A report on Consciousness and Mental state

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

Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states.

- Mental state

Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: simple wakefulness, one's sense of selfhood or soul explored by "looking within"; being a metaphorical "stream" of contents, or being a mental state, mental event or mental process of the brain; having phanera or qualia and subjectivity; being the 'something that it is like' to 'have' or 'be' it; being the "inner theatre" or the executive control system of the mind.

- 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

Mind

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Set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena.

René Descartes' illustration of mind–body dualism.
Descartes believed inputs are passed on by the Sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Simplified diagram of Spaun, a 2.5-million-neuron computational model of the brain. (A) The corresponding physical regions and connections of the human brain. (B) The mental architecture of Spaun.

Computer simulation of the branching architecture of the dendrites of pyramidal neurons.

The mind is often understood as a faculty that manifests itself in mental phenomena like sensation, perception, thinking, reasoning, memory, belief, desire, emotion and motivation.

One problem for all epistemic approaches to the mark of the mental is that they focus mainly on conscious states but exclude unconscious states.

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.

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.

Property dualism

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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

Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is composed of just one kind of substance—the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties.

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.

Experience

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Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these conscious processes.

Desires comprise a wide class of mental states.