Sample questions provided by the teacher in preparation for end of semester assignment - an essay. The essay questions are answered on instructions from the teacher highlighting the information necessary to be presented in the essay.
SEMESTER REVIEW
PREP FOR ASSIGNMENT 2
6 SHORT ESSAYS
1 How are minds conceived in the cognitive science? How are they related to physical processes?
In the cognitive science the mind is conceived to be some kind of a program, a software, which is
being run by the brain as the hard drive. If minds are conceived as the software it means that the
most important thing is not the actual physical brain itself – the most important thing is that
software and the idea that you can take it and run it potentially on a machine that wasn’t made of
carbon stuff, probably just made of silicon stuff, as long as you have the program right so then that
machine would be able to create feelings, consciousness, emotions, learning,
2 What is the mind-body problem?
Antient problem. How are your body, which is made of physical stuff, and your mind related, which
mind doesn’t appear to be made of physical stuff? It feels like your thoughts are not made of the
same kind of atoms and molecules etc. for example if you hurt your hand this feeling of pain it looks
as if its not made of atoms or molecules etc. Deep division between minds (thoughts) and bodies.
This is the mind-body problem – how are minds related to physical bodies? Despite all the
researches and work we still don’t complete understand that problem.
3 What is the ‘hard problem of consciousness’? What are the ‘easy problems of consciousness’?
Why is the hard problem hard? Why are the easy problems easy?
We don’t have an understanding of how brain produce consciousness and that is the hard problem
of consciousness. (both ‘hard and easy problems of consciousness’ are technical terms). The ‘hard
problem’ is that scientist wants to understand how things work, how brain gives experience. How
any of the physical processing can lead to for example the feeling of pain. How does brain chemistry
can somehow gets translated into the feeling of pain.
‘Easy problems of consciousness’ is about how consciousness manifests itself in behaviour. How
people act and do and they are conscious. Its called ‘easy’ because you can observe it, you can kind
of understand what the physical process are that involve in lets say verbal report, look into the brain,
all that (as feeling pain for example0 can be described in physical terms
4 What is the distinction between ‘phenomenal consciousness’ and ‘access consciousness’?
Phenomenal consciousness is the feeling of pain for example) the one you can’t describe completely
(like when you fall in love or sad) rich experience, the way it feel from inside is what a phenomenal
consciousness is. It is consciousness that is inaccessible from a first person point of view.
Access consciousness is how people behave consciously, our brains take in information, that info
gets boosted those signals get amplified, get accessible to other parts of our brain (for example the
language part of our brain that allows us to express ourselves). Access consciousness is what is going
on in the physical system when this person reports being conscious. We can begin to understand
Access consciousness but Phenomenal consciousness is related to the ‘hard’ problem.
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