Lecture 7&8, Chapter 7 Flashcards
Mind-brain problem
Issue of how the mind is related to the brain; three main views are dualism, materialism and functionalism
Dualism
View of the mind-body relation according to which the mind is immaterial and completely independent of the body; central within religions
Consciousness
Private, first-person experiences an individual lives through; contains all the mental states a person is aware of; part of the mind that can be examined through introspection
Materialism
View about the relationship between the mind and brain that considers the mind as the brain in operation
Folk psychology
Collection of beliefs lay people have about psychological functioning; no efforts made to verify empirically or to check them for their internal coherence
Identity problem
The difficulty the materialistic theory of the mind-brain relationship has to explain how two events can be experienced as the same despite the fact that their realization in the brain differs
Functionalism
In the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal consistency, but rather on the way it functions; predicts that the mind can be copied onto another Turing machine
Meme
Information unit proposed by Dawkins that reproduces itself according to the principles of the evolutionary theory
Symbol grounding problem
The finding that representations (symbols) used in computations require a reference to some external reality in order to get meaning
Embodied cognition
The conviction that the interactions between the human body and the environment form the grounding (meaning) of human cognition
Access consciousness
Access conscious information can be reported by the patient, used for reasoning and acted upon intentionally
Phenomenological consciousness
Refers to the fact that human experiences possess subjective qualities that seem to defy description; experiences have a meaning that goes beyond formal report
Masked priming
Experimental technique to investigate unconscious information processing, consisting of briefly presenting a prime between a forward meaningless mask and a subsequent target, and examining the effect of the prime on the processing of the target
Global workspace model
Model that explains the role of consciousness by analogy of the theatre; consciousness is meant to make some info available to the whole brain (the play), so that background processes can align their functioning to what is going on
Chinese room
Thought experiment by Searle to illustrate the difference between information processing in humans and computers
Qualia
Qualities of conscious thoughts that give the thoughts a rich and vivid meaning, grounded in interactions with the world
Zombie thought experiment
Chalmers; illustrates that consciousness is more than the working of the brain or the implementation of information on a Turing machine because it involves a subjective component with qualia
Hard problem
Chalmers; difficulty of explaining in what respects consciousness is more than accounted for on the basis of functionalism