consciousness important people

Kabat-Zinn

Kabat-Zinn

created a mindfulness program, focused on stress reduction

Descartes

Cartesian Dualism, based on skepticism

→ if you can question your reality, you can never be sure of anything other than the fact that you are thinking, therefore you exist

→ “I think, therefore I am”

→ Cartesian Dualism form of substance dualism

→ interaction between the mind and the body happens in the pineal gland

critique: refuted because we do not know how interaction takes place, pineal gland theory has not been proven

only humans are conscious because we have language

Chalmers

believes that finding a definition for consciousness is unlikely since consciousness itself needs to be explained

Mary the color scientist would be surprised when she sees color

naturalistic dualism is compatible with the scientific view of the world, argues that mental states influence physical systems such as the brain “naturally”

→ but mental states are not reducible to physical systems, they are distinct

the explanatory gap is because of the difference between the easy and hard problems

→ try to solve the hard problem, information has two aspects (physical and experimental),

conscious experience = info + physical organization of brain

to solve we need an understanding of fundamental physics and the quantum theory

philosopher’s zombie: zombies and conscious beings would be identical, a zombie is logically possible, no biochemical root for consciousness

needs conscious inessentialism: the idea that consciousness is superfluous and does nothing

Levine

believes the explanatory gap is the metaphysical gap between physical phenomena and conscious experience

the cause of the mystery of consciousness is the gap between the inner and outer world

Baars

GWT

Hume

our concept of self is our sensations, impressions, and ideas which seem tied together because our memory creates the illusion of continuity, there is nothing that actually unifies our experiences

Mack

talks about inattentional blindness (failure to notice visible, unexpected object b/c attention is elsewhere)

Jackson

thinks that Mary the color scientist would learn what color is like, can add that qualia to the knowledge she already has

perceptual release theory: memories and internally generated images are usually inhibited by the senses, released when inhibitive input is disrupted

Beaton

Mary the color scientist would be surprised and would learn something new when she saw color

disagrees with Dennett, RoboMary would only be modeling what a state of knowing is like

Maloney

Mary the color scientist would not be surprised, this man thinks you should do a test, if she is an expert she will be able to imagine the feeling of the color and if asked to pick a color she could

materialism and functionalism

if she can imagine it she knows it basically actually seeing the color doesnt add anything to knowing a lot about it

Dennett

dualism is false (basically everything is false)

Cartesian Theater is false

Descartes and dualism are dead

only humans are conscious because we have language

qualia is fake

conscious experience has properties but the “raw feel” when you discuss qualia is not there

(actual taste = qualia) vs. (opinion of taste)

Mary the color scientist would not be surprised and if you think that you did not follow the thought experiment right and you cannot imagine that she is an expert of color

invented RoboMary (would the robot understand color or just have the programming/expertise)

philosopher’s zombie: would be a zimbo (unconsciously has internal informational states, believes it was in various mental states, thinks it is conscious but actually isn’t

everybody is a complex, self-monitoring zombie

no fundamental difference between phenomenal and access consciousness (disagrees with Block)

no hard problem because it misconstrues consciousness, we need to explain why it seems there is actual phenomenology rather than phenomenology itself

free will exists but not in the way we imagine, there is no area or system in the brain where everything we are conscious of comes together, no specific time either

evolution has no plan or intentions, no god

intentional stance theory (understand behavior of others by thinking they have same intentions as us)

Pierce and Lewis

qualia are the building blocks of sensory experience, the subjective quality of a property, and about the experience itself

it is philosopically okay to talk about how something feels

problems: disagreement about properties and nature, how do objective brains and bodies produce subjective qualia?

Rizzolatti

made the premotor theory of selective spatial attention (attending to a point in space is the same as preparing to look towards it, the premotor neurons that prepare for visually guided actions are activated during attention shifts)

supports the existence of information flow from visual selection to motor planning, which can be adjusted to meet task demands

Damasio

3 kinds of self:

1. proto-self: set of neural patterns which map the state of an organism moment by moment

2. core self: more complex organization, core consciousness which an entity recreates for each object the brain interacts with

3. autobiographical self: extended consciousness, more complex organization develops over a lifetime and builds on working and autobiographical memory

the self is not a separate entity, it born of neural patterns in the brain stem, thalamus, and cerebral cortex

Tart

tried to map states of consciousness with two dimensions:

1. irrationality

2. ability to hallucinate

3 major clusters (states of dreaming, lucid or normal consciousness), discrete states of consciousness

1. ordinary consciousness: high rationality and low ability to hallucinate

2. REM dreaming: low rationality, high ability to hallucinate

3. lucid dreaming: high rationality and high ability to hallucinate

the forbidden zone is when you cannot function stably or have experiences (low rationality and low ability to hallucinate)

meditation induces ASCs because people who meditate feel like they’re in an ASC

O’Regan and Noë

sensorimotor theory

aims to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual experience (‘qualia’ ).

the theory stresses patterns of sensorimotor dependencies (or ‘sensorimotor contingencies’), defined as the regularities in how sensory stimulation depends on the activity of the perceiver

Graziano

made the attention schema theory of consciousness (consciousness is an internal model of attention the evolved to control attention, subjective awareness is a caricature of attention)

Nagel

says that the understanding that mental states can be caused by neurons firing does not answer questions of consciousness

made “what is it like to be a bat”

“what is it like to be a bat” cannot be answered because we have never experienced it, if you were a bad you couldn’t answer questions about consciousness

the hard problem is insolvable because there is no physical explanation of mental phenomenon

Lamarck

thinks that an animal’s drive to adapt is what leads to progress, offspring will inherit improved characteristics, evolution is directional and progressive

Hobson

3D model to classify ASCs

dimesions:

A: activation energy

I: input source

M: mode

recognizes that brain states are always changing and any state can be in this model, any area can be occupied

Libet

dualist interactionism

non-physical conscious mind is responsible for subjective experience and free will

this emerges from brain activity, can occur without neural pathways

conscious mental field is how conscious unity is achieved, it does not depend on nerve pathways

there is a half-second delay, because half a second of constant neural activity in somatosensory cortex is needed for consciousness, minimum intensity at which no sensation is felt

is readiness potential the neural basis of the URGE to act rather than the DECISION to act?

