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lecture notes Consciousness (6462PI002) Consciousness, ISBN: 9781138801318
Notes of all the lectures of year 2020/2021
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Voorbeeld 4 van de 38 pagina's
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I. Philosophy of consciousnessWhat is consciousness?
- Dual process theory of thoughts
o System 1: Fast and automatic, emotional (impulses, habits, beliefs)
o System 2: Slow and effortful, logical (reflection, planning, problem solving)
consciousness?
- Starting point of consciousness is taking subjective experience as starting point for analysis of how
you can account for this experience to arise.
Dualist: mind can exist independent of body (Descartes)
o Dualism: mind and body are different
Origin of DUALISM is Plato vs. Aristotle
P: points to sky, refers sky as source of the world of ideas. Reality we observe is shadow of
real reality which consists of abstract ideas. Only when die we get access to world of ideas,
mind travels to world. (Cave metaphor)
Dualist notion of the mind, mind through contemplation has access
A: points downwards, in order to get knowledge, you have to refer to sensory experience
(more empiricist philosophy)
Descartes: skepticism: how can we be sure we know anything? That the world
exists? Certain we know anything at all? But because I think I am: mind (thinking
substance) must be different than body. Pineal gland location where mind is
connected to body
Substance dualism: body is extended vs mind is non extended
Property Dualism: substance might be same but property differ. World made of one
substance but can be described using different properties (mental or physical etc.)
Pain: have subjective explanation or neurotransmitter explanation
Reductionism: contrast to property dualism, mental states can be reduced to physical
properties. All there is etc. matter, mental properties are enabled through physical
properties
→ Supervention: mental properties follow physical properties
Physical properties enable mental states to occur, consciousness depends on physical
properties. There cannot be mental difference without physical difference. Any difference
in consciousness has a difference in brain but opposite not true
Monist: mind cannot exist independent of body
o Monism: mind and body are the same
Other points of views
- Interactionism (Popper and Eccles): physical and mental substances interact. Try to figure out how
you can account for biology gives rises to subjective experience.
- Naturalistic dualism (Chalmers): dualism is true, but need to come up with psychophysical law that
are helping to explain how mental states are explained by physical state.
, - Cartesian Theater (Dennet): critical of dualist, tempting to suppose there is theater. Difficult to
escape the metaphor but need to be aware that it is only brain state
- Materialism (Churchland): in order to understand consciousness, you need to do neuroscience
- Epiphenomenalism: mental states are due to physical event. Physical events give rise to mental
events
- Pan-psychism: instead of reducing everything to metric material c substances, all material things
also have awareness. Everything we call matter also has mind.
- Functionalism: multiple realizability, same mental events can be caused by different physical
states/events. Different brain state can give rise to same mental event.
Psychological point of view
William James: stream of consciousness is always going on
- Introspection/Phenomenology: if you think about consciousness, it is different forms of
consciousness. Normal wake consciousness is one special type of consciousness
- Introspection has been criticizedc because it is very subjective but at the same time gives valuable
insights in immediate conscious experience.
- Phenomenology: take subjective experience as starting point of for careful observation
PP: brain is a predictive machine
Explanatory gap
Why is there so much fuss about theories? related to explanatory gap: There are different levels on which you can
explain phenomena.
Hard and easy problem
Easy problems of consciousness: how is it that I can respond to you?, mechanisms 8(attention, memory) which be
addressed by mainstream cognitive science
Hard problems of consciousness: how is it that all physical process in brain gives subjective experience? 3 rd person
experience . According to Chalmers: purely neurobiological explanation will never answer hard questions.
Responses:
Hard problems cannot be solved: new mysterianism
Try solving: dualism, quantum physicals
First tackle easy problems: dehaene
Identify more hard problems, and need to distinguish what we are talking about
No hard problems: Churchland and Dennett
II. Qualia
The relevance of thought experiment for psychology
, Thought experiments: typically used in philosophy to make arguments, clarify a concept and debunk
reasoning fallacies
Not like real experiments, they are experiments that you can do alone by thinking
through a story and consequences of this story for your thinking and view on topic
Relation with hard problem and qualia
Qualia
- Quality or property as perceived/experienced by person
- Subjective experience (I have an experience of an apple and you have a different)
Marie the color scientist
- She knows everything about brain and colors but lives in black and white. She can explain everything
there is to know
o Would it make a difference for her, her color knowledge if she would leave her room and go
out in real world? Would it make a difference in color knowledge?
