Consciousness Flashcards
What is phenomenology?
Study of how things seem to the conscious person
What is the problem of other minds?
the fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others
What do philosophers call the hypothetical nonconscious person?
zombie
- no clear way to distinguish a conscious person from someone who is not conscious but just appears to be
What are the 2 dimensions of mind perception?
People judge minds according to
- capacity for experience
- capacity for agency
> minds have experiences and lead us to perform actions
What solution did behaviorism offer for the problem of other minds?
Eliminate consciousness from psychology entirely and follow the other sciences into total objectivity by renouncing study of anything mental.
What is the mind-body problem?
the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body
What are the 4 basic properties of consciousness?
- intentionality: quality of being directed towards an object
- unity: resistance to division/ ability to integrate info from all of the body’s senses into one coherent whole
- selectivity: capacity to include some objects but not others/brain makes decisions about what info to include or exclude
- transience: tendency to change
what is dichotic listening?
- a task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages in each ear
- conscious system is most inclined to select info of special interest to listener
eg. cocktail party phenomenon: people tune in one message even while they filter out others nearby
What are the different levels of consciousness?
- minimal: low-level kind of sensory awareness & responsiveness that occurs when mind inputs sensations may output behavior
- full: you know and are able to report your mental state
- self-conscious: person’s attention is drawn to the self as an object to the exclusion of everything else
What are 3 disorders of consciousness?
- coma: patients don’t communicate & don’t respond to their name being called/ completely unaware
- vegetative state: alternate btw eyes-open and eyes-closed states/ no behavior caused in response to external stimuli
- minimally conscious: can respond reliably but inconsistently to sensory stimulation
What is locked-in syndrome?
- condition where patients have full awareness but can’t demonstrate it, because unable to voluntarily move muscles
- not a disorder of consciousness
What is daydreaming?
- state in which a seemingly purposeless flow of thoughts comes into mind
- brain active when it has no specific task at hand > default network
- default network involves thoughts about social life, self & past and future
What is mental control?
the attempt to change conscious states of mind
What is thought suppression?
conscious avoidance of a thought
What is the rebound effect of thought suppression?
the tendency of a thought to return to consciousness with greater frequency following suppression
What is ironic processes of mental control?
- mental process can produce ironic errors because monitoring for errors can itself produce them
- ironic monitor works outside of consciousness
What is Freud’s dynamic unconscious?
an active system encompassing a lifetime of hidden memories, the person’s deepest instincts and desires and the person’s inner struggles to control these forces
What does Freud believe must be done about the unconscious?
- force to be held in check by repression: mental process that removes unacceptable thoughts and memories from consciousness and keeps them in the unconscious
What are Freudian slips?
- evidence of the unconscious mind in speech errors and lapses in consciousness
- believes that errors are not random and instead have some deeper meaning created by intelligent unconscious mind
What is the cognitive unconscious?
all the mental processes that give rise to a person’s thoughts, choices, emotions, and behavior even though they are not experienced by the person
What are dual-process theories?
suggest that we have 2 different systems in our brains for processing info:
1. dedicated to fast, automatic and unconscious processing (System 1); helps efficiently navigate your daily life
2. dedicated to slow, effortful and conscious processing (System 2); uses info and inputs from S1 to help guide future behavior
What is an altered state of consciousness?
- a form of experience that departs significantly from the normal subjective experience of the world and the mind
- can be accompanied by changes in thinking, disturbances in sense of time, feelings of loss of control, etc.
What is pre-sleep consciousness called?
hypnagogic state
What’s a hypnic jerk?
sudden quiver or sensation of dropping