L03 - Consciousness Flashcards
What is the Interaction problem?
How are the mind and body related?
What are Idealists?
aka spiritual monist: mind is fundamental, disagrees with dualism, mono=1 – only mind, no matter
What are Neutral monist?
two different ways to represent reality: mental and physical
What are Materialists ?
Most popular: matter is fundamental, brain+mind=matter (same thing)
There is a problem with this view – the hard problem
What is the Hard Problem?
How to account for consciousness, how does matter give rise to mind?
Core of all questions of consciousness
What we perceive of the world and ourselves in the world
Who is Thomas Nagel?
What’s it like to be a bat
If it makes sense to ask, what is it like to be X, then X should be conscious
Bats live a very different life compared to humans. The conscious awareness will be based on totally different perceptions from humans.
Can we ever know what it is like to be a bat?
Nagel argues that that would be impossible because consciousness is subjective, a private experience (phenomenality)
What are examples of easy problems (cognitive psychology)?
Attention
Learning
Perception
Memory
What did Massimo Pigliucci suggest?
The hard problem is an illusion
How is this illusion generated?
What did Patricia Churchland suggest?
Impossible to decide in advance what is easy and hard problems
If we solve all the easy problems, will there be a hard problem?
What is Consciousness as a subjective, private experience?
We have no idea what it is like to be others – we cannot see their consciousness
Materialist problem – just knowing all the facts will not get you what you are after (always things left out)
They can say, I know it is wrong, but we can agree they will never get the answer but still study the brain when it is conscious
Or they can change their materialistic ways
You cannot be a materialist and still study consciousness.
Materialists believe that mind and brain are the same thing – matter
There is a Buddhist approach – use consciousness to study itself
What is Qualia?
Content of consciousness
The private aspect of our mental lives (our private reaction to: Tasting something sweet, Smelling something weird
The ineffable, subjective qualities of experience, such as the redness of red or the indescribable smell of turpentine. Some philosophers claim that qualia does not exist.
If qualia arise from mental activity, one way to understand what others are experiencing is generating similar activity by mimicry
The same faces have the same brain activity.
If you feel something from a face, you will think the person making the same face as you is feeling the same way you feel when making that face.
Give me examples of mimicry
Animals also mimic others and use it to their advantage.
Mimic octopuses change its shape to scare off predators (ex. Mimics Sea Snakes to scare off the fish that is afraid of sea snakes)
Mimic octopuses must know more than us what it is like to be other animals since they can mimic them so well (can change colours and shape)
What is consciousness?
There is no commonly agreed upon definition
Consciousness is identical to the physical process we can observe in the brain
Studying attention, learning, memory, perception etc. will let us understand consciousness in the end.
Materialist view
Consciousness is an illusion and does not exist
Consciousness does not exist and is an additional quality added to humans
We must understand the purpose of it: What does it allow us to do that we could not do without it?
Functionalist view: consciousness exists and is an additional quality to humans. It is intrinsic and an inseparable quality to humans
What does consciousness allow us to do? What are humans without consciousness? Give an example of how this could be shown.
Are humans without a consciousness functional beings?
Philosophical zombies – Physically identical to humans and behave like humans (will react the same as humans using their mimicry skills) but they do not have qualia/they have no conscious experience.
Would we consider a philosophical zombie a human? NO!
David Chalmers – pure materialism will not be enough to explain consciousness. Consciousness cannot be reproduced
What is Panpsychism?
Consciousness is possibly everywhere (Pan = everywhere)
Gaia theory – Earth itself has a consciousness: climate change is to make earth unlivable for humans (trying to extinct the humans because they are a threat to earth).
All particles in the universe have some form of experience – consciousness pervades the universe
Where there is life, there is consciousness
What is the Intergrated information theory?
All systems that integrate information has some type of consciousness
Can be calculated – phi-score
The more information integrated, the higher the score, the higher the system’s level of consciousness
Ex. A human cell – integrates information that leads to changes in behaviour or others – cells have a high phi-score therefore high level of consciousness.
