Consciousness is something that is experienced on the daily basis, whether we are describing our awareness or perception of the physical world. David Chalmers provides his insight on consciousness by first identifying the easy problems presented by consciousness, then the hard problem that is puzzling and one that can’t be fully explained. The hard problem serves as crucial topic has sparked many philosophers to attempt to provide a solution for this problem. To Chalmers, the hard problem involves our experience. Ned Block responds to hard problem by providing his ideology of the epistemic gap that exists between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness.
The explanation of how the mind can discriminate towards stimuli, report information or even control behavior can easily be reduced with science. These are practical problems that can be solved and even be given a structure. Through the study of cognitive process, these problems can be solved systematically and mechanistically. However, what cannot be fully explained through cognitive process is our first person experience.
Our experience is subjective, therefore we each develop a different experience from each other. In the mind, activities can be seen when a person is experiencing a phenomena, yet the question remains as to how physical sensation and experience are connected. We are phenomenally conscious of our experience, and that experience is personal to us. Our mind enters a particular state when experiencing different emotions or sense pain. Our phenomenal consciousness called qualia accompanies our senses, and as a result we gain our first person experience.
Using the conceivability argument, Chalmers distinguishes between cognitive and subjective experienc...
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In conclusion, Block fails to give an answer to Chalmers’ hard problem. While both Block and Chalmers hold the idea that there is a separation between the physical access to the world and phenomenal consciousness, Block’s account fails to escape the invalidation of his argument with the example of Mary’s case through the knowledge argument. However, an insightful explanation of the access consciousness and how it work provides us a better understanding of cognitive properties, and certainly separates it from phenomenal consciousness. Though this essentially becomes categorized under the easy problem, and leaves the hard problem at bay.
Works Cited
Block, Ned. "Consciousness, Philosophical Issues about." The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Web.
Chalmers, David J. "Consciousness and Its Place in Nature." Research School of Social Sciences. Print.
When it first appeared on the scene in the philosophy of mind, the concept of supervenience was warmly embraced. Supervenience was thought to capture the idea of dependence without reduction and thus promised to provide a useful framework for discussions of mental causation, phenomenal experience, and, more generally, the relation between the mental and the physical. Since then a great deal has changed. Much careful work has been done to show that philosophical applications of supervenience do not, in fact, achieve what they were thought to. For example, Jaegwon Kim, whose name is closely associated with the concept, has shown convincingly that the standard formulations of supervenience in the philosophy of mind (weak, strong, and global) do not capture the idea of psychophysical dependence. (1) Many philosophers believed that supervenience could express a form of physicalism, but since the concept of dependence is a minimal req...
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Renner, T., Feldman, R., Majors, M., Morrissey, J., & Mae, L. (2011). States of Consciousness. Psychsmart (pp. 99-107). New York: McGraw-Hill.
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