Lec. 1 (intro)

Question 1

Perception

Answer 1

• 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
• For example, an optical illusion is a perception

Question 2

Sensation

Answer 2

Experience produced by stimulation of a sensory receptor and the resultant activation of a specific brain center, producing basic awareness of a sound, odor, color, 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.

Question 3

Subjective experience

Answer 3

Experience particular to a specific person and thus intrinsically inaccessible to the experience or observation of others.

Question 4

Consciousness

Answer 4

An organism’s awareness of something either internal or external to itself.

Question 5

Easy problem of consciousness

Answer 5

From philosopher David Chalmers (1995): The easy problem refers to the explanation of mental phenomena that are testable by standard methods of science (ex. recognition of stimuli, cognitive processes, sleep/wake cycles…). An easy problem is solved once its neurobiological mechanisms are specified.

Question 6

Hard problem of consciousness

Answer 6

From philosopher David Chalmers (1995): what remains once the neurobiological mechanisms of a phenomenon have been explained. For example, we can explain the mechanisms by which visual experience occurs (through the sequence of events just described), but we cannot explain how these mechanisms give rise to the subjective experience of colors.

Question 7

Thomas Nagel’s view on consciousness

Answer 7

We can know if an animal is conscious if the question “What is it like to be [this animal]?” makes sense (ex. “What is it like to be a bat?”: this question also implies what it’s like to perceive as a bat, to use echolocation, etc.).

Question 8

Consciousness and subjective experience

Answer 8

• 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 (e.g., 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

Question 9

The Inverted spectrum thought experiment (John Locke)

Answer 9

What if, since you were born, you saw strawberries green? You think that green is red (because you know that strawberries are red). How can someone know how others perceive colors or make sure that they perceive color the same way? How do you know that you see red as red?

Question 10

Mary the colour scientist (Frank Jackson)

Answer 10

• Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black-and-white room via a black-and-white television 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, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the CNS.
• If one day Mary comes out of the room will she learn anything new? Could she discriminate objects by their colour?