Psychological Orders: The Phenomenological Aspect Of The Mind
These are suggested paper topics for your final paper. Some of these include more than one question; you are not required to address all of the questions listed under a particular topic. Use the book "The Conscious Mind
Book by David Chalmers" as your source of this interesting topics. I've suggested a bunch here, and I may suggest more after we've discussed more of the book. In any case, you may wish to write on something other than one of my suggested topics. If you do wish to do so, talk to me about the topic you wish to write on. Also, if you plan to write on question 11, let me know. The papers are to be approximately 1750-2200 words, double-spaced (with normal font size and normal margins). Check your papers for spelling and grammar. Remember to adequately characterize the position you are addressing, and to give and argue for your own views. The papers are due by 7 PM on December 19. Email the paper to me as a Word document. Use the subject line "my philosophy paper" without the quotation marks.
1. Are materialists committed to the logical impossibility of zombies?
2. Are zombies logically possible? Is the "just-so" story Chalmers tells about the presence of consciousness compatible with the possibility of zombies? Suppose zombies are not logically possible, do Chalmers' other arguments in favor of the impossibility of a reductive explanation of consciousness still give adequate support for his conclusion.
3. When Chalmers attempts to set up a theory of consciousness he puts his dualism to the side. Is a scientific study of consciousness compatible with Naturalistic Dualism?
4. Chalmers vacillates between two accounts of consciousness: (1) Consciousness naturally (or nomologically) supervenes on the physical, but it does not logically supervene on the physical, or (2) Consciousness doesn't naturally supervene on the physical, but instead requires the presence of additional non-physical (phenomenological) properties. Which of these views is his considered view? Which of these views should be his view?
5. Is consciousness ubiquitous? If so, are we (as opposed to our cells) conscious?
6. What is the phenomenological aspect of the mind? Can it be distinguished from the psychological?
7. Key to Chalmers' argument for dualism is the claim that we cannot give a reductive explanation of the phenomenological (this is comparable to Levine's explanatory gap). Is this correct? Is this a problem for materialists? Is reductive explanation the sort of explanation materialism is committed to give of any phenomenon? Is reductive explanation the right sense of reduction?
8. Chalmers notes that his arguments have the consequence that our knowledge about our phenomenological states is not caused by those states. This, he says, may cause discomfort, but it's not fatal to his position. Is he right about this?
9. Is it possible that my beliefs about my experiences are really beliefs about your experiences?
10. Is consciousness better described as the ability to represent (think about) one's experiences?
11. Pick one of the chapters we didn't read and discuss (one of) the issues raised in that chapter.
12. Are Chalmers' arguments for Strong AI and against Searle persuasive? How might Searle respond? Do they really show that AI is possible or simply that artificial brains are possible? (That is, do they show that we can create an artificially intelligent machine or simply that we can replicate a brain with other materials, but that the only way to generate a thinking machine is by copying the brain.)
13. Do the arguments Chalmers puts forward in favor of artificially conscious machines generalize to support the idea that there could be artificially intelligent machines? What's the difference between the two?
The Phenomenological Aspect of the Mind
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The Phenomenological Aspect of the Mind
Introduction
In this age of psychological orders, the phenomenological philosophical approach to the mind was shelved as being immaterial or irrelevant. For quite a while, the one solitary voice that demanded its pertinence to issues relating to the field of forged consciousness and the subjective sciences came from the likes of Hubert Dreyfus. This situation has, however, changed of lately with many philosophers acknowledging the phenomenological approach to the mind as an instrumental contribution towards understanding consciousness and intentionality. Three advancements have pushed it off its royal position (Mehling et al. 2011). The first is a resuscitated enthusiasm for remarkable awareness. Beginning in the late 1980s therapists and philosophers began to discuss cognizance with regards to the intellectual sciences. Amid the 1990s, a wider civil argument about the difficult issue of cognizance started, drove by David Chalmers (1996). At the point when methodological inquiries emerged about how to examine the pragmatic measurement experimentally, and along these lines, without falling back on old-style introspectionism, another talk of phenomenology was begun. The ensuing discussion examines the phenomenological aspect of the mind as presented by Chalmers.
Phenomenology as a philosophical approach was believed to be of conceivable significance when cognizance was brought up as a logical issue. The second thing that happened to persuade a re-evaluation of phenomenology as a philosophical-logical approach was the appearance of epitomized ways to deal with comprehension. In the subjective sciences, the thought of exemplifying cognizance went up against quality in the 1990s, and it proceeds even today. Researchers and logicians have long protested the solid Cartesian mind– body dualism that, regardless of the best endeavors of rationalists like Ryle, Dennett, and others, kept on plaguing the intellectual sciences (Mehling et al. 2011). Functionalism persuaded that discernment could be instantiated in a free PC program, or 'brainin-a-vat’ and that encapsulation added nothing to the psyche. Varela et al., and also Clark and others, indicated back the bits of knowledge of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) as an approach to build up their complaints to free insight (Mehling et al. 2011). In reality, we will see that Merleau-Ponty offers extraordinary compared to other cases of how phenomenology can assume an imperative part in the psychological sciences.
A third advancement that has made phenomenological ways to deal with discernment significant to exploratory science has been the astounding advancement of neuroscience. In the previous 20 years we have possessed the capacity to take in a huge sum about how the mind functions (Chalmers, 1996). Advances, for example, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has produced new test standards. The study of mind imaging is perplexing, and is surely not simply an issue of taking a depiction of what is happening inside the head (McCulloch, 2005). However, the age of pictures of neural preparing utilizing non-intrusive innovation has made conceivable an assortment of investigations that rely upon reports about the experience of the trial subjects. Both so as to outline the tests legitimately and keeping in mind the end goal to translate their outcomes, experimenters regularly need to realize what the subject's experience resembles. Once more, the issue of procedure requires some thought of tried and true methods for portraying cognizant experience, and phenomenology offers simply such a technique (Chalmers, 1996). It appears to be clear, at that point, that the time is ready for a watchful record of how phenomenological rationality and strategy can add to the intellectual sciences.
The idea of cognizance has a similarly various scope of implications that to a great extent parallel those of the descriptive word "cognizant". Qualifications can be drawn amongst animal and state cognizance and also among the assortments of each. One can allude particularly to amazing awareness, get to cognizance, reflexive or meta-mental cognizance, and story awareness among different assortments. Here awareness itself is not commonly regarded as a substantive element, however, only the unique reification of whatever property or perspective is credited by the significant utilization of the descriptive word "cognizant". Access cognizance is only the property of having the required kind of inside access relations, and subjective awareness is basically the property that is credited when "cognizant" is connected in the subjective sense to mental states. How much this submits one to the ontological status of awareness essentially will rely upon the amount of a Platonist one is about universals as a rule (Chalmers, 1996). It requires not submitting one to awareness as an unmistakable substance any more than one's utilization of "square", "red" or "delicate" confers one to the presence of sureness, redness or tenderness as particular elements. In spite of the fact that it isn't the standard, one could in any case take an all the more heartily pragmatist perspective of cognizance as a segment of reality. That is, one could consider cognizance more on a standard with electromagnetic fields than with life.
Since the death of vitalism, we have not considered life in essence as something unmistakable from living things. There are living things, including life forms, states, properties and parts of living beings, groups and developmental ancestries of creatures, yet life isn't itself a further thing, an extra segment of reality, some key power that gets included into living things. We apply the descriptive words "living" and "alive" accurately to numerous things, and in doing as such, we may be said to ascribe life to them, however, with no significance or reality, other than that eng...