Consciousness

Question 1

Aspects of consciousness

Answer 1

sentience, wakefulness, access conscious and phenomenal consciousness

Question 2

sentient consciousness:

Answer 2

If something responds intelligently to its environment and others

Question 3

wakefulness

Answer 3

Something is conscious if it’s awake.

Question 4

access conscious:

Answer 4

Parts of our thoughts that are reportable, they are things we can report back to others.

Question 5

phenomenal consciousness:

Answer 5

conscious feelings, (basically just feeling things and sensing).

Question 6

What is phenomenology?

Answer 6

describing what a feeling is like, describing conscious feelings. Reflecting on our conscious life from an introspective subjective point of view is phenomenology.

Question 7

Hard problem of consciousness:

Answer 7

Explaining how brain activity produces consciousness

Question 8

Mary thinking experiment: catch

Answer 8

Mary walks out of the room one day and sees a red flower, this is the first time she sees colour so she has learned something new about colour, and experiences seeing colour and obtains conscious feeling. This conscious feeling is not something she could have obtained from reading the books alone.

Question 9

Overall argument of the hard problem of consciousness

Answer 9

The quest to explain and reduce phenomenal consciousness via brain science is doomed to failure.

Question 10

What part of the brain is the cortex?

Answer 10

the outer layer of the brain

Question 11

which area of the brain is associated with external awareness (navigating and interacting with our environment)

Answer 11

areas on the upper/outer surface of the brain (frontal and parietal lobes)

Question 12

Which areas of the brain are associated with internal awareness (daydream, remembering or planning for the future)

Answer 12

remidial side of the brain (where the two sides of the brain face each-other).

Question 13

what is the correlation between the two sorts of awareness?

Answer 13

activity in one means less activity in the other so they’re negatively-correlated

Question 14

which areas of the brain are associated with wakefulness?

Answer 14

subcortical regions of the brain such as the thalamus and reticular formation

Question 15

what can damage to the reticular formation and thalamus cause?

Answer 15

comas and disorders to do with consciousness.

Question 16

what are bistable images?

Answer 16

images that you can see as two different things.

Question 17

unconscious priming

Answer 17

when exposed to one stimulus, we are unconsciously primed to related stimulus for example: We recognise the word “Nurse” quicker after we have read the word “Doctor” than the word “Orange”.

Question 18

what is reductive explanation?

Answer 18

explaining high level phenomena in terms of low level phenomena