Introduction To Consciousness Flashcards
What are the three fundamental and mysterious stages of creation?
- The creation of something out of nothing
- Life from inorganic dead matter
- The birth of consciousness and conscious beings from organic mater
What is the fundamental question of the mind-body problem?
What is the relation between the conscious mind and the electro-chemical interactions in the body that give rise to it?
What are qualia?
The sensory qualities of the consciousness experience
What do philosophers mainly talk about in terms of consciousness?
The mind’s capacity to represent or to be about things
What is a zombie according to philosophy?
An imaginary being who behaves and acts just like a normal person but has absolutely no conscious life, no sensations, and no feelings
What are zombie agents?
Actions done by n individual that bypass awareness, which means consciousness isn’t required
Where did the mind-body problem originate from?
Rene Descartes publication ‘Traite de l’homme’ in he mid-17th century
What is the religious belief of consciousness?
The heart of it lies a transcendent and immortal soul
What is res extensa?
Physical substance with spatial extent
What is res cogitans?
Thinking substance
What is Descartes perspective on res cogitans?
It is unique to humans and gives rise to consciousness
What is dualism?
Two forms of substances, mater and soul stuff
What does the mysterian position claim?
Human beings are unable to comprehend consciousness because it is just too complex
What is Dennett’s perspective on consciousness?
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.
What is present day physics incapable of doing?
Explaining the intuitive powers of mathematicians and of people a large
What is the role of microtubules?
Mediation of coherent quantum states across large populations of neurons
What does the enactive and sensorimotor account of consciousness stress?
A nervous system can’t be considered in isolation
What generates feeling?
The behaving organism embedded in a particular environment
What is the working hypothesis of consciousness?
Consciousness emerges from neuronal features of the brain
What are synapses?
Molecular machines that come equipped with learning algorithms that modify their strength and dynamics across many timescales
What does consciousness consist of according to John Searle?
States of sentience, or feeling, or awareness until entering a state of unconsciousness
What does true language enable?
Homo sapiens to represent and disseminate arbitrarily complex concepts
What does the evidence accumulated from split-brain patients suggest?
Mammals experience the sights and sounds to life
What is motion-induced blindness?
A bunch of randomly moving blue lights that are superimposed onto three highly salient but stationary yellow spots
What are the sensory forms of awareness noted as?
Core consciousness
What are examples of altered states of consciousness?
- Hypnosis
- Out-of-body experiences
- Lucid dreaming
- Hallucination
- Meditation
What is the goal of studying the neural correlates of consciousness?
Discover the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept
What does the NCC explore?
Involves the firing of neurons in the forebrain
What is the principle output of forebrain neurons?
Binary spikes or action potentials
What must the NCC explicitly show?
Correspondence between any mental event and its neuronal correlates
Where is NCC not expressed?
In the spiking activity of some neurons
What is involved in NCC expression
Glia cells that support, nurture and maintain nerve cells and their environment in the brain
What does physicalism assert?
That mental events and and neuronal events are identical to each other
