Naturally, DB protested that he could see no stripes at all. Apparently, his brain was perceiving the stripes without his mind being conscious of them. One interpretation is that DB was a semi-zombie, with a brain like any other brain, but partially lacking the magical add-on of consciousness.
Chalmers knows how wildly improbable his ideas can seem, and takes this in his stride: at philosophy conferences, he is fond of clambering on stage to sing The Zombie Blues, a lament about the miseries of having no consciousness.
McGinn, to be fair, has made a career from such hatchet jobs. But strong feelings only slightly more politely expressed are commonplace. Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with — making the whole debate kickstarted by Chalmers an exercise in pointlessness. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying. Chalmers has speculated, largely in jest, that Dennett himself might be a zombie.
But everybody now accepts that goldness and silveriness are really just differences in atoms. However hard it feels to accept, we should concede that consciousness is just the physical brain, doing what brains do. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label we give to certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually, neuroscience will show that consciousness is just brain states.
After all, our brains evolved to help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. O r maybe it is: in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, Chalmers and Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age.
Besides, panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too — well, where does it stop?
Growing up as the child of German-born Catholics, Koch had a dachshund named Purzel. The problem is that there seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or sparrows or mice or insects, or, for that matter, trees or rocks.
Which is how Koch and Chalmers have both found themselves arguing, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, that an ordinary household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind you might find in your smoke detector, might in principle be conscious.
The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality — such as space, mass, or electrical charge — just do exist.
Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too — and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.
It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organised. But in principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. The ethical implications are unsettling: might we owe the same care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals?
Koch, for his part, tries to avoid stepping on insects as he walks. Sure enough, when people fall into a deep sleep, or receive an injection of anaesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness, the device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, Koch argues and in theory you could take any device, measure the complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious.
But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that? Existing subscribers, please log in with your email address to link your account access. Paid quarterly. Inclusive of applicable taxes VAT. By Anil Ananthaswamy If physical processes in a brain create consciousness, what are they? Consciousness special What is consciousness like for other animals and when did it evolve?
Paid quarterly Inclusive of applicable taxes VAT. Trending Latest Video Free. When we are dealing with the data of observation, we can do experiments to test whether what we observe matches what the theory predicts. But when we are dealing with the unobservable data of consciousness, this methodology breaks down. But the accumulation of such correlations does not amount to a theory of consciousness. What we ultimately want is to explain why conscious experiences are correlated with brain activity.
Why is it that such activity in the hypothalamus comes along with a feeling of hunger? In fact, we should not be surprised that our standard scientific method struggles to deal with consciousness. But Galileo wanted a purely quantitative science of the physical world, and he therefore proposed that these qualities were not really in the physical world but in consciousness, which he stipulated was outside of the domain of science.
This worldview forms the backdrop of science to this day. This may seem bizarre, but it turns out that physics is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter. For example, matter has mass and charge, properties which are entirely characterised in terms of behaviour — attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view — physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.
There is only matter — nothing spiritual or supernatural — but matter can be described from two perspectives. This means that mind is matter, and that even elementary particles exhibit incredibly basic forms of consciousness.
Before you write that off, consider this.
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