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The Hard Problem Of Consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences. This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information, and so forth. These problems are seen as relatively easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify the mechanisms that perform such functions. Philosopher David Chalmers writes that even once we have solved all such problems about the brain and experience, the hard problem will still persist. The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial. 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. However, its existence is disputed by philosophers of mind such as Daniel Dennett, Massimo Pigliucci, Thomas Metzinger, Patricia Churchland, and Keith Fran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qualia
In philosophy of mind, qualia ( or ; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term ''qualia'' derives from the Latin neuter plural form (''qualia'') of the Latin adjective '' quālis'' () meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific this particular apple now". Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of ''pain'' of a headache, the ''taste'' of wine, as well as the ''redness'' of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that ''qualia'' was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us". Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patricia Churchland
Patricia Smith Churchland (born 16 July 1943) is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar, writing for ''The New Yorker,'' observed of the philosophical couple that: "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes disc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Physicalism
In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality as opposed to a "two-substance" ( dualism) or "many-substance" ( pluralism) view. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated. Physicalism is closely related to materialism. Physicalism grew out of materialism with advancements of the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms are often used interchangeably, although they are sometimes distinguished, for example on the basis of physics describing more than just matter (including energy and physical law). According to a 2009 survey, physicalism is the majority view among philosophers, but there remains significant opposition to physicalism. Neuroplasticity has been used as an argument in support of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logical Possibility
Logical possibility refers to a logical proposition that cannot be disproved, using the axioms and rules of a given system of logic. The logical possibility of a proposition will depend upon the system of logic being considered, rather than on the violation of any single rule. Some systems of logic restrict inferences from inconsistent propositions or even allow for true contradictions. Other logical systems have more than two truth-values instead of a binary of such values. However, when talking about logical possibility, it is often assumed that the system in question is classical propositional logic. Similarly, the criterion for logical possibility is often based on whether or not a proposition is contradictory and as such, is often thought of as the broadest type of possibility. In modal logic, a logical proposition is possible if it is true in some possible world. The universe of "possible worlds" depends upon the axioms and rules of the logical system in which one is work ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inverted Qualia Of Colour Strawberry
Inverse or invert may refer to: Science and mathematics * Inverse (logic), a type of conditional sentence which is an immediate inference made from another conditional sentence * Additive inverse (negation), the inverse of a number that, when added to the original number, yields zero * Compositional inverse, a function that "reverses" another function * Inverse element * Inverse function, a function that "reverses" another function **Generalized inverse, a matrix that has some properties of the inverse matrix but not necessarily all of them * Multiplicative inverse (reciprocal), a number which when multiplied by a given number yields the multiplicative identity, 1 ** Inverse matrix of an Invertible matrix Other uses * Invert level, the base interior level of a pipe, trench or tunnel * ''Inverse'' (website), an online magazine * An outdated term for an LGBT person; see Sexual inversion (sexology) See also * Inversion (other) * Inverter (other) * Opposite (di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irreducibility
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry. In philosophy, theories that emphasize emergent properties have been called emergentism. In philosophy Philosophers often understand emergence as a claim about the etiology of a system's properties. An emergent property of a system, in this context, is one that is not a property of any component of that system, but is still a feature of the system as a whole. Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950), one of the first modern philosophers to write on emergence, termed this a ''categorial novum'' (new category). Definitions This concept of emergence dates from at least the tim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logical Consequence
Logical consequence (also entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic, which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically ''follows from'' one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the premises. The philosophical analysis of logical consequence involves the questions: In what sense does a conclusion follow from its premises? and What does it mean for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises?Beall, JC and Restall, Greg, Logical Consequence' The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). All of philosophical logic is meant to provide accounts of the nature of logical consequence and the nature of logical truth. Logical consequence is necessary and formal, by way of examples that explain with formal proof and models of interpretation. A sentence is said to be a logical conse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher. He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1980 to 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are legal philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics. Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay " What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in ''The Possibility of Altruism'' (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in ''Mind and Cosmos'' (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness. Life and career Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to German Jewish refugees Carolyn (Baer) and Walter Nagel. He arrived in the US in 1939, and was raised in and around New York. He had no religious upbringing, but regards himself as a Jew. N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his academic specializations are visual cognition and developmental linguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, as well as the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Lewis (philosopher)
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years. Lewis made significant contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, epistemology, philosophical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of time and philosophy of science. In most of these fields he is considered among the most important figures of recent decades. But Lewis is most famous for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics, in which his books ''On the Plurality of Worlds'' (1986) and ''Counterfactuals'' (1973) are considered classics. His works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Conscious Mind
''The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory'' was published in 1996, and is the first book written by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher specialising in philosophy of mind. Though the book has been greatly influential, Chalmers maintains that it is "far from perfect", as most of it was written as part of his PhD dissertation after "studying philosophy for only four years". Summary Thesis In ''The Conscious Mind'' Chalmers argues that (1) the physical does not exhaust the actual, so materialism is false; (2) consciousness is a fundamental fact of nature; (3) science and philosophy should strive towards discovering a fundamental law of consciousness. Definitions *psychological consciousness: publicly accessible descriptions of consciousness, such as its neurochemical correlates or role in influencing behaviour. *phenomenal consciousness: experience; something is phenomenologically conscious if it feels like something to be it. Every mental state can be described ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio ( pt, António Damásio) is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years. Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books: his next to latest work, ''Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain'' (2010), explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making. Life and work During the 1960s, Damasio studied medicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School, where he also did his neurological residency and completed his doctorate in 1974. For part of his studies, he researched behavioral neurology unde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
