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Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate by philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a 1995 book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author looks at some of the repercussions of Darwinian theory. The crux of the argument is that, whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned, there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design might not need a designer. Dennett makes this case on the basis that natural selection is a blind process, which is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to explain the evolution of life. Darwin's discovery was that the generation of life worked algorithmically, that processes behind it work in such a way that given these processes the results that they tend toward must be so.
In philosophy, the self is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes.
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul is a 1981 collection of essays and other texts about the nature of the mind and the self, edited with commentary by philosophers Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. The texts range from early philosophical and fictional musings on a subject that could seemingly only be examined in the realm of thought, to works from the twentieth century where the nature of the self became a viable topic for scientific study.
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher. He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1980 until his retirement in 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are political philosophy, ethics and philosophy of mind.
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
In the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.
Philosophical realism – usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters – is the view that a certain kind of thing has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder. This includes a number of positions within epistemology and metaphysics which express that a given thing instead exists independently of knowledge, thought, or understanding. This can apply to items such as the physical world, the past and future, other minds, and the self, though may also apply less directly to things such as universals, mathematical truths, moral truths, and thought itself. However, realism may also include various positions which instead reject metaphysical treatments of reality entirely.
Existential psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy based on the model of human nature and experience developed by the existential tradition of European philosophy. It focuses on concepts that are universally applicable to human existence including death, freedom, responsibility, and the meaning of life. Instead of regarding human experiences such as anxiety, alienation and depression as implying the presence of mental illness, existential psychotherapy sees these experiences as natural stages in a normal process of human development and maturation. In facilitating this process of development and maturation existential psychotherapy involves a philosophical exploration of an individual's experiences while stressing the individual's freedom and responsibility to facilitate a higher degree of meaning and well-being in his or her life.
"Cartesian theater" is a derisive term by philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, made known in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, to refer pointedly to a defining aspect of what he calls Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialist theories of the mind.
The Sleeping Beauty problem, also known as the Sleeping Beauty paradox, is a puzzle in decision theory in which an ideally rational epistemic agent is told she will be awoken from sleep either once or twice according to the toss of a coin. Each time she will have no memory of whether she has been awoken before, and is asked what her degree of belief that the outcome of the coin toss is Heads ought to be when she is first awakened.
Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology is a 1978 book by American philosopher Daniel Dennett. The book is a collection of seventeen essays in which Dennett reflects on the early achievements of artificial intelligence to develop his ideas on consciousness, theory of mind, and free will.
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"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by consciousness, including the possible insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. Someone who studies metaphysics can be called either a "metaphysician" or a "metaphysicist".
In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".
Open individualism is a view in the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future. It is a theoretical solution to the question of personal identity, being contrasted with "Empty individualism", the view that personal identities correspond to a fixed pattern that instantaneously disappears with the passage of time, and "Closed individualism", the common view that personal identities are particular to subjects and yet survive over time.
Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of a person over time. Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time.
Buddhist thought and Western philosophy include several parallels.
References
- ↑ Elga, Adam (2000-04-01). "Self-locating belief and the Sleeping Beauty problem". Analysis. 60 (2): 143–147. doi:10.1093/analys/60.2.143. ISSN 0003-2638.
- ↑ "Works by Arnold Zuboff". PhilPapers. Retrieved 2019-10-15.
- ↑ Forgas, Joseph P.; Innes, J. Michael (1989). Recent Advances in Social Psychology: An International Perspective. Amsterdam: North Holland. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-444-88519-7.
- ↑ Valentine, Elizabeth R. (2020). "Perception and action in East and West". Philosophy and History of Psychology: Selected Works of Elizabeth Valentine. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-000-08294-4.
- ↑ "Arnold Stuart ZUBOFF". Companies House. Archived from the original on 2021-08-15. Retrieved 2021-08-15.
- 1 2 "About". Arnold Zuboff Art. Retrieved 2024-08-05.
- ↑ "1968 June 3". Commencement Programs. University of Connecticut: 25. 1968-06-03.
- ↑ "Zuboff, Arnold Stuart, 1972". Finding Aids - Princeton University. Retrieved 2024-08-05.
- ↑ "Ph.Ds awarded full list" (PDF). Philosophy - Princeton University. Retrieved 2024-08-05.
- ↑ "Full Programme" (PDF). London School of Philosophy. p. 5. Retrieved 2020-06-08.
- ↑ "People". UCL Philosophy. 2020-08-04. Archived from the original on 2020-08-15. Retrieved 2021-10-08.
- ↑ Sypnowich, Christine (2024-07-09). G. A. Cohen: Liberty, Justice and Equality (PDF). John Wiley & Sons. p. 12. ISBN 978-1-5095-2996-4.
