Download what is consciousness - Raymond Williams Foundation

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
Based in part on an article in TIME magazine “the Mystery of Consciousness” by Steven Pinker
We are experts at consciousness but none of us know
what it is!
Some religions believe that consciousness and the soul
are at least similar. They often believe that the soul
continues after death. Consciousness and the soul are
the very essence of life.
What is consciousness to you?
A fairly new science looking at consciousness has
evolved of late (because until recently to was too
difficult!!). It brings together such areas as
neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. We now know
to some extent what people are thinking. Eg if they are
looking at a picture of a bottle or a shoe.
Are you comfortable with science investigating
the workings of the brain?
The Hard problem is WHY there is a first person, subjective experience. This problem is so hard no-one
knows even what the answer would look like. There is at least one hypothesis that describes WHAT
consciousness could be.
Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and
aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in
an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.
Why is this hypothesis astonishing?
What are the possible consequences of this hypothesis?
Only conscious about 4000 years ago!! "There is in general no consciousness in the ILIAD."
Analysing Homer's great epic, Jaynes came to the conclusion that the characters of the Trojan siege did
not have conscious minds, no introspection, as we know it in the modern human.
Whether Achilles or Agamemnon, there was no sense of subjectivity. Rather they were men whom the
gods pushed about like robots. The gods sang epics through their lips. Jayne declares that these Iliadic
heroes heard "voices," real speech and directions from the gods--as clearly as those diagnosed epileptic
or schizophrenic today.
Jaynes stresses that the Iliadic man did not possess subjectivity as we do--rather "he had no awareness
of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon." This mentality of the
Myceneans, Jaynes calls the bicameral mind. - Julian Jaynes.
He cannot be serious - can he?
.....consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain
during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a
song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and
alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the
corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two
consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.
Is the brain just a machine?
The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence.......... a human
judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to
appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.
Will a machine ever become conscious?
“As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is
conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an alltoo-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own
consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other
people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more
pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a
thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny
our common capacity to suffer. “
Towards a new morality?