Turing

created a test where the goal is to see what machines can do instead of test if they can think

the imitation game: judge who decides which of two people is a woman, cannot see or hear the person in the other room, communicates by asking questions, getting answers through computer (no voice), both participants reply as the woman would the machine is the man

Wegner

came up with three requirements for creating an experience of will:

1. priority: thought must occur before the action (apparent causal act)

2. consistency: thought and action much be consistent (apparent and actual causal path linked)

3. exclusivity: action cannot have other plausible causes, other than the conscious thought

James

believes that psychology is the science of mental life, both phenomena and conditions

monist, believes consciousness can be altered by brain injuries and drugs

radical empiricism: experience must be the heart of philosophical inquiries and understood beyond physical data

consciousness is a stream and attention is the mental activity that structures it

theory of deliberate action: there are various reinforcing and inhibiting ideas that compete for physical action, once one wins we feel like we made a decision

multiple ego theory: different selves with different consciousnesses and separate wills may exist within one body

the self = two always present elements the “me” (stream of consciousness) and the “I” (subjective knowing of self)

no separate self, the thought itself is the thinker (there is a passing thought that remembers previous thoughts and appropriates some of them, this big thought it called the Thought capital T)

rejected soul theories and homunculus (theory that says the baby is fully formed inside the germ cell and just grows in size during pregnancy, basically a pro-lifer’s dream)

rejects Aristotle’s substanstialism (substantial realities underly all phenomena?), rejects Descarte’s dualism, rejects Locke’s associationist theory

Susan Blackmore

studied animal consciousness

4 factors needed to assess animal consciousness:

1. self-recognition

2. other minds

3. language

4. imitation

Churchland

believes once our framework for understanding consciousness has evolved, defining it will be as easy as answering the vital fluids theory

there is no hard problem because we cannot predict which problems will turn out easy and which will turn out hard, also how do we know that after we solve the easy problem there will be more problems to solve?

Gilbert Ryle

criticizes substance dualism and terms like “in the mind” or “in the body”

these terms shouldn’t be used because they are categorical mistakes, they give material properties to non material things

Popper and Eccles

think that the mind and the body can causally affect each other, they are different entities, the influence is not clear, synapses are infleunced by thinking therefore the self can control the brain

(dualist interactionism)

Huxley

believes that consciousness and subjective experiences have no causal influence

problems with this: if conscious experience has no effect, we should not be able to speak about them

sort of dualism because if the mind product of physical world but not physical itself

Helmholtz

pioneered the study of reaction time, the first to measure the speed of nerve signals and the velocity of thought

consciousness and the interaction of the mind + body occurs in the brain

covert attention scanning (looking directly at something while paying attention somewhere else, both involve same brain regions)

Husserl

believed that we should go back to the way things occur in experience, systematic enquiry into immediate conscious experience by suspending scientific/logical inferences about the world

phenomenology

Wundt

introspection and self-reflection = precise observations about our experiences

thought there were two types of physical elements:

1. sensory: heat/light

2. affective: pleasure/aversion

every conscious experience depends on the union of both elements

problems with his thinking: no objective way to measure feelings

Watson

said we should abolish introspection

psychology = prediction and control of behavior

→ behaviorism: most things we do are learned in a way that repetition increases behavior

the introduction of this into the field stopped the study of consciousness for 50 years

inspired Skinner’s operant conditioning

Block

said that a state is phenomenally conscious when you can describe what it is like, it is an experience

access consciousness is used in reasoning and rationally guided speech and thought

reflective consciousness (higher order reflection, thinking about thinking)

Moody

rejects the consciousness essentialism, says that the philosopher’s zombies would be people with no conscious experience and they wouldn’t understand problems of consciousness

Crick and Koch

pioneers NCCs which are studied by two approaches

1. contrastive method: conscious perception is compared to unconscious perception

2. classic method: rivalry in vision, binocular rivalry

first find NCCs and then solve the hard problem

he wanted to find NCCs of specific experiences, focused on vision

Kozuch

says that there is a possibility that one has a conscious mental state and does not know it yet or is not able to describe it

this means accepting the phenomenal/access consciousness way of thinking and the notion that different brain areas represent distinct contents

problems: matching content doctrine (belief that first task of neuroscience of consciousness is to uncover neural representational systems), this is a mereological fallacy

Breitmeyer

says that binocular rivalry is the lowest level of hierarchy of unconscious processing (which tries to identify whether suppressing of one blinding method always precedes or follows another blinding method)

Dehaene

made the neuronal global workspace model, no information has to become conscious, a collection of specialized unconscious processors compete for GW (has limited capacity and shares info with other brain areas)

consciousness depends on attention

there must be a link between consciousness and the self-consciousness, being conscious of oneself is form of conscious access to the workplace

epiphenomenalism

mental events are caused by physical events but mental events don’t effect physical events