Questions tagged [consciousness]
Consciousness, and related notions like sentience and self-awareness, denote the capacity of certain organisms to express recognition of their own presence in the world.
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Is there a person in the world that is smarter than me? [closed]
So, is there?
The catch is that I would not accept if a person has greater expertise in-- something. Simply knowing more about quantum mechanics, fishing and politics doesn't count as smarter.
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Why should I care about the person who will wake up in my bed tomorrow? [closed]
Is there some philosophical basis for temporal coherence of our identity?
I noticed that there were many changes in my beliefs and personality throughout my life, e.g. me from 2000 probably would ...
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Which aspects of consciousness are most often addressed by philosophers of mind?
What are the most discussed parts of consciousness according to philosophers?
Epistemologists cite perception, memory, reason, and testimony as frequent objects of philosophical discourse in respect ...
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Does panpsychism imply consciousness after death?
Does panpsychism imply that after we die, we will still exist as some form of consciousness? It might be so faint that we are barely aware of anything, but it might still be consciousness. Is there ...
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Does personal identity/“the self” persist through periods of unconsciousness, such as dreamless sleep?
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
I read the above comic, something which turned out to be a mistake because I have just enough understanding of physics, and philosophy to follow its line of ...
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Does This Answer The Two Hard Problems – Why Is There Anything? and How Do We Know It?
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I imagine that most philosophers, professional or amateur, must have some kind of personal philosophical view of their preferred ontology/metaphysic, even if it is incomplete. This is mine as ...
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What is Life exactly? [closed]
This question was inspired by the fact that scientists have successfully created synthetic bacteria with similar geneome in the lab.
My exact question is if Life is just an aggregate of the bunch of ...
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Infinite Sleep vs Death
I know a similar question has been adressed before but I feel it did not address my question.
When we sleep all our pain/ache on our body vanishes for some time span, you do not know what happened ...
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1answer
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Is there an existing assessment to determine a person's stance on the nature of mind, cognition, consciousness, etc.?
There are a lot of different theories about the nature of consciousness, cognition, and the mind. I'm looking for a set of questions that a person could answer that would then give them some kind of ...
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How likely is it you are actually a philosophical zombie? [duplicate]
A philosophical zombie is someone who strongly insists behaviorally they are conscious even though they don't actually have any conscious experiences at all. How likely is it that you, the reader, are ...
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Boundary case on the morality of torture [closed]
Most everyone would agree that "cold-blooded" torture is morally wrong. We agree so much so that many assume it's objectively wrong.
That being said, imagine this thought experiment:
A ...
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1answer
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How to explain nothingness in Consciousness theory of Tegmark
The hypothesis was first put forward in 2014 by cosmologist and theoretical physicist Max Tegmark from MIT, who proposed that there's a state of matter - just like a solid, liquid, or gas - in which ...
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Are there any Things for which Hegel's approach to consciousness' apprehension of reality fails?
In the Consciousness chapter, Hegel presents two naive approaches to the picture of how consciousness interfaces reality. Hegel shows these approaches are inadequate in the endeavor of consciousness ...
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What can we conclude about consciousness in the past? [duplicate]
All we can be certain of is consciousness in the present. What can we conclude about consciousness in the past? Can we even conclude that it existed? Whenever someone presents "evidence" of ...
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3answers
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Do you create your own thoughts? [closed]
Once upon a time I came up with the following paradox:
Statement 1. I have freedom of will.
Statement 2. If I have freedom of will, then I create my own thoughts.
For example: I'm gonna think about ...
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Consciousness in Simulation theory & AI, why do some believe that it is even possible?
There are many famous philosophers that assume that "consciousness can be create by calculations in a computer". For example: Nick Bostrom with the simulation theory [I greatly respect and ...
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Does Eternalism imply looping consciousness?
If the idea of Eternalism as expressed by those like J.M.E. McTaggart and Sean Carroll is true (as much of physics seems to suggest), the idea of the present moment being more real than the past or ...
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What is the relationship between consciousness and memory?
If someone has amnesia for a certain experience, was that person conscious of that experience in the past or was that person never conscious at that moment? If that person dies, their memories are ...
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Is it possible philosophically that the entire cosmic void with one or more universe/s inside it will stop exist eternally?
As a conscious agent who suddenly appeared in this cosmic void as a child to my parents and got a consistent memory since about the age of 3;
With time I have learned of the question "why is there ...
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Do really all mental states exist in some universe according to Many-Minds Interpretation?
According to the Many Minds interpretation of quantum mechanics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation), the distinction between worlds in the Many Worlds interpretation should be ...
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What do philosophers mean when they say qualia do not exist?
In university, my professor said that his position is that there are no qualia. He acknowledged that non-philosophers can find this position bizarre, but did not explain the rationale behind why he ...
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Is murder wrong accross the board? If not, when?
Is it wrong to murder anything, in any circumstance?
If sometimes its justified, based on species, circumstance, self defense, ideology, when is it considered wrong?
What is the justification for ...
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Are thoughts independent of physical variables around them and arise from inside?or just consequence of forces around it
For example non conscious bodies can't do a thing on their own ,like wind will move them, water will soak them, gravity will make them fall,but conscious beings can go against the nature like if i am ...
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What is justice? Is justice blind?
Is justice something you find at a courthouse? Where would you find justice?
From my perspective there is no justice until the one being judged has a say in how he is being judged. I believe ...
