Group items tagged

"The time honoured star of the B grade horror flick - the Zombie, the brain-eating living dead, a body without a soul - has entered the world of philosophy. The Zombie sits at the centre of a charged debate about the mystery of human consciousness. Whilst you can be confident that you're not a Zombie, how can you be sure about the next person? Your mother, neighbour or boss? Join two of the world's great philosophers of the mind, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, and a B grade movie maker...it's zombie mania."

Dennett, D. "Who's On First? Heterophenomenology Explained" Journal of Consciousness Studies, Special Issue: Trusting the Subject? (Part 1), 10, No. 9-10, October 2003, pp. 19-30

Conscious Entities

"It is widely accepted that conscious experience has a physical basis. That is, the properties of experience (phenomenal properties, or qualia) systematically depend on physical properties according to some lawful relation. There are two key questions about this relation. The first concerns the strength of the laws: are they logically or metaphysically necessary, so that consciousness is nothing 'over and above' the underlying physical process, or are they merely contingent laws like the law of gravity? This question about the strength of the psychophysical link is the basis for debates over physicalism and property dualism. The second question concerns the shape of the laws: precisely how do phenomenal properties depend on physical properties? What sort of physical properties enter into the laws' antecedents, for instance; consequently, what sort of physical systems can give rise to conscious experience? It is this second question that I address in this paper." Published in Conscious Experience, edited by Thomas Metzinger. Imprint Academic, 1995.

"Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is extraordinarily hard to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from neural processes in the brain? These questions are among the most intriguing in all of science." From Scientific American, December 1995, pp. 62-68.

"Chapters on various issues relating to the nature of consciousness. Plus papers on video and other matters of interest, including language, cybernetics, interactivity and computing machines."

"The brain and its 'agent' debate the provenance of thoughts in the charming language of an old Readers Digest article." Also found in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, 1995.

"The new field of experimental philosophy introduces a novel twist on this traditional approach. Experimental philosophers continue the search to understand people's ordinary intuitions, but they do so using the methods of contemporary cognitive science (see also here and here)-experimental studies, statistical analyses, cognitive models, and so forth. Just in the past year or so, a number of researchers have been applying this new approach to the study of intuitions about consciousness. By studying how people think about three different types of abstract entities-a corporation, a robot and a God-we can better understand how people think about the mind." (Scientific American)

"Zombies are stipulated to be creatures that are in some way identical to human beings-and thus, in some sense, indistinguishable from human beings-but which lack consciousness. Zombies are at least behaviorally identical to human beings or other conscious creatures, and they may also be like us in other ways."

"My goal is subversive. I am out to overthrow an idea that, in one form or another, is "obvious" to most people--to scientists, philosophers, lay people. My quarry is frustratingly elusive; no sooner does it retreat in the face of one argument than "it" reappears, apparently innocent of all charges, in a new guise." Found in in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press 1988. Reprinted in W. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader, MIT Press, 1990, A. Goldman, ed. Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 1993.

Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness

18 November 2006 - New Scientist

"Dennett has various targets in his book; they all seem to get lumped together, but in fact some seem distinct from others. Here are three that it might be useful to distinguish." Curtis Brown

Discussion Board on Dennett's thesis

"Confronted by the discoveries of artificial intelligence, some philosophers are questioning the very minds that keep their profession afloat."

"Studying the neurons when a percept changes, even though the visual input is constant, should be a powerful experimental paradigm. We need to construct neurobiological theories of visual awareness and test them using a combination of molecular, neurobiological and local imaging studies. We believe that once we have mastered the secret of this simple form of awareness, we may be close to understanding a central mystery of human life: how the physical events occurring in our brains while we think and act in the world relate to our subjective sensations-that is, how the brain relates to the mind." From Scientific American Sept 92

"This web page explores the function of the brain's hemispheres, how information is shared between them via the largest of the interhemispheric commissures, and what symptoms result as a consequence of a split brain operation in which the commissure is severed."

"The best reason for believing that robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily complex self-controlling, self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural selection, and operating according to the same well-understood principles that govern all the other physical processes in living things: digestive and metabolic processes, self-repair and reproductive processes, for instance."

A robust and well-organized list compiled by David Chalmers.