A report on Consciousness and Philosophy of mind

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

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.

John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century

René Descartes' illustration of mind/body dualism.

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

Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)

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).

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.

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

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.

- Philosophy of mind

These issues remain central to both continental and analytic philosophy, in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, respectively.

- Consciousness

17 related topics with Alpha

René Descartes's illustration of dualism. Inputs are passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Mind–body dualism

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Four varieties of dualist causal interaction. The arrows indicate the direction of causations. Mental and physical states are shown in red and blue, respectively.

Another one of Descartes' illustrations. The fire displaces the skin, which pulls a tiny thread, which opens a pore in the ventricle (F) allowing the "animal spirit" to flow through a hollow tube, which inflates the muscle of the leg, causing the foot to withdraw.

Cartesian dualism compared to three forms of monism.

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable.

Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence.

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.

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

It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science.

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.

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.

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.

Hard problem of consciousness

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

It has been accepted by philosophers of mind such as Joseph Levine, Colin McGinn, and Ned Block and cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela, Giulio Tononi, and Christof Koch.

Chinese room

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Sitting in the combat information center aboard a warship – proposed as a real-life analog to the Chinese Room

The "standard interpretation" of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is given the task of trying to determine which player – A or B – is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions to make the determination. Image adapted from Saygin, et al. 2000.

The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a "mind", "understanding" or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave.

Although the Chinese Room argument was originally presented in reaction to the statements of artificial intelligence researchers, philosophers have come to consider it as an important part of the philosophy of mind.

Mental state

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State of mind of a person.

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

Mental states play an important role in various fields, including philosophy of mind, epistemology and cognitive science.

The circled dot was used by the Pythagoreans and later Greeks to represent the first metaphysical being, the Monad or The Absolute

Monism

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Distinct from them; e.g., in Neoplatonism everything is derived from The One. In this view only the One is ontologically basic or prior to everything else.

A diagram with neutral monism compared to Cartesian dualism, physicalism and idealism.

The mind–body problem in philosophy examines the relationship between mind and matter, and in particular the relationship between consciousness and the brain.

Monism is also still relevant to the philosophy of mind, where various positions are defended.

Artificial intelligence

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Intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans.

An ontology represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.

A parse tree represents the syntactic structure of a sentence according to some formal grammar.

Feature detection (pictured: edge detection) helps AI compose informative abstract structures out of raw data.

Kismet, a robot with rudimentary social skills

A particle swarm seeking the global minimum

Expectation-maximization clustering of Old Faithful eruption data starts from a random guess but then successfully converges on an accurate clustering of the two physically distinct modes of eruption.

A neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain.

Representing images on multiple layers of abstraction in deep learning

For this project the AI had to learn the typical patterns in the colors and brushstrokes of Renaissance painter Raphael. The portrait shows the face of the actress Ornella Muti, "painted" by AI in the style of Raphael.

AI Patent families for functional application categories and sub categories. Computer vision represents 49 percent of patent families related to a functional application in 2016.

The word "robot" itself was coined by Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R., the title standing for "Rossum's Universal Robots"

The only thing visible is the behavior of the machine, so it does not matter if the machine is conscious, or has a mind, or whether the intelligence is merely a "simulation" and not "the real thing".

The philosophy of mind does not know whether a machine can have a mind, consciousness and mental states, in the same sense that human beings do.