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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, theologians, and all of science. 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, 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.
Epiphenomenalism is a position on the mind–body problem which holds that physical and biochemical events within the human body are the sole cause of mental events. According to this view, subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body, yet themselves have no influence over physical events. The appearance that subjective mental states influence physical events is merely an illusion. For instance, fear seems to make the heart beat faster, but according to epiphenomenalism the biochemical secretions of the brain and nervous system —not the experience of fear—is what raises the heartbeat. Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, yet have non-physical properties, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a form of property dualism.
A mental event is any event that happens within the mind of a conscious individual. Examples include thoughts, feelings, decisions, dreams, and realizations. These events often make up the conscious life that are associated with cognitive function.
The mind is that which thinks, imagines, remembers, wills, and senses, or is the set of faculties responsible for such phenomena. The mind is also associated with experiencing perception, pleasure and pain, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. The mind can include conscious and non-conscious states as well as sensory and non-sensory experiences.
Neutral monism is an umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind, concerning the relation of mind to matter. These theories take the fundamental nature of reality to be neither mental nor physical; in other words it is "neutral".
Free will is the notional capacity or ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.
Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.
In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that the mind or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe". It is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson. In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism. Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness and developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century.
In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. 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, as each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
Max Velmans is a British psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, principally known for the theory of consciousness called "reflexive monism".
Understanding Consciousness (2000) is a book by Max Velmans, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, which combines an account of scientific studies of consciousness with a perspective from the philosophy of mind. The book was shortlisted for the British Psychological Society book of the year award in 2001 and 2002. Philip Pullman called it "one of the clearest and most elegant accounts" he had seen of the topic.
Antireductionism is the position in science and metaphysics that stands in contrast to reductionism (anti-holism) by advocating that not all properties of a system can be explained in terms of its constituent parts and their interactions.
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.
The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the body.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
Divided consciousness is a term coined by Ernest Hilgard to define a psychological state in which one's consciousness is split into distinct components, possibly during hypnosis.
Interactionism or interactionist dualism is the theory in the philosophy of mind which holds that matter and mind are two distinct and independent substances that exert causal effects on one another. An example of your mind influencing your body would be if you are depressed, you can observe the effects on your body, such as a slouched posture, a lackluster smile, etc. Another example, this time of your body affecting your mind would be: If you struck your toe very forcefully on a door, you would experience terrible pain. Interactionism is one type of dualism, traditionally a type of substance dualism though more recently also sometimes a form of property dualism. Many philosophers and scientists have responded to this theory with arguments both supporting and opposing its relevance to life and whether the theory corresponds to reality.
Consciousness after death is a common theme in society and culture, and the belief in some form of life after death is a feature of many religions. However, scientific research has established that the physiological functioning of the brain, the cessation of which defines brain death, is closely connected to mental states.
Dualism in Indian philosophy refers to the belief held by certain schools of Indian philosophy that reality is fundamentally composed of two parts. This mainly takes the form of either mind-matter dualism in Buddhist philosophy or awareness-'nature' dualism in the Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy. These can be contrasted with mind-body dualism in Western philosophy of mind, but also have similarities with it.
References
- ↑ "Understanding Consciousness: 2nd Edition (Paperback) - Routledge". Routledge.com. Retrieved 2017-01-11.
- ↑ "Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness: Selected works of Max Velmans (Hardback) - Routledge". Routledge.com. Retrieved 2017-01-11.
- ↑ Velmans, Max. "Dualism, Reductionism and Reflexive Monism," in Max Velmans and Susan Schneider (eds.). The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, pp. 346-358. preprint
- Velmans, Max. "Reflexive Monism," Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(2) pp.5-50 (2008) preprint
- Hoche, H-U. "Reflexive monism versus complementarism: An analysis and criticism of the conceptual groundwork of Max Velmans's reflexive model of consciousness," Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(3) pp.389-409 (2007), doi:10.1007/s11097-006-9045-8 preprint
- 1 2 Price, Donald D. and Barrell, James J. Inner Experience and Neuroscience: Merging Both Perspectives. MIT Press, 2012, p. 277ff.
- ↑ Rao, K. R. History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization Volume XVI, Part 1: Cognitive Anomalies, Consciousness, and Yoga. New Delhi: Matrix, 2011, pp. 322-323, 376-383, 766-774.
