brute’ . John B. Watson: psychology as the
behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs
introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics. He proposed to abolish such
nonsense as introspection and consciousness and establish a psychology whose goal was the
prediction and control of behavior.
,Skinner: human behavior was shaped by the history of reinforcements, and he believed that with the
right reinforcement schedules a human utopia could be created.
The explanatory gap: described as a metaphysical gap between physical phenomena and conscious
experience. The hard problem: is to explain how physical processes in the brain gives rise to
subjective experience.
Chapter 2: What is it like to be…?
The closest we come to a definition of consciousness is that there is something like to be that
organism and something is like for that organism. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ is about this. The
consciousness is subjectivity.
The reason that a bat was chosen for this question is because the bat’s sensory systems are quite
different but the lives and senses are well understood.
Phenomenal consciousness: is an experience: what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that
there is something ‘it is like’ to be in that state. Distinguished from access consciousness which is
availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action.
Quale: what something is like. A quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.
We test qualia with using thought experiments, they are experiments done in the head. These
experiments help to clarify our thinking instead of giving reliable answers than can be applicable
widely.
Mary’s thought experiment: Mary who has been in a black and white room all her life, but who does
have knowledge about colors gets out of the room. What is her reaction? It could be ‘Wow I never
imagined red to look like that’ or ‘I knew it would look like this’. Frank Jackson devised this
experiment as an argument against physicalism. He argued that when she comes out she obviously
learns something fundamentally new- what red is like. Now she has color qualia as well as all the
physical facts about color. No amount of knowledge about, or reasoning from, the physical facts
could have prepared her for the raw feel of what it is like to see a blue sky or green grass. In other
words, the physical facts about the world are not all there is to know, and therefore materialism has
to be false.
Zombie example: someone who is exactly like you but without consciousness.
Conscious in essentialism: is the idea that zombies are possible, or that consciousness is a kind of
optional extra.
Zimbo: a zombie that monitors its own activities, including even its own internal activities, in an
indefinite upward spiral of reflexivity. It is a zombie that, as a result of self-monitoring, has internal
(but unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about its other, lower-order
informational states. When you ask the zimbo a question it will answer in such an orderly fashion
that it thinks it has a consciousness, but it doesn’t. Just like us! → this theory supports
epiphenomenalism.
Chalmer’s distinction between the hard problem and the easy problems of consciousness related
directly to Nagel’s question: What is it like to be a bat? And get at the central issue of the 2 thought
experiments: ‘Why aren’t we all zombies?’ and ‘What does Mary gain when she emerges from her
black and white room?’.
Responses to the hard problem:
1. The hard problem is insoluble. We don’t have the brains to know what consciousness is. Just
like a dog can try its hardest and still won’t be able to read the paper.
, 2. Tackle the easy problems. Visual blinding: this theory synchronized oscillations to explain
how the different attributes of a perceived object become bound together to make a
perceptual whole. ‘But why’, asks Chalmers, ‘should synchronized oscillations give rise to a
visual experience, no matter how much integration is taking place?’. He concludes that this is
a theory of the easy problems.
3. There is no hard problem. 3 reasons to ignore the hard problem.
a. We know how to address the easy problems so we should start with them
b. Solutions to the easy problems will change our understanding of the hard problem,
so trying to solve the hard problem now is premature
c. A solution to the hard problem would only be of use if we recognize it as such, and
for the moment the problem is not well enough understood.
Chapter 3: What does consciousness do?
When you throw a ball in the air you seem conscious of doing the catching, and of the sight of the
ball as your hands reach for it, but did the consciousness itself cause anything to happen? In doing
this simple task, it is easy to imagine that your conscious perception of the ball caused you to catch it.
The causal sequence seems to be:
➢ 1. Consciously perceive
➢ 2. Act on basis of conscious experience
This is a strange notion because 2 mysterious conversions take place: first the physical information in
the nerve firings in the visual system must somehow give rise to a conscious experience, and then the
conscious experience must somehow cause more nerve firings to direct the appropriate action. How
can non-physical experiences cause physical firings of nerve cells, or movements of muscles?
Consciousness and skilled movements: Studies of skilled motor actions reveal a dissociation between
fast visuomotor control and conscious perception. For example when you play tennis and hit the ball
at such a high speed you are not even conscious about doing this. But the ball is consciously
perceived.
