PHIL 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Sentience, Reductionism, Physicalism
Document Summary
Wakefulness: being awake and capable of attending to something. Introspection: the internal accessibility of one"s mental states. Phenomenal consciousness: the first-person experience- what it"s like to be: nagel means to indicate consciousness in the sense of 6. Why is consciousness a problem? we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future (436) If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible.
