1. What is consciousness?

Question 1

What is consciousness accroding to Dehanae?

Answer 1

conscious experience is a percept, thought, action or feeling that can be (re)produced or reported about

Question 2

What is the problem of other minds?

Answer 2

It is impossible to know what is like to be in somebody else mind. The only way to know is to ask other people (issues with reliability of self report). Things complicate even more with other animals -> no standard for how to measure consciousness

Question 3

What is like to be a bat? - Thomas Nagel

Answer 3

What is -> LIKE -> LIKENESS -> phenomenal consciousness = raw experience, feelings, sensations. Importantly, we still cannot communicate with animals, but we have this idea that we could image how it is to be them. It is impossible to answer this question right now, but the goal is to do so (eventually).

Question 5

What is a difference between sentience and consciousness?

Answer 5

sentience = raw experience = phenomenal consciousness, consciousness = sentience + other mind characteristics

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations, while consciousness refers to the ability to have subjective perceptual experiences or “qualia.”

Question 6

What is the hard problem?

Answer 6

Why and how do subjective experiences arise from objective brains (neural processes)?

-> explaining the function doesn’t explain the experience
-> how do we explain phenomenal experience? how do we explain qualia?

formulated by Chalmers

Question 7

qualia

Answer 7

quality of experience -> private and intrinsic phenomena of consciousness, private experiences not reducible to other descriptions (eg. neural)

Question 8

What is the easy problem?

Answer 8

explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking

can be reduced to functional explanations

Question 9

philosophical zombie

Answer 9

a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal human being but does not have conscious experience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would

David Chalmers

Question 10

Mary the color scientist

Answer 10

The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black-and-white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual perceptual experience of color. Mary has learned everything there is to learn about color, but she has never actually experienced it for herself. The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she goes outside of the colorless world and experiences seeing in color.

Question 11

Daniel Dennett - views on consciousness

Answer 11

materialistic point of view
consciousness ≠ special
predictive processing/Bayesian brain
the mind works as a system of mechanical sub-processes
the opposite of qualia → interactive neurons, can be explained, there is no one place in the brain where everything comes together (homunculus)

Question 12

dualistic ideas about consciousness

Answer 12

the mind and body are not identical and consciousness cannot be reduced to pure brain activity (David Chalmers, ideas by Descartes )

Question 13

materialism

Answer 13

all emergent phenomena, including consciousness, are the result of material properties and interactions in the brain