Fast motor reactions and conscious perception are disassociated, an explanation is that the two are
based on entirely different systems in the brain.
Millner and Goodale (1995) suggest a functional dissociation between two vision systems: visual
perception and visuomotor control. They map this into the two neural streams in the visual system:
the ventral and dorsal streams. The ‘what’ and ‘where’ of vision.
Conscious and unconscious actions
We can divide action into five types:
➢ Are always unconscious →can’t consciously grow your hair or increase your blood sugar level
➢ Can be made conscious →when made aware that your right hand is warmer than the left,
you can control this variable, even though you don’t know how you do it. When you open a
door, you have no idea how all the intricate muscular activity required to turn the handle.
➢ Start out being done consciously but with practice become unconscious → riding a bike,
driving a car.
➢ Can be done either way → making coffee while thinking about stuff, arriving at a familiar
destination with the car without having been conscious of the journey.
➢ Are always done unconsciously → trying to remember a phone number, making a moral
decision.
, The self-conscious mind theory o f Popper and Eccles. There is a constant two-way interaction
between the two worlds of mind and brain. In one direction, the scanning self-conscious mind reads
out neural events in the brain and integrates them into a unified experience. In the other, the
self-conscious mind acts on a large area of the brain, causing activity that eventually home in on the
motor pyramidal cells and brings about the action that is desired.
A problem with this theory: it is very well to hypothesize that the non-physical mind liaises with the
physical brain in special liaison areas, but as in any dualist theory the sticking point is the nature of
this interaction to which there is no answer.
Eliminative materialism: denies the existence of consciousness.
Representational theories:
➢ Higher-order perception (HOP) → being conscious of a mental state means monitoring
first-order mental states in a quasi-perceptual way – with something analogous to an ‘inner
eye’.
➢ Higher-order thought (HOT) → having a thought about the first-order state, so a mental state
is conscious if the person has a higher-order though to the effect that they are conscious of
being in that state.
For example, my perception of a reflash is only conscious if accompanied by a HOT that I am seeing a
fed flash.
Functionalism: the view that mental states are functional states. For example, if someone is in pain,
the pain is understood in term of the input from the damage done, the output behaviors such as
crying or rubbing the wound, and other mental states such as the desire for the pain to go away,
which can also be specified functionally.
Global workspace theory (GWT): cognitive system is built on a global workspace or blackboard
architecture analogous to a stage in the theater of the mind. (Further explanation in chapter 5).
Section 2: The world
Chapter 4: Attention and timing
William James: ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my
mind- without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos’.
Attention and consciousness: there are two kinds of connections that are made between
consciousness and attention.
➢ First is the idea that when something is attended to it is ‘in’ consciousness → effect theory
➢ Second, there is the idea that consciousness can direct attention, or even that directing
attention is the major function of consciousness → cause theory
Imagine you are sitting in a lecture and the door opens. You notice this disturbance and turn around
to see who it is. So you 1. Consciously hear a sound. 2. Turn around to look.
It feels as though our conscious perception of the noise caused us to pay attention.
Attention is often directed involuntarily, for example when we react to a loud noise, we only realize
afterward that we have done so.
Chapter 1: What is the problem?
Mind-body problem: what is the relationship between the physical and the mental?
Consciousness is your private experience, no one can see and feel stuff the way you do.
A monist theory is that there is only one kind of stuff in the world, and dualist theory proposes of two
kinds of stuff.
The doctrine of epiphenomenalism i s the idea that mental states are produced by physical events but
have no causal role to play. In other words, physical events cause or give rise to mental events, but
mental events have no effect on physical events; Problem with this is if conscious experiences can
have no effect on anything whatsoever, then we should never know about or be able to speak about
them since this would mean they had had an effect. Also makes it a dualist perspective, if mind is a
by-product or side effect of the physical world but it is not actually physical self. Accepts the
existence of consciousness but denies that it has any effects.
Neutral monism: the world is all made of one kind of stuff but a stuff that cannot be classified as
either mental or physical.
Panpsychism: the view that all material things have associated awareness or mental properties,
however primitive. In some versions this means that everything in the universe is conscious, including
clouds, rivers and cockroaches. In other versions everything has mental properties but this can
include both conscious and unconscious minds.