According to this, internet has a high consciousness – is this true? No way of knowing.
Consciousness is linked with the idea of self (thing in us that is aware and knows it is aware)
What does Buddhism argue?
that consciousness is a complete ILLUSION
What is Unconsciousness?
Someone throws a tomato at you; you will catch it softer than if they threw a tennis ball at you because your unconsciousness tells you that if you would catch it as hard as a tennis ball you would smash the tomato. (Making a subconscious decision
Going downstairs and the stair is further than you expected, you realise that you made a prediction on where the stair would be before getting there – subconscious behaviour
Give examples of Unconscious awareness/
slips of the tongue, dreams – evidence on unconsciousness
We believe that we are in full control of our actions but is free will just an illusion?
People argue that free will is just a thought after actions have been done (body does something, you become conscious, and you answer; why did I do that?)
Do children have self-awareness?
When you are younger, you do not know what you are
The development of self-awareness happens at about one and a half year old.
Younger than a year and a half old, they do not recognise that they are looking at themselves in the mirror, they think it is someone else.
At a year and a half, they start realizing that it is them (put a red dot on their forehead and they recognized that it was on their forehead by looking in the mirror.
Explain the Self.
Me – empirical self (objective self)
I – subjective self (knowing self – pure ego)
Receive sensation and perceptions occurring in the stream of consciousness
Appears to be the source of attention, the origin of effort and will
What is the default mode network?
Brain is never silent
Always something going on
When doing nothing, same network in the brain is activated (DMN)
Claim that that might represent the “Self”
The self-concept – the broad network of mental representation that a person has of him/himself
The more an aspect of the self is activated, the more schematic you are to feel about that trait. Ex. If you are always being told that you are gorgeous, you find it hard to believe when someone does not find you attractive.
We seek to try to confirm that our self/affirmation trait is true by askin others
What do Buddhists believe?
that the self is just an illusion – that it needs to be destroyed (make us know it is an illusion
What are the 8 species on the planet demonstrate self-recognition (in the mirror)?
Humans
Chimpanzees
Gorillas
Orangutans
Bonobos
Dolphins
Magpies
Elephants
What are the stages of self-recognition? What is the mark test?
3 stages
Social behaviour – see a stranger in the mirror
Test behaviour – test the reaction of thing in mirror (it does the same thing as me?)
Self-directed behaviour – look at their bodies in the mirror (check themselves out) sidenote: elephants like to look inside their mouths
Mark test – Scientists put a mark on their body where they can only see when they look at themselves in the mirror and look at how they react
If they touch the mirror, they are confused
If they use the mirror to wipe it off, they understand the “self”
What is the importance of the frontal lobe?
All the bits and pieces come together
Thought, planning, decision making, self-control
Hold things in your mind when they are not present as well as keeping distractions out
Linking your different “selves” across time (uses the past in order to decide what to do in the present that is best for the future).
Last checkpoint of choosing to act
Frontal lobe calculates the complexity and the implications of the final act
Represents your will and conscience
Critical for holding your behaviour in check
Therefore, children are more immature – conscience grows over time
Research has shown that psychopaths have abnormally reduced activity prefrontal cortex
Damage there can result in psychological disorders such as acquired sociopathy, resulting in impaired sympathy and aggressive behaviour without remorse
SHOWS THAT FRONTAL LOBE AND MORE SPECIFICALLY THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX ARE CENTRAL TO US BEING HUMAN, OF BEING WHO WE ARE.
Who is Phineas Gage?
suffered in an explosion and an injury to the frontal lobe made him be a different person, was not the old Gage anymore.
What are different things that everyone struggles with during their life?
We struggle with different things over the span of our life.
Infancy – we struggle with trust
Early childhood – shame and doubt
Preschoolers – guilt
School age - inferiority
Adolescence – role confusion
Early adulthood – isolation
Middle age – stagnation
Later years – despair
