Intro class Flashcards
1
Q
What is perception?
A
- The process or result of becoming aware of objects, relationships, and events by means of the senses, which includes such activities as recognizing, observing, and discriminating.
- These activities enable organisms to organize and interpret the stimuli received into meaningful knowledge and to act in a coordinated manner
2
Q
What is sensation?
A
- Experience produced by stimulation of a sensory receptor and the resultant activation of a specific brain centre, producing basic awareness of a sound, odor, colour, shape, or taste or of temperature, pressure, pain, muscular tension, position of the body, or change in the internal organs associated with such processes as hunger, thirst, nausea, and sexual excitement.
3
Q
What is subjective experience?
A
- Particular to a specific person and thus intrinsically inaccessible to the experience or observation of others
4
Q
What is consciousness?
A
- An organism’s awareness of something either internal or external to itself
- Much philosophizing about this
- Everything you’re aware of at this moment in time, your memories, emotions…
5
Q
What did philosopher David Chalmers propose?
A
He proposed what are known as the easy problem and the hard problem of consciousness.
6
Q
What is the easy problem?
A
- The explanation of mental phenomena that are testable by standard methods of science
- This includes the recognition of stimuli, cognitive processes, and the processes involved in wakefulness and sleep
- An easy problem is solved once its neurobiological mechanisms are specified.
- For example, visual experience is explained by the stimulation of photoreceptors by a specific range of wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrum, which ultimately results in the activation of the visual cortex and extrastriate areas
7
Q
What is the hard problem?
A
- What remains once the neurobiological mechanisms of a phenomenon have been explained
- How does it go from neurobiological processes to experiencing something
- For example, we can explain the mechanisms by which visual experience occurs, but we cannot explain how these mechanisms give rise to the subjective experience of colours
8
Q
What did Thomas Nagel do?
A
- He wrote a paper entitled “What is it like to be a bat?”
- Humans can know everything about echolocation but we can’t hear it so we can’t experience it
9
Q
What did Thomas Nagel say about subjective experience?
A
- Comprehending the subjective experiences of other beings presents a significant challenge
- Understanding consciousness requires considering what it’s like from the perspective of the entity itself (like a bat)
- Reducing the complex experience of being a bat to mere physical or neuroscientific terms, may miss the true essence of bat consciousness
- Certain aspects of bat (and other animals) consciousness may be inherently beyond human understanding, given the constraints of our own sensory experiences
10
Q
What is the inverted spectrum thought experiment?
A
- John Locke
- What if you were born and a strawberry looks green to you (but everyone says its red)
- There’s no way to know that someone is seeing it like that (they think green is red)
- The brain is different but we can’t/don’t know that it is
11
Q
Who is Mary the colour scientist?
A
- Frank Jackson
- Mary is a brilliant scientist who is forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white tv monitor
- She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky and use terms like red, blue, and so on
- She discovers just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system
- She has solves the easy problem
12
Q
What question does Mary the colour scientist raise?
A
- If one day Mary comes out of the room, will she learn anything? (yes)
- Could she discriminate objects by their colour?