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What possible refutations are there for “we die every time we sleep”? [closed]
The proposition is as follows:
When I sleep, my consciousness dies. Next morning, another person's consciousness is born. He believes that he is me, but my consciousness is dead and never awake.
Are ...
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Do panpsychism and its variants (such as Russellian monism) face an interaction problem?
Many philosophers of the mind—such as David Chalmers, Galen Strawson and Philip Goff—have become sympathetic to variants of panpsychism when it comes to explaining consciousness. Yet, on their own ...
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Does human conciousness “prove” that God exists?
I'm aware this question assumes our universe isn't an infinite regression.
The logic is as follows:
A is the source of everything. B exists. B came from A. Therefore B is an attribute of A.
A being ...
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Definition of a “sense”
Besides the five basic senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) there is also, for example, the sense of balance. While it may seem that this one is not really about perceiving the external world ...
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6answers
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Probability of something given that time will exist forever?
What is the probability of something happening given that time always will exist? If time never ends, is it 100% likely that I will be born again after death?
I have a great way to illustrate my ...
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1answer
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An English room inside Searle's Chinese Room?
The Chinese room experiment has a fundamental function of giving the system/person interacting with it the illusion that the room understands chinese, but it seems flaky to me what the term ...
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Assigning “self-awareness” to qualia as a necessary attribute [duplicate]
The teleportation question which I'm sure most of you have researched,
If I replicate you atom for atom, which one of them will be you?
The issue of materialistic basis for consciousness posits a ...
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5answers
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Why does Man ask Why questions? [closed]
I am not a particularly educated or intelligent individual. If this question is easily answered, forgive me. As I can think of no answer, I am compelled to ask. I'm afraid this line of questioning ...
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Is dualism unlikely because the mind is inextricable in its activity from matter?
I've been thinking about dualism lately, but one thing that deals a pretty strong blow to this view in my mind is that it implies that the mind can exist apart from physical reality (an immaterial ...
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What is the theory of defining consciousness by the ability to use counterfactuals called?
I'm aware there are a number of ways of defining if something is conscious or sentient. Such as the ability to experience qualia, or the ability to be aware you're experiencing qualia. Another theory ...
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1answer
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How do epiphenomenalists explain our knowledge of felt-states?
The traditional epiphenomenalist claim is that the mental properties are simply a by-product of neurophysiological events and so have no causal efficacy over the physical world. This obviously implies ...
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Thought experiment: The distorted brain in a vat
[This is the second version of another question: How does consciousness depend on spatiality?]
I admit that the technical details of the following thought experiment sound completely weird but that's ...
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1answer
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Reverse epiphenomenalism and recursion?
Let's say for a moment that the mind is of unknown substance, and that the state of a particular brain region is emergent from it. That is certain states of the mind will cause certain states of this ...
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1answer
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Are neural correlates of consciousness and immortal souls compatible?
Can one be a hard-boiled believer in neural correlates of consciousness and at the same time believe in things like
the immortal soul
reincarnation
telepathy
and if so, which approaches have been ...
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4answers
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Is consciousness (as we perceive it) what really separates us from animals?
The last couple of weeks or even months, I'm thinking a lot about consciousness.
I have some ideas I would really like to discuss with some open minded, philosophical people. And in the search for ...
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The role of qualia in explaining Skinner box experiments
I wonder if this point of view has been considered before and which role it does play in the discussion of consciousness:
Consider a typical Skinner box experiment: A rat is exposed to some pleasant ...
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Does being able to remember conscious experience mean consciousness cannot be an epiphenomenon?
It has been proposed (or maybe just speculated) by a number of philosophers and scientists, including Richard Dawkins, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon, but I think this cannot be the case....
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3answers
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Physical correlates of consciousness
The term neural correlates of consciousness is well established (~ 277,000 Google results, one Wikipedia article), but I'd like to ask for more general physical correlates of consciousness (~ 6,000 ...
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1answer
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Is there any theory of consciousness that extends conscious existence into the future?
I would like to be able to claim that consciousness is a physical phenomenon, arising from, subject to, and embedded in the physical structure of the universe, while at the same time claim that ...
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What does “there is something that it is like” in Thomas Nagel's “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” mean?
I was reading The enigma of human consciousness in ANNALS of the New York Academy of Sciences and this came up:
think it’s very hard to define consciousness in terms of anything more basic than ...
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1answer
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Why does consciousness appear unitary? [duplicate]
Let us imagine lightning striking you so hard it disintegrates all your atoms and then, simultaneously, lightning strikes just a few meters from where you stood, somehow happening to rearrange all the ...
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1answer
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Free will and consciousness [duplicate]
I am reading about free will and it seems to me that for everyone free will is associated with consciousness and this is why the Libet experiment has been so important in this debate.
I do not ...
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Are these arguments — in philosophy of mind?
Do any of these arguments [epiphanies] exist in the philosophy of mind?
Consciousness is a complex structure, and it is unlikely to be realizable in just any structure, else anything big enough would ...
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What is the utility of consciousness if free will is an illusion?
Introspectively speaking, it seems to me obvious that free will is illusion. Thoughts just emerge from background causes, and actions are just thoughts about actions that we have more thoughts about ...
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Why do we personally identify with our future selves, but not mental copies? [closed]
I'm sure this question has been asked somewhere before, but I don't know the name of this type of question, and so I've been unable to find it. Any pointer to literature written on the topic would be ...
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What is duality called when it refers to the separation between us and the external world?
Like many philosophical terms, dualism and duality are used differently by different people and in different circumstances. I am aware of Substance dualism (mind and body being separate things ...
