Introduction To Consciousness

Question 1

What are the three fundamental and mysterious stages of creation?

Answer 1

1. The creation of something out of nothing
2. Life from inorganic dead matter
3. The birth of consciousness and conscious beings from organic mater

Question 2

What is the fundamental question of the mind-body problem?

Answer 2

What is the relation between the conscious mind and the electro-chemical interactions in the body that give rise to it?

Question 3

What are qualia?

Answer 3

The sensory qualities of the consciousness experience

Question 4

What do philosophers mainly talk about in terms of consciousness?

Answer 4

The mind’s capacity to represent or to be about things

Question 5

What is a zombie according to philosophy?

Answer 5

An imaginary being who behaves and acts just like a normal person but has absolutely no conscious life, no sensations, and no feelings

Question 6

What are zombie agents?

Answer 6

Actions done by n individual that bypass awareness, which means consciousness isn’t required

Question 7

Where did the mind-body problem originate from?

Answer 7

Rene Descartes publication ‘Traite de l’homme’ in he mid-17th century

Question 8

What is the religious belief of consciousness?

Answer 8

The heart of it lies a transcendent and immortal soul

Question 9

What is res extensa?

Answer 9

Physical substance with spatial extent

Question 10

What is res cogitans?

Answer 10

Thinking substance

Question 11

What is Descartes perspective on res cogitans?

Answer 11

It is unique to humans and gives rise to consciousness

Question 12

What is dualism?

Answer 12

Two forms of substances, mater and soul stuff

Question 13

What does the mysterian position claim?

Answer 13

Human beings are unable to comprehend consciousness because it is just too complex

Question 14

What is Dennett’s perspective on consciousness?

Answer 14

The way most people conceive it is an elaborate illusion, mediated by the senses in collusion with motor output, and supported by social constructions and learning.

Question 15

What is present day physics incapable of doing?

Answer 15

Explaining the intuitive powers of mathematicians and of people a large

Question 16

What is the role of microtubules?

Answer 16

Mediation of coherent quantum states across large populations of neurons

Question 17

What does the enactive and sensorimotor account of consciousness stress?

Answer 17

A nervous system can’t be considered in isolation

Question 18

What generates feeling?

Answer 18

The behaving organism embedded in a particular environment

Question 19

What is the working hypothesis of consciousness?

Answer 19

Consciousness emerges from neuronal features of the brain

Question 20

What are synapses?

Answer 20

Molecular machines that come equipped with learning algorithms that modify their strength and dynamics across many timescales

Question 21

What does consciousness consist of according to John Searle?

Answer 21

States of sentience, or feeling, or awareness until entering a state of unconsciousness

Question 22

What does true language enable?

Answer 22

Homo sapiens to represent and disseminate arbitrarily complex concepts

Question 23

What does the evidence accumulated from split-brain patients suggest?

Answer 23

Mammals experience the sights and sounds to life

Question 24

What is motion-induced blindness?

Answer 24

A bunch of randomly moving blue lights that are superimposed onto three highly salient but stationary yellow spots

Question 25

What are the sensory forms of awareness noted as?

Answer 25

Core consciousness

Question 26

What are examples of altered states of consciousness?

Answer 26

• Hypnosis
• Out-of-body experiences
• Lucid dreaming
• Hallucination
• Meditation

Question 27

What is the goal of studying the neural correlates of consciousness?

Answer 27

Discover the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept

Question 28

What does the NCC explore?

Answer 28

Involves the firing of neurons in the forebrain

Question 29

What is the principle output of forebrain neurons?

Answer 29

Binary spikes or action potentials

Question 30

What must the NCC explicitly show?

Answer 30

Correspondence between any mental event and its neuronal correlates

Question 31

Where is NCC not expressed?

Answer 31

In the spiking activity of some neurons

Question 32

What is involved in NCC expression

Answer 32

Glia cells that support, nurture and maintain nerve cells and their environment in the brain

Question 33

What does physicalism assert?

Answer 33

That mental events and and neuronal events are identical to each other