Week 6 Office Hour
A state is conscious, rather than a person
建议看 Consciousness 的 SEP，里面 Julius 提到的几个哲学家都有涉及，结合后面的参考文献和引注。
Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Topics and phil. works related to Vivian's presentation
David Chalmers
Duplicate brain doesn't lead to duplicating consciousness. (Julius: If we copy Vivian's brain, ...)
He argues that duplicating the brain does not necessarily lead to duplicating consciousness. This is because consciousness has subjective, qualitative aspects ("qualia") that are not captured by the physical structure of the brain alone.
- "zombie argument" by Chalmers
Frank Jackson
"Knowledge argument" against physicalism.
Even if someone knew everything physical about color perception (Over physical knowledge like wave length, artistically, etc.), they would still learn something new upon experiencing color for the first time.
- The subjective, qualitative experience of color, which cannot be reduced to physical facts.
- "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982): His arguments about qualia and their relationship to physical states.
Thomas Nagel
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
The subjective experience of consciousness is inherently first-personal
- Cannot be fully understood from an objective, third-person perspective.
A bat, whose sensory and cognitive experiences are radically different from ours.
- The limitations of objective descriptions in capturing the "what-it-is-like" aspect of consciousness.
... criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel's example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point of view can not emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat's own point of view.
Questions by Vivian:
- If neurally one's mind can be read by a machine and displayed on screen, can it then be explained by physicalism? #todo
- Does supervenience exhibit hierarchy?
- A supervenient on B, and B supervenient on A simultaneously.
Supervenience: wherever your brain is there, consciousness is there. Because of different causes/explanations: Whether they are identical, or ... etc. (Different unproved hypothesis)
Evidence vs. Axiomatic deduction.
Zhuo: Different Dualism hypothesis
- Mind being supported by a separate entity that stands alone after body decays (pineal gland)
- Building blocks of mind and body which constitutes the "Part of body has consciousness" 见 Youtube 视频 The nature of persons: dualism vs. physicalism
For Vivian's presentation
- Complicated works: Always explain the jargons, use examples
Julius:
- Over consciousness: Playing table tennis, instinctual reaction vs. conscious reaction.
- 后面忘了