Nova: Secrets of the Mind

1. Nova: Secrets of the Mind Neuroscience Meets the Philosophy of Mind

2. Consciousness • The subjective character of experience. • What it’s like to be something.

3. Big Question of Consciousness • (Blakemore) • Is consciousness a special added extra that we conscious humans are lucky to have, or is it something that necessarily comes along with all those evolved skills of perceiving, thinking, and feeling? (Consciousness: A Brief Introduction, p. 11) • Chalmers: YES! • Nagel: We can’t know • Dennett: NO!

4. The “Explanatory Gap” • Seems like something that materialism can’t capture (or explain) • Chalmers: “neuroscience cannot provide a full account of conscious experience” • Easy Problem: “the objective mechanisms of the cognitive system” (p. 81) • Hard Problem: “the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience.”

5. The “Explanatory Gap”, con’t • Seems like something that materialism can’t capture (or explain) • Nagel: Science is objective, consciousness is subjective. • Two completely different approaches, science can’t appropriately study consciousness. • We also have to expect that some facts will be unknowable.

6. Neuroscience • Collecting data on brains • Dr. Ramachandran

7. Our questions: • What can the data provided by Neuroscience show us about the mind/body problem? • What can neuroscience tell us about conscious experience?

8. Re: Mind/Body Problem • Seems to: • provide “clues about how certain brain structures control fundamental thought processes” • Could this fill in the “explanatory gap”? • Indicate that what we think can affect the brain’s processing • Cf. phantom limbs and mirror box

9. Re: Consciousness • Seems to show: • that some elements of conscious experience might be necessary for human interaction. • Does this answer the “Big question”? • Does this answer Chalmers’ “hard problem”? • Does it help with Nagel’s challenge?