Lecture 10: Consciousness 1

Question 1

How can consciousness be defined?

Answer 1

“ The normal mental condition of the waking state of humans, characterised by the experience of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, awareness of the external world, and often un humans … self - awareness.” - not necessarily correct though

Question 2

What is being self aware?

Answer 2

Feeling of under ‘volitional’ control (one aspect of consciousness according to the definition)

Question 3

Involuntary actions (against self-awareness definition)- Fitzgerald et al 2007

Answer 3

Had corticobasal degeneration - when instructed to stay still, but the patient could not control own actions (alien limb) - he is still fully conscious but lacks voluntary control

Question 4

States of consciousness (Laureyss 2005)

Answer 4

General anesthesia/coma - sleep walking, seizures, vegetative state - sleep - consciousness wakefulness

Question 5

Vegetative state

Answer 5

Results from surviving brain injury, altered state of consciousness (no behavioural response, lack of communication, no sign of awareness (although this is debated)

Question 6

Reserach: vegetative state self awareness?

Answer 6

Monti et al 2020 - fMRI investigating areas associated with spatial imagery - both control and vegetative state patients had activated para hippocampal gyrus’

Question 7

Qualia

Answer 7

Individual instances of subjective, conscious experience

Question 8

what is the issue with studying consciousness?

Answer 8

Qualia

Question 9

What is the mind-body problem?

Answer 9

The gap between what our brain acctually processes and our feelings

Question 10

Mind body problem - dualism

Answer 10

Mind and body are ontologically distinct substances (Descartes 17th century) - the mind is immaterial and body is a physical experience

Question 11

The mind body problem - monism

Answer 11

Mind and body are the same things, brain is the only reality but neural patterns = mental states

Question 12

The mind body problem - functionalims

Answer 12

mental states serve cogntiive funtions (mind is like a computer analogy)

Question 13

The easy and hard problems of consciousness

Answer 13

Easy: attention and perception - can be studied with methods, info flow between neural systems neural correlated etc
The hard problem - subjective experiences (qualia) - chambers 1995

Question 14

why is the hard problem hard?

Answer 14

we cannot experience someone elses/something elses internal state (like a bats - we would just think about what it would be like to be a human bat - Nagel 1974)

Question 15

Approaches to the hard problem

Answer 15

• dualism is true (do not have the mental capacity to understand consciousness)
• concentrate on solving easy problem and the hard problem will be solved eventually