If she is shocked about what red is:
→ Qualia must be true, if you know everything there is to know about brain
states then it is not sufficient for knowing what it is like to have subjective
experience
→ Physicalism is wrong
o Epiphenomenalism? color perception is epiphenomenon
o Dualism: subjective experience idependent of physical processes
If she new red would be like this:
→ Physical and physiological description is enough to know what is it like to
experience a color
o Materialism: subjective experience can be accounted for in terms of
brain processes
o Functionalist: getting insight into info processing capacities
underlying color perception are sufficient for having knowledge
about color
Illustrated the importance of qualia
Can qualia be reduced to brain states or not?
What is it like to be a bat?
- They don’t have the same sensory as us
- Can we as humans ever experience world as bat does?
- We can imagine how it is to navigate like them but cannot experience it, difficult to mimic the world
as a bat experience it because we lack a system
o Can we truly experience like the bat does?
Sure, why not
Never this is impossible humans cannot simulate it
We need to distinguish between:
- Phenomenal consciousness: experience of smtg it is like to be in that state, being in that state , felt
experience (qualia?)
o what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something “it is like” to be in that
state
- Access consciousness: reportability of that experience, having access to the experience
o availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action
o we rely on reportability to infer consciousness
Conversation with zombies
- Imagine there is a duplicate of you (body), exactly the same as you physically. Can’t distinguish from
outside who is who. BUT copy has no consciousness, however, does everything else. No what it is
like to be a zombie
, o Human: feels pain when hit, Zombie: says ouch but doesn’t feel pain
o Humna has what it is like to have pain while zombie not
- Would you be able to ever figure out whether it lacks consciousness?
- No “it’s like being me”, no consciousness. Are zombies possible?
o Sure why not: epiphenomenalism, consciousness is an unimportant extra
o Never, this is impossible: so creature like you could exists without consciousness
Demonstrates importance of qualia
Possibility of zombies shows consciousness is not physical (chalmers)
III. Illusions
Illusions are about way we perceive world, and often there is a dissociation between perceptual input and
subjective experience
o Perpetual input of brain fills gaps and automatically inferring there is a triangle
o Illusions show dissociation between way we perceived the world and information that is
presented in the world
There is a difference between perception illusion and cognitive illusions in illusion work=> perception vs cognition,
they differ in terms of cognitive penetrability .
These two illusions are cognitively not penetrable: even though you know at conscious level
that it’s brain fooling you, you still experience effect
of illusion. This is different from
illusions that are more cognitive,
more penetrable to cognitive
influences. Example: if ppl wear
very heavy backpack you will
overestimate the steepness of hill. It
is of course illusion and it’s highly
penetrable for cognition to seek through and make yourself thinking that indeed it’s steeper
based on physical state. It’s different than strong visual illusion, because you don’t literally
SEE a steeper hill, you think it, it’s more cognitive than perceptual.
So CP refers to what extent that illusions are easy to see through.
Illusions tell us smtg about how we perceive the world and so also conscious experience. In
many cases our brain fills in the gap of our perception. Perception isn’t accurate reflection our
reality,
- Blind spot in the e ye: optic nerve leaves retina so no rodes are cones. But we are not aware of our
blind spot in visual scene, we perceive world as coherent bcs brain automatically fills in.
- Saccadic eye movement: we are hardly aware that almost every second we do saccadic eye
movement. But between them there are milliseconds where we are blind bcs we don’t get any
perceptual inputs. However we never experience that bcs brain fills in what happens during the
movement continuous experience of world around us
o Gives coherent perception, we make saccadic eye movement to get a full picture
o Relevance with consciousness: shows in many cases the way we perceive world is not
accurate perception of reality
Change blindness: blind to perceive change in different scene way we perceive scene is determined by
getting a gest of the scene rather than a detailed representation of the points out there. Brain only processes
things only in general and fills in a lot
Inattentional blindness: don’t notice salient event
- We attend and integrate information very selectively
- Rich phenomenal experience is to some degree illusion (contra Cartesian Theatre)
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