Essays on Designing Minds by Daniel Dennett
... stance). Besides overcoming the tension between instrumentalism and realism, Wilkerson suggests a further gain in his reconstruction of Dennett's notion of patterns: avoiding the possibility that Dennett's view might ultimately clash with the hopes of contemporary neuroscience, that is, the hopes fo ...
... stance). Besides overcoming the tension between instrumentalism and realism, Wilkerson suggests a further gain in his reconstruction of Dennett's notion of patterns: avoiding the possibility that Dennett's view might ultimately clash with the hopes of contemporary neuroscience, that is, the hopes fo ...
Consciousness: The Hard Problem
... imagination. But, the answer is accessible to us only because we base our imagination on our own experiences. We need the subjective experience of being human to imagine the experience of others. Objective science alone could not give us these answers. A Martian could not learn from objective facts ...
... imagination. But, the answer is accessible to us only because we base our imagination on our own experiences. We need the subjective experience of being human to imagine the experience of others. Objective science alone could not give us these answers. A Martian could not learn from objective facts ...
Functionalism According to functionalism, the essential or defining
... common-sense intuitions about qualia. Consider the inversion problem first. I think the functionalist is right to insist that the type-identity of our visual sensations be reckoned according to their functional role. But the objector is also right in insisting that a relative inversion of two peopl ...
... common-sense intuitions about qualia. Consider the inversion problem first. I think the functionalist is right to insist that the type-identity of our visual sensations be reckoned according to their functional role. But the objector is also right in insisting that a relative inversion of two peopl ...
Facing the Hard Question
... Information processing in the brain is ultimately done by molecules (Black 1994) and therefore it is based on the real physical states of very complex matter. No amount of information processing will change a simulated vibration into a real vibration. I do not see any reason to believe that qualia a ...
... Information processing in the brain is ultimately done by molecules (Black 1994) and therefore it is based on the real physical states of very complex matter. No amount of information processing will change a simulated vibration into a real vibration. I do not see any reason to believe that qualia a ...
Qualia
In philosophy, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) are individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term ""qualia"" derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkwaːlis]) meaning ""of what sort"" or ""of what kind""). Examples of qualia include the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky.Daniel Dennett (b. 1942), American philosopher and cognitive scientist, regards qualia as ""an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us"".Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take:The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition of the term, and various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia. As such, the nature and existence of qualia remain controversial.