Consciousness and fundamental act

1. Consciousness is the fundamental fact of human existence, from the view point of persons examining their own experience. There are various aspects of consciouness, such as perception, mental imagery, thinking, memory and emotions. I believe that consiouness is a property of some lower animals and machines. An ant for an example has a conscious mind about staying in covered areas during the rain and to panic when something attacks it. This shows memory, perception and thinking which shows that it does have a conscious. Some machines have something similar to a conscious. A computer for example has a hard drive which is a lot like a “memory”, in which it stores something, and it has ram, which is basically information stored and ready to be used. If I were to open a web page browser and than open up a word document, I could instantly jump back to the browser because its stored on my hard drive, but loaded on my ram, which is a lot like how if we think about an old memory, such as grade school, and than wash our hands, the memory of grade school is still fresh in our mind, and we can go back and instantly load it up with less difficulty than the first time.

2. The mind-body problem asks what is the relationship between the mind(conscious) and the body( brain). The two major positions are dualism and materialism.

-Dualism holds that mind and body are made of different substances: the body is material but the mind is some immaterial soul stuff, and the mind interacts with the body to control human behavior. Out of body and near death experiences have also been offered in support of dualism, but alternative, naturalistic explanations of these experiences are available.

-Materialism is the view that mind and body are inseparable: mental events are produced by brain events. There are 4 types:

-Epiphhenomenalism is the view that conscious is a side effect of brain activity but it has no role in controlling behavior.

-Identity theory says that mental events are identical brain event. For each mental event, there is a corresponding brain event.

- Emergent interactionism- is the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon: it is produced by brain processes, but it has holistic properties of its own and it exerts downward control on brain processes.

-Functionalism is the view that the functional characteristics of mental processes is their critical feature, and it doesn’t make any difference whether the physical substrate is a brain or a computer.