CGSC 1001 Study Guide - Qualia, Mental Substance
Document Summary
We are aware of much less than we think: conscious of self. Automatization: as we get better at things, they become easier to do, and faster, and we think about other things while we do them. Example: driving: babies are more conscious than we are, because they are habituated to nothing. Consciousness is not the main event: artificial intelligence has the potential to do all kinds of stuff without consciousness, don"t know enough about it to know. Intuition: when we perceive or decide or believe something without having a notion of how the idea came about, can be caused by automatization, have genetic and learned intuitions, we cannot tell the difference. Qualia: the experience of consciousness, 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. Weird consciousness disorders: blindsight, hemisphere neglect, cut corpus callosum, thought alientation.