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.
I agree more with the identity theory, because I believe that the mind and body
are much like a computer. A computer needs a CPU and a motherboard. The CPU is
like the mind and the motherboard is like the brain. The CPU is what
consciously processes and directs all the information and at what speed, and
the moterboard is basically the channels it goes through. No matter what the CPU
does, its going to have to work with the motherboard and channel the
information somewhere. I believe this one over the other ones because in
dualism, its more on “faith” instead of facts.