Descartes: I think, therefore I am. In his view the world consists of two different kinds of stuff, the
extended stuff of which physical bodies are made, and the unextended, thinking stuff of which minds
are made.
Descartes’ theory is a form of substance dualism, which can be contrasted with property dualism or
dual aspect theory. According to property dualism, the same thing (e.g. a human being) can be
described using mental terms or physical terms, but one description cannot be reduced to the other.
For example when you are in pain, this can be described in mental terms and physical terms.
Weber-Fechner law: relating sensation to the intensity of a stimulus.
Cognitive unconsciousness: being capable of many types of thinking, learning and memory without
awareness, and then what is sometimes called the ‘new unconscious’ which expands this notion to
emphasize emotions, motivation and control.
Phenomenology: both a philosophy and psychology based on putting subjective experience first.
Conscious experiences are about objects or events, while physical objects are not about anything.
Introspection: Self reflection. Wilhelm Wundt studied psychology from the inside. This study had to
be systematic and rigorous and so he trained people to make precise and reliable observations of
their inner experience. He claimed that there were 2 kinds of physical elements: the objective
elements or sensations such as tones, heat or light. And the subjective elements or simple feelings.
Behaviorism: ‘recognizes no dividing line between man and brute’ . John B. Watson: psychology as the
behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs
introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics. He proposed to abolish such
nonsense as introspection and consciousness and establish a psychology whose goal was the
prediction and control of behavior.
,Skinner: human behavior was shaped by the history of reinforcements, and he believed that with the
right reinforcement schedules a human utopia could be created.
The explanatory gap: described as a metaphysical gap between physical phenomena and conscious
experience. The hard problem: is to explain how physical processes in the brain gives rise to
subjective experience.
Chapter 2: What is it like to be…?
The closest we come to a definition of consciousness is that there is something like to be that
organism and something is like for that organism. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ is about this. The
consciousness is subjectivity.
The reason that a bat was chosen for this question is because the bat’s sensory systems are quite
different but the lives and senses are well understood.
Phenomenal consciousness: is an experience: what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that
there is something ‘it is like’ to be in that state. Distinguished from access consciousness which is
availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action.
Quale: what something is like. A quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.
We test qualia with using thought experiments, they are experiments done in the head. These
experiments help to clarify our thinking instead of giving reliable answers than can be applicable
widely.
Mary’s thought experiment: Mary who has been in a black and white room all her life, but who does
have knowledge about colors gets out of the room. What is her reaction? It could be ‘Wow I never
imagined red to look like that’ or ‘I knew it would look like this’. Frank Jackson devised this
experiment as an argument against physicalism. He argued that when she comes out she obviously
learns something fundamentally new- what red is like. Now she has color qualia as well as all the
physical facts about color. No amount of knowledge about, or reasoning from, the physical facts
could have prepared her for the raw feel of what it is like to see a blue sky or green grass. In other
words, the physical facts about the world are not all there is to know, and therefore materialism has
to be false.
Zombie example: someone who is exactly like you but without consciousness.
Conscious in essentialism: is the idea that zombies are possible, or that consciousness is a kind of
optional extra.
Zimbo: a zombie that monitors its own activities, including even its own internal activities, in an
indefinite upward spiral of reflexivity. It is a zombie that, as a result of self-monitoring, has internal
(but unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about its other, lower-order
informational states. When you ask the zimbo a question it will answer in such an orderly fashion
that it thinks it has a consciousness, but it doesn’t. Just like us! → this theory supports
epiphenomenalism.
Chalmer’s distinction between the hard problem and the easy problems of consciousness related
directly to Nagel’s question: What is it like to be a bat? And get at the central issue of the 2 thought
experiments: ‘Why aren’t we all zombies?’ and ‘What does Mary gain when she emerges from her
black and white room?’.
Responses to the hard problem:
1. The hard problem is insoluble. We don’t have the brains to know what consciousness is. Just
like a dog can try its hardest and still won’t be able to read the paper.
, 2. Tackle the easy problems. Visual blinding: this theory synchronized oscillations to explain
how the different attributes of a perceived object become bound together to make a
perceptual whole. ‘But why’, asks Chalmers, ‘should synchronized oscillations give rise to a
visual experience, no matter how much integration is taking place?’. He concludes that this is
a theory of the easy problems.
