P and A Consciousness/Explanatory Gap Flashcards
What is phenomenal consciousness?
There is something that it is like to be a conscious entity, a being that has experiences (Nagel, 1974). Some sort of ‘feel’ or ‘subjective character’. Quale or qualia. The essential feature of the concept of consciousness
What is access consciousness?
Representational in character. ‘Privileged’ representations. Access or availability of information between certain special or privileged subsystems of the brain
What are the sufficient conditions for a state to be A-conscious, according to Block 1995?
If in virtue of one’s having the state, a representation of its content is (1) inferentially promiscuous (can be used to aid reasoning), (2) poised for rational control of action, (3) poised for rational control of speech (can tell people about it)
What are the two prominent theories of access consciousness?
Global workspace theory and information integration theory
How does global workspace explain A consciousness?
Cortical broadcasting of selected information by the GW leads to consciousness. A blackboard architecture operates in brain in order to integrate, provide access and coordinate functioning of large numbers of specialised networks that otherwise work autonomously. Contents of the blackboard/GW correspond to what we are conscious of
How does information integration explain A consciousness?
Richness of integration determines level of consciousness. Way in which information is embodied and processed in a particular system at a particular moment determines the conscious experience (conceptual structure)
What is the ‘hard problem’?
Doubt about ability of any scientific theories to explain p consciousness. Explanatory gap question. Question of how physical processes in brain give rise to subjective experience. How is it that physiological and information processing events in our brains can be responsible for experiential or phenomenal aspect of consciousness? Why does it feel like anything at all?
What was Nagel’s work in 1974?
What is it like to be a bat. Reductive accounts fail to capture P consciousness. Imagining what it is like to behave as a bat is not to imagine what it is like to be a bat, and we can never have the conscious experience of being a bat. But that shouldn’t lead us to conclude that bats experiences do not have subjective character
What are Nagel’s views on physicalism?
A move in the direction of greater objectivity takes us further away from understanding subjective character of experience so reductive accounts cannot explain consciousness but this does not show that physicalism is false. We do not have any conception of how physicalism might be true. Even though we don’t understand physicalism, we could have good reason to believe it
What type of beliefs does Nagel hold?
He is a mysterian. Believe the explanatory gap will never be bridged, whether by current or future science. Phenomenal consciousness will forever lie outside our explanatory grasp
Based on the study ‘what Mary didn’t know’, what are Jackson’s arguments against physicalism?
If it is true, Mary knows all there is to know about colour vision, yet on her release, she discovers something new (redness or red and the blueness of blue etc), therefore physicalism is false as it believes that all information is physical information and all facts are physical facts - Subjective experience is not relevant in knowledge
What is Levine’s explanatory argument?
Physical accounts explain, at most, structure and function, but this does not suffice to explain consciousness, therefore, no physical account can explain consciousness…though physicalism might be true. Similar position to Nagel’s (physicalism is or may be true but we don’t understand how).
What are philosophical zombies?
Imaginary humans whose behaviour is indistinguishable from ordinary human behaviour, but who are not P-conscious
What is the conceivability argument?
It is conceivable that there are zombies. It is conceivable that there are zombies, it is (metaphysically) possible there are zombies, and so physicalism is false. Therefore physicalism is false
