Consciousness Flashcards
Consciousness
What must happen, to really know what something is like?
You have to experience it yourself.
No description or explanation can achieve this.
Consciousness
What are qualia?
What are characterizes them?
- Properties of phenomenally conscious experiences
- They are only subjectively accessible
- They have a specific qualitative experiental character
- They have identifiable time boundaries
- They can be named but usually not really described
Consciousness
What is access consciousness?
What makes a thought “access-conscious”?
Which toughts can be “access-conscious”?
A form of consciousness that makes toughts directly available or “access-conscious”
The tought is directly available:
* to co-determine your actions
* as input for your speech
* as input for further thoughts
Every informational state is potentially access-conscious
Consciousness
What is the connection between phenomenal and access consciousness?
Can we access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness exist seperatelly?
Both forms are not mutually exclusive
A conscious state can be both phenomenally - and access conscious
Still a matter of dispute
(Examples: Clock in a room, computer)
Consciousness
What is phenomenal consciousness?
A form of consciousness that lets you experience what something is like
Content is purely experiental (not abstract, descriptive or conceptual)
Consciousness
- What are intrinsic properties? (Examples?)
- What are extrinsic properties? (Examples?)
- How does this relate to the hard problem of consciousness?
- The property cannot be defined in terms of the way this object is related to other things. It can only be defined by looking at that object. (qualia)
- Properties of objects that can be described only be refering to other objects and properties as well. (causal properties, relative size)
- What makes the hard problem seemingly insoluble is the fact, that experience supposedly has an ineradicably intrinsic quality. You can not define phenomenal consciousness in functional terms (causal role).
Consciousness
- What is the intentionality of consciousness?
- What is an intentional object?
- What is the problem with intrinsic qualities of experience?
- How could intentional “aboutness” be explained in representational terms?
- Conscious experience is always the experience of something. If you are not conscious of something, you are not conscious. If you are not thinking about something, you are not thinking.
- The object your consciousness is directed towards. It is not the conscious mind/brain itself!
- Any quality of conscious experience must be a quality of the intentional object of experience. So it cannot be intrinsic to consciousness, for in order to think or talk about such qualities we cannot but point outside of consciousness to the intentional object of experience.
- The intentional object is represented in the mind of the person who consciously thinks of it
What is the hard problem of consciousness?
can we provide a causal profile for phenomenaly conscious states?
if we explain how something is caused and what it causes, have we thereby explained how it feels?
zombies
inverted colour spectrum
-> qualia cannot be captures in terms of causal roles
-> no way to (physicaly) explain phenomenal consciousness
devising a physical explanation of phenomenal consciousness is the hard problem
What is the easy problem of consciousness?
can consciousness be explained in physical terms? (Jackson -> knowledge argument)
define mental states in terms of the causal role they play in the overall cognitive economy and then try to find a brain state that plays (realizes) this role
access-consciousness: caused by perceptions, causes actions and is available to speech & thought -> what brain state is its realizer?
‘easy’ because we know what to do (but still a complex task)
Explain the PANIC theory!
Poised Abstract Non-Conceptual Intentional Content
claims to be able to solve the hard problem
all phenomenal consciousness is also access conscious
Phenomenal consciousness is just a sub-class of access consciousness which is explainable in functional terms
the content needs to abstract and non-conceptual to qualify as phenomenal
problem with representational theories and phenomenal experience?
- is a particular phenomenal experience really an intrinsic property of the intentional object?
- or is it just the outcome of how the sensory system responds to the object?
- if the same effect (quale) can be achieved by combining a different mix of sensory input (e.g. odours), it cannot be taken as a property of the intentional object but as a property of “the-object-as-perceived-by-us”
how can the type-identity theory explain qualia in physical terms?
what is the response of David Chalmers?
- combine functionalism and type-identity theory into a hybrid theory
- functionalism explains the “easy” part (beliefs, thoughts, intentions, …) while the phenomenal part is explained by the kind of stuff the brain is made of.
- what this stuff and its properties are is still unknown
- Fading and dancing qualia
