cogprints316: Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

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tags :

source :

authors
Chalmers, D. J.
year
1995

Chalmer’s argues that there is a non-reductive explanation for consciousness, which could lead us to a naturalistic account. The main points of the paper are clearly laid out in the introductory paragraph

Separating the Hard and Easy problems

The first goal Chalmer’s sets out to accomplish is the seperation of the hard problem (those not explainable through cognitive sciences) and the easy problem (those which are explainable through cognitive sciences). He suggest to separate these categories into “consciousness” and “awareness” respectively, but I will continue the use of hard and easy in the following passages.

The easy problem, according to Chalmer’s, is quite simply the explanation of 7 sub-problems of intelligence:

  1. The ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to the environment
  2. The integration of information (or learning) of a cognitive system
  3. The reportability of mental (internal) states
    • This bothers me a bit. Can we actually report on our internal states, or only report the stories or our explanations of what might be our internal states.
  4. The ability of a system to access its own internal states
    • Access in what sense?
  5. The focus of attention
    • I’m unsure what this means. Being able to focus or attend to one task at a time?
  6. The deliberate control of behaviour
    • Deliberate in what sense. Do we actually control behavior, or are we just dynamical systems?
  7. The difference between wakefulness and sleep

Chalmer’s claims these can be explained scientifically, and I tend to agree with him (not considering my misgivings if some of the above are parts of the easy problem).

  • To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes (learning, neurophysiological changes).
  • To account for sleep and wakefulness, and appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for contrasting behaviour in those states is enough.

He describes the hard problem as the subjective aspect of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also an experiential aspect. An aspect which we feel as experience. There is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This phenomena has been described with terms as ‘phenomenal consciousness’ and ‘qualia’, but he uses conscious experience.

Functional Explanation

Chalmer’s perportes that experience can not be explained as a mechanism or function. This is what distiguishes the hard from the easy problems. He then laysout how we report the performance of a function, specifically looking at describing a mechanism which entails the function. He argues that if we can describe a natural mechanism which explains the function, this function is explainable and known. I agree with the later part of the argument, but not the former. I’m unsure what “experience” actually is, and don’t buy this statement without doubt. I don’t see why experience is different from other functions describable by cognitive science. It feels different, sure, but that does not mean it is different. His argument rests on this claim, which is not well supported.

Some Case-Studies

Here he goes into some failed theories on conciousness, relaying the reader agrees with the notion that experience is not a function. Some of the examples are interesting, but for briefness I will skip them for now.

Non-reductive Explanations

This is where chalmer’s really lost me. He discussed the only way to create a theory of consciousness was to

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