Category: consciousness
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Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?
Alva Noë “Is the visual world a grand illusion?” Journal of Consciousness Studies. Volume 9, No 5/6, 2002: 1-12. p. 10 “In general, our sense of the perceptual presence of the detailed world does not consist in our representation of all the detail in consciousness now. Rather, it consists in our access now to all…
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Neuroscience as Science of Thought?
Nowadays one can often hear that neuroscience can explain everything about a human being. The external physical world interacts with human sensory systems, natural neural nets in the brain get excited and this in turn causes excitation of muscles. Modern science has found nothing else in a human body, hence when we would like to…
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Mental and Physical
Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness p. 300 “To make matters worse, there are four distinct ways in which body/brain and mind/consciousness might in principle, enter into casual relationship. There might be physical causes of physical states, physical causes of mental states, mental causes of mental states, and mental causes of physical states. Establishing which forms of…
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Conscious Visual Experience by a Newborn
In the book Jeffery A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem there was a discussion on whether an infant has conscious experience. p. 119 “A mother is normally in no doubt that a cry of pain is a reliable sign that her infant is consciously experiencing pain; but many scientists and philosophers have…
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You and your Emotion
From Jeffery A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem p. 275. “Suppose yourself in a seemingly tranquil and innocuous conversation with the Dearly Beloved (as ‘significant others’ were once, more romantically, called). She (or he, to taste) says something wounding (or rejecting, or arousing your jealousy, also according to taste). At first, you…
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Max Velmans’ Reflexive Monism
My messages to the everything list http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/t/a5d2deabda634c9f 26.05.2012 17:57: I have just finished reading Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness and below there are a couple of comments to the book. The book is similar to Jeffrey Gray’s Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem in a sense that it takes phenomenal consciousness seriously. Let me give…
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Velmans on Popper’s Objective Knowledge
Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness p. 215. “As Popper (1972) notes, knowledge that is codified into books and other artefacts has an existence that is, in one sense, observer-free. That is, the books exist in our libraries after their writers are long dead and their readers absent, and they form a repository of knowledge that can…
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Quantum Dualist Interactionism
Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness In Chapter 2, Conscious Souls, Brains and Quantum Mechanics there is a nice section Quantum Dualist Interactionism (p. 17 – 21) where Max Velmans describes works that present interpretation of dualism in the framework of quantum mechanics. Stapp, H. (2007a) ‘Quantum mechanical theories of consciousness’ in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness,…