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Consciousness through a neurophilosophical looking glass
Sydney, April 2011 NeuroLeadership Interest Group blog.emergitect.com
Why – Neuroscience can help us be7er understand how people are mo:vated and behave • Provides clues on more effec:ve management techniques – Our understanding is incomplete and will evolve over :me
– Change strategies are more persuasive when underpinned by a scien:fic ra:onale • Not everyone will be easily convinced
– A cri:cal apprecia:on can help us be7er deal with objec:ons
Socrates
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Defini:on
– A testable defini:on has not been formulated, e.g. Locked-‐in Syndrome
"Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.“
blog.emergitect.com
Neurophilosophy – or philosophy of neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy. Two dis:nct methods.
– The first method a7empts to solve problems in philosophy of mind with empirical informa:on from the neurosciences.
– The second method a7empts to clarify neuroscien:fic results using the conceptual rigor and methods of philosophy of science.
David Chalmers
blog.emergitect.com
Making Inferences about the Brain • Traumas/Lesions. Phineas Gage (1848) an
accidental explosion of a charge he had set blew his tamping iron through his head. (AUer accident) was impa:ent and obs:nate, yet capricious and vacilla:ng, unable to se7le on any of the plans he devised for future ac:on.
• fMRI. Blood Oxygena:on Level Dependent signal
indirect measure of neural ac:vity. Neural correlates …
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Philosophy of Mind – is a branch of modern analy:c philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, consciousness and their rela:onship to the physical body, par:cularly the brain.
– The mind-‐body problem, i.e. the rela:onship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, e.g. dualism vs monism
Daniel Dennet
Descartes
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Physicalism is a philosophical posi:on holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical proper:es; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things.
"the language of physics is the universal language of science and, consequently, any knowledge can be brought back to the statements on the physical objects.”
O7o Neurath
Democritus
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The Hard Problem • Someone could know all the physical truths about the world and, in par:cular,
all the physical informa:on about the brain and the neurophysiology of vision, and s:ll not know what it is like to see red (Jackson 1982; 1986). Mary the color blind neuroscien2st.
• Someone could know all the physical truths about bats and s:ll not know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel 1974). Problem of Subjec2vity.
Thomas Nagel
• We can conceive of an individual that is physically iden:cal to me, molecule per molecule, but does not have any phenomenally conscious state whatsoever (Chalmers 1996). Philosophical Zombie.
• Shows that we cannot explain consciousness in physical terms (Levine 2001), or even that phenomenal consciousness is not physical and therefore physicalism is false (Chalmers 1996; 2002). The Explanatory Gap.
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On Youtube • The Mary Argument – h7p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERtHFw_fw9Y
• David Chalmers – h7p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo&feature=related
• Patricia Churchland – h7p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2DPKLRBuio
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Some Implica:ons • Is there such a thing as Free Will
• When can I switch off the Life Support
• What are the limita:ons of Neuroscience
• Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? – The Hard Problem of Consciousness
The Diving Bell and the Bu7erfly
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