Ned Block On The Philosophical Topic Of Consciousness

After being taught three chapters of psychology I have encountered a wide range of information that has interested me, but perception has definitely interested me the most. It has interested me the most because ever since I was a kid I wondered why things closer to the car seemed to be moving faster than objects in the distance. Perception is the body's abilities to sense or detect something through its senses. We use perception everyday as it plays a large role in human life due to the fact that almost everything we encounter can be detected by our five senses.

Numerous factors determine when and why you feel tired, full of energy, and hungry. A person's state of consciousness and awareness varies throughout the day and depends on a person's activity, environment, and time clock.

In the most famous experiment, the invisible gorilla, showed how oblivious we can be. To start off, people were asked to count how many passes between the players in white shirts had, ignoring the players in the black shirts. For half of the participants, a giant gorilla walked onto the court without anyone noticing. A monstrous, distinct gorilla was gone unnoticed because it was not expected or focused on. This experiment proves to us as readers that our minds put us in situations

“Explain Singer's distinction between sentience and self-consciousness, and what the distinction implies for the moral status of animals. Do you believe non-human animals have the same or a different moral status to human animals? Explain the basis of your answer.”

In order to come to a decision concerning these two questions, several authors, among them Peter Carruthers, Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn, Nicholas Humphrey and Robert VanGulick, refer to an empirical phenomenon called "blindsight". (2)

Before Du Bois brought the term “double consciousness” to light, there was no way to describe such an unspoken phenomenon. In W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he introduces and describes how African Americans and their history have been shaped by the state of living in and wanting to overcome double consciousness. Du Bois perfectly describes double consciousness in African Americans as living behind a veil. The veil is bittersweet and produces a “second-sight” in America. From one perspective, the veil is a curse. On the contrast, it is what has made African Americans what they are today. In Du Bois’ own words, double consciousness is a “sense of always looking at one 's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one 's

In October of this year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) released a news article titled “Vegetative Patients Show Glimmers of Consciousness” (Mundasad, 2014). The article brought attention to the fact that while a patient may fit the medical description of being unconscious or in a vegetative state, research shows that some patients have brain activity similar to healthy adults, which suggest that the patients have mental awareness. The article referenced a study conducted by Chennu et al. (2014) comparing the structure and network differences between healthy adult brains to the brains of patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC).

Thesis: The mind-body problem arises because of the lack of evidence when looking for a specific explanation of the interaction of mental and physical states, and the origin and even existence of them.

In particular, in 1974, Ned Block created the China Brain thought experiment to criticize functionalism and variable realizability. Supposed that the entire population of China was ordered to simulate the working of a single brain, with each person acting as a neuron. To simulate neuron firing, each individual is handed a two-way radio and unique instructions on whom to contact depending on who called him or her. All of this would then be connected to a body, which would provide the sensory input and express the behavioral output for the China “Brain”. Block argues that since this brain contains sensory input, behavioral output and internal mental states, the China brain would be consciousness since it contains all of the elements of a functionalist description of the mind. However, Block thinks that it would be absurd for the China Brain to have any sort of experiences at all. It just doesn’t seem intuitively correct for this being to have consciousness or be able to experience qualia. Thus, Block argues that functionalism and variable realizability are

Consciousness, Thomas Nagel states, “is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.” Here he refers particularly to phenomenal consciousness, which Block defines as “perceptual experiences,” and Nagel describes as “something that it is to be.’ This experiential element appears to present a challenge to the physicalist assertion that all mental processes are explicable in terms of physical brain states, biochemical reactions and the laws of physics. Frank Jackson presents this argument in his 1982 thesis Epiphenomenal Qualia. Whilst Jackson’s argument occupies a seminal position in philosophy of mind, whether he adds anything new to knowledge of the nature of conscious experience, is debateable. Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to

The displacement of people from their place of origin to other places, areas or countries (immigration), has always existed. These shifts or changes of residence occur for a variety of reasons: search of food, settlement of new lands, horror of wars, political causes, ect. Today most immigration to the U.S is Mexican and other Central America countries, for needs work or family connections. According to MPI estimates, about 8.1 million (71 percent of the total unauthorized population) unauthorized immigrants in the 2008-12 period were born in Mexico and other Central America countries. About 1.5 million (13 percent) were from Asia; 817,000 (7 percent) from South America; 455,000 (4 percent) from Europe, Canada, or Oceania; 317,000 (3

The statements “I have a guilty conscious” and “My conscious eating me alive” are phrases that have been giving physical meaning by everyday people. What has not been given merit is the imaginable state of consciousness or ones conscious. Are the statements true or just simply a saying with no meaning?

The scientists did not, however, go over if recognition without awareness is associated with other perceptual patterns. Or if it could be applied to real life. Another critque was that no one mentioned how the divided attention group was distracted from the experiment.

Before reading Dr Branden’s “The Art of Living Consciously: The Power of Awareness to Transform Everyday Life”, I was ignorant of such a notion as living consciously. To say this book has been an eye opener for me would be an understatement. Through his use of layman terms, personal experiences from himself and clients and sentence completion exercises he weaves a web that captures our interest and retains it. For me, it was a source of untapped knowledge that my mind readily absorbed.

What if our society was different and the problem of human inequality within human society was solved? The world may be an equal place and we would not have as much conflict as we do now. The book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is about a man named Atticus Finch who is a lawyer and gets a case about a black man who that was accused of raping a white girl. This story takes place in a town called Maycomb County, Alabama during the 1930s where the country was plagued with the conflict of the Great Depression. Scout Finch, the main character and narrator, progressively grows older throughout the book and learns many things from her father, Atticus Finch and her brother Jem Finch. As Jem and Scout grow older, their viewpoints of the world changes throughout the book as they realize that society is not the same as they thought it once was. This story shows conflicts about racism, discrimination, prejudice and people’s social status. Many characters in the book such as Walter Cunningham, the Ewells and different families in Maycomb are profoundly affected by their status in their community. Their experiences are different from each other but they bespeak one thing -, the problem of human inequalities.