A report on Consciousness and Hard problem of consciousness

Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician

John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century

Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat." (Townsend's big-eared bat pictured).

Neon color spreading effect. The apparent bluish tinge of the white areas inside the circle is an illusion.

Square version of the neon spread illusion

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences.

- Hard problem of consciousness

Some basic questions include: whether consciousness is the same kind of thing as matter; whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious; how consciousness relates to language; how consciousness as Being relates to the world of experience; the role of the self in experience; whether individual thought is possible at all; and whether the concept is fundamentally coherent.

- Consciousness

4 related topics with Alpha

A phrenological mapping of the brain – phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain although it is now widely discredited.

Philosophy of mind

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Branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body.

René Descartes' illustration of mind/body dualism.

Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)

Four varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions. Occasionalism is not shown.

The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single physical type. For anomalous monism, the token–token correspondences can fall outside of the type–type correspondences. The result is token identity.

John Searle—one of the most influential philosophers of mind, proponent of biological naturalism (Berkeley 2002)

Since the 1980s, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI (above), have furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the human brain, shedding light on ancient philosophical problems.

The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states.

Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.

The "redness" of red is a commonly used example of a quale.

Qualia

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In philosophy of mind, qualia ( or ; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.

David Chalmers formulated the hard problem of consciousness, raising the issue of qualia to a new level of importance and acceptance in the field.

Philosophical zombie

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A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.

These arguments aim to refute the possibility of any physicalist solution to the "hard problem of consciousness" (the problem of accounting for subjective, intrinsic, first-person, what-it's-like-ness).

Property dualism

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Composed of just one kind of substance—the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties.

Biological Naturalism states that consciousness is a higher level function of the human brain's physical capabilities.

Huxley explained mental properties as like the steam on a locomotive

Substance dualism, on the other hand, is the view that there exist in the universe two fundamentally different kinds of substance: physical (matter) and non-physical (mind or consciousness), and subsequently also two kinds of properties which inhere in those respective substances.

David Chalmers has expressed sympathy for panpsychism (or a modified variant, panprotopsychism) as a possible resolution to the hard problem of consciousness, though he regards the combination problem as an important obstacle for the theory.