Lecture: Consciousness

• Awake (Not asleep) • Conscious of something (e.g., awareness of an oncoming car). We are aware of much less than we think • Conscious of self: Descartes “I think therefore I am” (the consciousness of the self and being aware that the self exists). Awareness of what is doing the action or having the experience

Some creature, or kinds of creature, have the ability to have mental-state consciousness

Whether some particular mental state is conscious or not

• As we get better at things, they become easier to do and faster, and we can think about other things while we do them (e.g., driving- It gets so fast that making yourself conscious of it will mess up your performance) • Perhaps babies are more conscious than we are, because they are habituated to nothing (kids are like “look it’s a dog” and we don’t even notice)

• Much of what the brain/mind does is not available to consciousness or does not require consciousness • It is like an iceberg- only a small part of the mind is available to reflect on or control • AI has the potential to do all kinds of stuff without consciousness. We just don’t know enough about it to know. • Another possibility – the rest of the brain is conscious but not available to “us” – we see that this is possible in the case of split-brain patients.

• When we perceive or decide or believe something without having a notion of how the idea came about • Can be caused by automatization • We have genetic and learned intuitions • We cannot tell the difference • When can we trust it? Often were wrong • Old brain processes are mostly impenetrable

• The qualities of consciousness- “what it is lke” to see, hear taste etc • Qualia’s for some things and not others • An example of a “quale” (plural qualia): What the colour red looks like, or what pain feels like. • There is a debate in philosophy regarding whether qualia are reducible to physical processes and states.

• Blindsight (ability to guess above chance aspects of visual stimuli in absence of perception) • Hemisphere neglect (damage to the brain causing deficit of awareness of one side of space) • Severed corpus callosum (split-brain or commisurotomy)

In philosophy, a zombie is a being that is like a human but has no conscious experience. is this possible? • Behavioural Zombie: behaves just like a human. E.g. Chinese room (can answer questions just like a person but isn’t conscious according to some) • Neurological Zombie: a behavioural zombie, the brain states of which are indistinguishable from a human • If zombies are possible, then perhaps some form of dualism is correct. • Dualism is the belief that there is some kind of mental substance that is not physical

• A class of consciousness theories that are functional (what is it for/what its purpose) • They claim that things are conscious when involved with abstract or high level thought (really abstract thoughts) • They have problems with Qualia

• Consciousness highlights certain parts of memory, that are viewable by other processes (everyone sees the blackboard) • Similar to a “blackboard architecture” in AI (like servants in a house they are all doing separate things but they communicate through one thing if need be).

• There are multiple processes in the mind that interpret things. These are like multiple drafts of the same story, such as picking up a glass of water. • They compete for control over other parts of your mind. • There is no set point at which something becomes conscious