3. There is no hard problem. 3 reasons to ignore the hard problem.
a. We know how to address the easy problems so we should start with them
b. Solutions to the easy problems will change our understanding of the hard problem,
so trying to solve the hard problem now is premature
c. A solution to the hard problem would only be of use if we recognize it as such, and
for the moment the problem is not well enough understood.
Chapter 3: What does consciousness do?
When you throw a ball in the air you seem conscious of doing the catching, and of the sight of the
ball as your hands reach for it, but did the consciousness itself cause anything to happen? In doing
this simple task, it is easy to imagine that your conscious perception of the ball caused you to catch it.
The causal sequence seems to be:
➢ 1. Consciously perceive
➢ 2. Act on basis of conscious experience
This is a strange notion because 2 mysterious conversions take place: first the physical information in
the nerve firings in the visual system must somehow give rise to a conscious experience, and then the
conscious experience must somehow cause more nerve firings to direct the appropriate action. How
can non-physical experiences cause physical firings of nerve cells, or movements of muscles?
Consciousness and skilled movements: Studies of skilled motor actions reveal a dissociation between
fast visuomotor control and conscious perception. For example when you play tennis and hit the ball
at such a high speed you are not even conscious about doing this. But the ball is consciously
perceived.
Fast motor reactions and conscious perception are disassociated, an explanation is that the two are
based on entirely different systems in the brain.
Millner and Goodale (1995) suggest a functional dissociation between two vision systems: visual
perception and visuomotor control. They map this into the two neural streams in the visual system:
the ventral and dorsal streams. The ‘what’ and ‘where’ of vision.
Conscious and unconscious actions
We can divide action into five types:
➢ Are always unconscious →can’t consciously grow your hair or increase your blood sugar level
➢ Can be made conscious →when made aware that your right hand is warmer than the left,
you can control this variable, even though you don’t know how you do it. When you open a
door, you have no idea how all the intricate muscular activity required to turn the handle.
➢ Start out being done consciously but with practice become unconscious → riding a bike,
driving a car.
➢ Can be done either way → making coffee while thinking about stuff, arriving at a familiar
destination with the car without having been conscious of the journey.
➢ Are always done unconsciously → trying to remember a phone number, making a moral
decision.
, The self-conscious mind theory o f Popper and Eccles. There is a constant two-way interaction
between the two worlds of mind and brain. In one direction, the scanning self-conscious mind reads
out neural events in the brain and integrates them into a unified experience. In the other, the
self-conscious mind acts on a large area of the brain, causing activity that eventually home in on the
motor pyramidal cells and brings about the action that is desired.
A problem with this theory: it is very well to hypothesize that the non-physical mind liaises with the
physical brain in special liaison areas, but as in any dualist theory the sticking point is the nature of
this interaction to which there is no answer.
Eliminative materialism: denies the existence of consciousness.
Representational theories:
➢ Higher-order perception (HOP) → being conscious of a mental state means monitoring
first-order mental states in a quasi-perceptual way – with something analogous to an ‘inner
eye’.
➢ Higher-order thought (HOT) → having a thought about the first-order state, so a mental state
is conscious if the person has a higher-order though to the effect that they are conscious of
being in that state.
For example, my perception of a reflash is only conscious if accompanied by a HOT that I am seeing a
fed flash.
Functionalism: the view that mental states are functional states. For example, if someone is in pain,
the pain is understood in term of the input from the damage done, the output behaviors such as
crying or rubbing the wound, and other mental states such as the desire for the pain to go away,
which can also be specified functionally.
Global workspace theory (GWT): cognitive system is built on a global workspace or blackboard
architecture analogous to a stage in the theater of the mind. (Further explanation in chapter 5).
Section 2: The world
Chapter 4: Attention and timing
William James: ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my
mind- without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos’.
Attention and consciousness: there are two kinds of connections that are made between
consciousness and attention.
➢ First is the idea that when something is attended to it is ‘in’ consciousness → effect theory
➢ Second, there is the idea that consciousness can direct attention, or even that directing
attention is the major function of consciousness → cause theory
Imagine you are sitting in a lecture and the door opens. You notice this disturbance and turn around
to see who it is. So you 1. Consciously hear a sound. 2. Turn around to look.
It feels as though our conscious perception of the noise caused us to pay attention.
Attention is often directed involuntarily, for example when we react to a loud noise, we only realize
afterward that we have done so.
