Archives - Consciousness: Page 12
Author: amparo enriquez (Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:25 pm)
Title: consciousness
There is no specification for consciousness, there is no definition. Consciousness is not one thing which you either have or do not have. Even the dictionaries either refer to consciousness as just to being awake or develop definitions using word such as ‘all the thoughts contained in a person’s mind’ without defining ‘thought’ and ‘mind’.
That's because it's pretty self-explanatory. There is no need to complicate things that don't need to be discussed or dissected.
Consciousness
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like red, blue, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue”. … What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.
Qualia states and consciousness provide knowledge that we need in order to survive. It is important to find out how are we conscious of our experiences, the very essence of our lives.
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grow and be kind