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The famous version of this is Twin Earth thought experiment, which explores two worlds which are identical, except one has no H2O. The H2O in this world is instead replaced with a substance XYZ. Denizens of both worlds call their substance "water." This thought experiment has countless arguments made on both sides.
Your particular argument presupposes ...
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What matters is not the fact that the experience is subjective per se, what matters is that there is no way to share the quality or quale of that subjective experience with anybody else.
If you see a shade of red, how do you know how others experience it? Some people have different chemoreceptors for red and will experience it as different shades. Others are ...
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The concepts on your question are largely biased. Physics describes, does not explain. See below.
Since it's the job of physics to explain everything in the universe (even indirectly)
False. The goal of physics is to find quantitative laws that describe nature. Explanations are the task of philosophy. Newton never tried to explain gravity, he explicitely ...
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tl;dr- Depends on a person's level of mental development. The truth's crazy complicated, but we go through stages of understanding.
Stage 1: Realism.
The simplest way to understand reality is through the lens of realism. It's the mental model children adopt upon acquiring object permanence.
The gist is that there's one, objective reality that we all ...
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This illustrates how removed the concept of 'philosophical zombie' is from reality. The mirror image does not have a brain; it is a trick of light. It is no more a 'zombie' than a photo, a drawing, or a terse sentence in a bad novel.
More specifically; the concept of a philosophical zombie is that there can exist something in principle indistinguishable ...
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As a biologist working in neuroscience with many physicists, I used to get this question a lot. Many physicists seem to believe that prime principles + computational power = infinite explanatory power up to chemistry, biology, sociology and on.
The best analogy I have been able to come up with is that physics is to biology as typography is to literature: it ...
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Within those who stipulate there is a God, I've seen 2 major approaches to this question:
1) Logic is subservient to God. If God, or one of his representatives says something or behaves a certain way, then it becomes de facto logical, even if it does not follow from normal rules of logic. (My opinion, for what it's worth, is this often leads to "logic" ...
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Q: … He phrased the hard problem as “why objective, mechanical processing can give rise to subjective experiences.” I find it difficult to think of this as hard. …
... Then, it seems like this task manager is “conscious”. Only the task manager itself is aware of the programs ran, and others don’t see the program status. This, the awareness is “subjective”.
...
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In the proposition IX, part III of Ethics, Spinoza operates the following reversal of concepts: it is not because we judge that something is good that we desire that thing, but it is because we desire it that we judge it to be good.
In Spinoza's philosophy, our judgement as well as our actions are entirely determined, based on what information and experience ...
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My friend, you stopped where things get really interesting.
The result of the process you described is a human consciousness whose substratum is a computer program instead of a bodily organ. Much more importantly, you did the transformation in a way that preserved what I call the continuity of consciousness.
Let's assume that this computer program is ...
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I will answer this question with Kant's own words taken from (my personal favorite of his works) The Critique of the Power of Judgment. Specifically, I will be citing the Cambridge University Press 2nd Edition, edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Please decide for yourself what you think Kant would think of Darwinian ...
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James was not the first one to realize that central "I" or "consciousness" as an entity is not in any way helpful in explaining the will, or any other mental faculties. It is just a homunculus in the head that moves all the problems along, with no explanatory power, and potential for infinite regress: what is the central "I" of the central "I"? The only ...
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Will computers ever have consciousness?
Depends on who you ask. 3 possible responses:
Consciousness and the mind are non physical phenomena, and computers are physical systems so, no, computers can't be conscious since they lack the non-physical component. The idea that consciousness is non-physical is called (mind-body) Dualism.
Consciousness is a ...
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Approach 1 - (4) is false.
One line of reasoning has already been presented.
(4). The person in the mirror looks and behaves like a conscious, qualia possessing human: you.
This is false, because the person in the mirror simply reflects the behavior of something else, which is not the behavior of a conscious human, but that of a reflection.
Approach 2 -...
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Mind continuous with environment
There is a considerable body of literature on 'the extended mind'. David Chalmers and Andy Clark are major names here. The basic idea is that 'the mind "extends" into the environment in cases in which a human organism and the environment become cognitively coupled systems' (Erik Myin, 'Unbounding the Mind', ' The Extended ...
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This question raises a lot of interesting problems about the continuity of self and consciousness, but I think it can be cut down with a very pragmatic, down to earth approach.
Quite simply, the idea that the person we will be tomorrow is a different individual than the present us is contradicted by the fact that, so far in our life, we have the continuous ...
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Arthur Eddington's "The Nature of the Physical World" as reprinted and edited in "Quantum Physics and Ultimate Reality; Mystical Writings of Great Physicists" editor Michael Green
and
"What is Life?: with 'Mind and Matter'" by Erwin Schroedinger
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Under a strict, philosophical, reading of the quote, Dr. Tyson isn't making much sense; interpreting "science" as "the methodology of science" or "the social endeavor of science" this sentence is a non-sequitur. Even if you are inclined to cut him some slack and interpret science more along the lines of "the findings that science produces", then Dr. Tyson ...
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Based on the little information in the freely accessible part of the article, it looks like the author is referring to bundle theories of the self. The illusion in question isn't that we are conscious at all, as you pointed it out, for there to be illusion there has to be consciousness in the first place. Instead what is illusory is that there must be a ...
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"19th century philosophers are not necessary to understand contemporary debates" is largely true because modern debates regurgitate ideas and arguments explored at length since Kant. Here is an example of Searle arguably replaying an argument already discussed by Kant, see What are the problems with the argument for the mind-body dualism from immateriality ...
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The problem with the idea that consciousness lasts forever because information is preserved is in the fact that information is being used in two different senses in your question. The differences lie in these two descriptions of the note example you gave. One sense is the physical description of information.
The amount of information contained within a ...
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Time, for Bergson, is not different from duration. On the contrary, Bergson's view is that time is duration.
Explanation: Bergson uses the word "time" like all of us do. That is, he uses the word "time" to capture the common, pre- theoretical and uncontroversial aspects of time. On the other hand, Bergson uses the word "duration" in a special, theoretical, ...
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There is a kind of epistemological ‘duality’ to our thinking about consciousness.
In 'The Puzzle of Conscious Experience', the philosopher David Chalmers describes the 'Easy Problem of Consciousness' as the question of how a cognitive agent is able to perceive things and be aware of things. This would also include awareness of self: self-awareness. This '...
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Question: “Can science account for consciousness?”
I don’t think everyone currently agrees on the answer, but personally, I believe it can. The future will tell.
Question: “I'm just interested what the scientific explanation is if there is one?”
You’re asking for the scientific explanation; I think I can give some. The followings are current scientific ...
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There are two things written by Kant that pretty much answer your question:
First, the famous quote “Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens above and the moral universe within” seems to indicate that Kant would put the beauty of the Universe on par with the beauty of the "unity of human consciousness".
Second, Kant was the first philosopher who ...
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Its the Turing Test put into first-person narrative form of a philosophical zombie (a golem would do just as well, and perhaps better, as it figured in the pre-history of imaginative literature and thinking about robotics). It was Chalmers that popularised this to argue that Physicalism is false - ie Consciousness is not Physical, as the SEP describes.
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