One Answer

  1. It's the same as the difference between hard and software on your computer.

    Difficulties arise because of what has become fashionable to call qualia: how does the subjective experience of color and sound arise?… Example: blind people. With some lesions of the occipital part of the head, a person loses the ability to see, but at the same time retains the ability to respond to visual stimuli. It is surprising that such a person can avoid obstacles, but at the same time will not be able to describe the location of objects in the room.

    Along with some agnosia, such as cortical achromatopsia, these people are a living example of “philosophical zombies”: an imaginary creature that completely reproduces human behavior, but which is “dark inside”.

    Why, then, do human mental processes “not run in the dark,” as Chalmers asks?

    I think that the answer should be found in the following.

    1. As Ryle pointed out, awareness of something and awareness of that awareness are different things. For example, I see a tree and my brain responds somehow to this set of visual stimuli. Then, in one form or another, I pay attention to what is happening to me. Words can express this: “I was thinking that I saw a tree”, etc. Both the first and second thoughts “go in the dark”, the second thought “highlights” the first. Then I can think about a second thought, etc.

    In other words, being conscious means constantly changing your thoughts. After all, most of the time we just react, especially without thinking. What Kahneman called “fast” system 1 in the psyche works.

    This is consistent with the experiments of Libet, who found that awareness is always “late”: we are just observers of our own actions.

    1. However, these are not just thoughts in the proper sense of the word. Any sensation is reflexive. Ivanitsky and Sergin drew attention to the fact that the subjective experience of sensation occurs after the excitation of the sense organ passes along a “circular path” (in Ivanitsky – through the “ring of sensation”), so it is synthesized with memory data. Sergin calls this auto-identification, which results in the brain not just spreading arousal, but processing information. In philosophy, Dubrovsky developed a similar “informational” theory of consciousness. The synthesis of arousal of the sense organ with itself “presents data in explicit form”, i.e., from a simple stimulus that causes a reaction, the arousal becomes a signal that carries information.

Leave a Reply

Categories