Consciousness

 Source: Wikipedia.org

Chalmers was born and grew up in Australia. Before he moved to the Australian National University in 2004, he was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Prior to his stay at Arizona, he taught at UC Santa Cruz. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Adelaide, obtaining his Bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science. He then briefly studied at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before studying for his PhD at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program, directed by Andy Clark, at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993-1995.

He is the author of the book The Conscious Mind (1996), which discusses consciousness and its relation to the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind. In the book, Chalmers forcefully and cogently argues that all forms of physicalism (whether reductive or non-reductive) that have dominated philosophy and the sciences in modern times fail to account for the most essential aspects of consciousness. He proposes an alternative dualistic view that has come to be called property dualism. The book was described by The Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the year".

Saeid's notes from Chalmers' works:

Chalmers has not yet fallen in either of these traps--not quite. He understands that he must show how his strategic proposal differs from these, which he recognizes as doomed. He attempts this by claiming that consciousness is strikingly unlike life, and unlike the features of perception misconstrued by Crock: when it comes to consciousness, the hard problem is "almost unique" in that it "goes beyond problems about the performance of functions." Almost unique? He gives us no other phenomena with this special feature, but in any case, what he says in support of this claim simply repeats the claim in different words: "To see this, note that when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience . . . there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open." Our vitalist can surely say ask the same dreary question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by life? Chalmers says that this would be a conceptual mistake on the part of the vitalist, and I agree, but he needs to defend his claim that his counterpart is not a conceptual mistake as well.

Dennett

What impresses me about my own consciousness, as I know it so intimately, is my delight in some features and dismay over others, my distraction and concentration, my unnamable sinking feelings of foreboding and my blithe disregard of some perceptual details, my obsessions and oversights, my ability to conjure up fantasies, my inability to hold more than a few items in consciousness at a time, my ability to be moved to tears by a vivid recollection of the death of a loved one, my inability to catch myself in the act of framing the words I sometimes say to myself, and so forth. These are all "merely" the "performance of functions" or the manifestation of various complex dispositions to perform functions. In the course of making an introspective catalogue of evidence, I wouldn't know what I was thinking about if I couldn't identify them for myself by these functional differentia. Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue of "qualitative content" bereft of all powers to move us, delight us, annoy us, remind us of anything. Dennett

A Catalog of conscious experiences

1. Visual experiences
2. auditory experiences
3. tactile experiences
4. olfactory experiences
5. taste exp.
6. experienes of cold and hot
7. pain
8. other bodily sensation
9. mental imagery
10. conscious thought
11. emotions
12. the sense of self

at the root of all this lie two quite distinct concepts of mind. (conceptual distinction)

1. phenomenal concept of mind = conscious experience (mind is characterized by the way it feels) (consciousness)
2. psychological concept of mind = causal or explanatory basis for behavior (mind is characterized by what it does) (awareness)

varieties of psychological consciousness

1. awakeness
2. introspection
3. reportability
4. self-consciousness
5. attention
6. voluntary control
7. knowledge

consciousness involves reportive activity

awareness is not necessary the same

awareness as I have described it need not be accompanied by consciousness

once empirical investigation shows how the relevant causal role is played, the phenomenon is explained

1. technical complication:
2. ambiguity of casual concepts
3. many casual concepts are partly characterized in terms of their effect on experience

problem with reductive explanation

1. does not usually go all the way to the microphysical level
2. conceivably maybe phenomenon does not have reductive explanation
3. local logical supervenience
4. learning vs. heat (learning is explication)(heat is explanation)

I will argue that conscious experience does not supervene logically on the physical, and therefore cannot be reductively explained

To make the case against reductive explanation, we need to show that consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical.