{"id":5140,"date":"2016-09-11T11:23:50","date_gmt":"2016-09-11T16:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=5140"},"modified":"2016-09-11T11:23:50","modified_gmt":"2016-09-11T16:23:50","slug":"consciousness-ctd-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/09\/11\/consciousness-ctd-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Consciousness, Ctd"},"content":{"rendered":"

NewScientist<\/strong><\/em>‘s Anil Ananthaswamy covers<\/a> the broad topic of consciousness (3 September 2016, paywall). This caught my eye:<\/p>\n

But how [does the brain give rise to consciousness]? That is a raging debate. At its heart is what philosopher David Chalmers at New York University termed the \u201chard problem\u201d of consciousness: how can physical networks of neurons produce experiences that appear to fall outside the material world? As Thomas Nagel, also at New York University, put it in the 1970s: you could know every detail of the physical workings of a bat\u2019s brain, but still not know what it is like to be a bat.<\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, those trying to solve the hard problem fall into two camps, according to psychologist and philosopher Nicholas Humphrey. There are those who think that consciousness is something real and those who say it\u2019s a mirage, and so dismiss the problem entirely. …<\/p>\n

Those [in the latter camp] say the hard problem creates one where there is none. \u201cIt\u2019s an unsolvable mystery, because the problem is ill posed,\u201d says neuroscientist Michael Graziano of Princeton University. He argues that consciousness is nothing but a trick of the mind. What\u2019s more, the brain doesn\u2019t just create the illusion of consciousness but also the feeling that there is a separate, immaterial \u201cI\u201d having a conscious experience. In other words: there is no need to explain strange interactions between material and immaterial things because the immaterial things don\u2019t really exist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From my limited perspective, I begin to wonder if the terms of the debate are ill-defined. I wonder if the question, What attributes typify consciousness<\/em>, would elicit very different answers from the two camps?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NewScientist‘s Anil Ananthaswamy covers the broad topic of consciousness (3 September 2016, paywall). This caught my eye: But how [does the brain give rise to consciousness]? That is a raging debate. At its heart is what philosopher David Chalmers at New York University termed the \u201chard problem\u201d of consciousness: how \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5146,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140\/revisions\/5146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}