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Consciousness Studies Consciousness Studies Wikibooks.org March 19, 2013 On the 28th of April 2012 the contents of the English as well as German Wikibooks and Wikipedia projects were licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. An URI to this license is given in the list of figures on page 321. If this document is a derived work from the contents of one of these projects and the content was still licensed by the project under this license at the time of derivation this document has to be licensed under the same, a similar or a compatible license, as stated in section 4b of the license. The list of contributors is included in chapter Contributors on page 319. The licenses GPL, LGPL and GFDL are included in chapter Licenses on page 329, since this book and/or parts of it may or may not be licensed under one or more of these licenses, and thus require inclusion of these licenses. The licenses of the figures are given in the list of figures on page 321. 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Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 A note on Naive Realism . 3 1.2 Intended audience and how to read this book . 6 2 Historical Ideas 9 2.1 Aristotle. (c.350 BC). On the Soul. 9 2.2 Galen . 14 2.3 Homer,(c.800-900 BC)The Iliad and Odyssey . 14 2.4 Plato (427-347BC) . 16 2.5 Parmenides c. 480BC On Nature . 22 2.6 Siddhartha Gautama c.500BC Buddhist Texts . 22 2.7 Rene Descartes (1596-1650) . 24 2.8 John Locke (1632-1704) . 32 2.9 David Hume (1711-1776) . 37 2.10 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) . 42 2.11 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) . 46 2.12 George Berkeley (1685 - 1753) . 49 2.13 Thomas Reid (1710-1796) . 54 2.14 References . 56 2.15 Nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy of consciousness . 57 2.16 ER Clay . 57 2.17 Alfred North Whitehead . 58 2.18 Edmund Husserl . 60 2.19 Gilbert Ryle 1900-1976 . 62 2.20 Daniel Clement Dennett (1942 -) . 65 2.21 Ned Block (1942- ) . 70 2.22 Francis Crick (1916 - 2004) . 75 2.23 David J Chalmers . 77 2.24 Thomas Nagel . 81 3 Defining the Problem 83 3.1 The definition and description of phenomenal consciousness . 83 4 The Philosophy of Consciousness 97 4.1 The conflict - supervenience and the location of the contents of phenomenal consciousness . 97 4.2 The problem of regression . 99 4.3 The Subject-Object paradox . 101 4.4 The homunculus fallacy in philosophy of mind . 102 4.5 Berkeley's "passive ideas" . 103 III Contents 4.6 More on the conflict . 104 4.7 References . 104 4.8 Phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness . 106 4.9 Direct Realism and Direct Perception . 110 4.10 Indirect Realism . 119 4.11 Dualism . 123 4.12 Idealism . 128 4.13 Panpsychism . 129 4.14 References . 129 4.15 The philosophical problem of phenomenal consciousness . 132 4.16 Epiphenomenalism and the problem of change . 133 4.17 The problem of time . 134 4.18 Relationalism, Substantivalism, the Hole Argument and General Covariance 146 4.19 Quantum theory and time . 149 4.20 Time and conscious experience . 151 4.21 The problems of space, qualia, machine and digital consciousness . 152 4.22 Notes and References . 152 4.23 The problem of space . 152 4.24 The problem of qualia . 156 4.25 Elementary Information and Information Systems Theory . 160 4.26 Classification, signs, sense, relations, supervenience etc. 165 4.27 The construction of filters: Bayesian and Neural Network models . 172 4.28 Qualia and Information . 172 4.29 The problem of machine and digital consciousness . 180 4.30 Notes and References . 186 4.31 The Measurement Problem . 191 4.32 The quantum probability problem . 192 4.33 The preferred basis problem . 192 4.34 Further reading and references . 194 5 The Neuroscience of Consciousness 197 5.1 Introduction . 197 5.2 Neuroanatomy . 198 5.3 Topological mapping and cortical columns . 208 6 The neurophysiology of sensation and perception 211 6.1 Vision . 211 7 The Cortex and Thalamus 231 7.1 The cortex and consciousness . 231 7.2 The delay before consciousness of "voluntary"actions . 235 7.3 Perception, Imagination, Memory and Dreams . 237 7.4 Blindsight . 242 7.5 The Role of the Thalamus . 243 7.6 General Anaesthesia and the Thalamus . 246 7.7 The function of consciousness . 246 IV Contents 8 Rivalries, Synchronisation and Workspaces 249 8.1 Perceptual "filling in" . 249 8.2 Binocular Rivalry, Pattern Rivalry and Binocular Fusion . 251 8.3 Synchronisation of Neural Processes . 254 8.4 EEG and synchronisation . 257 8.5 Event related potentials . 259 8.6 The integration delay . 260 8.7 Global Workspace Theory . 261 8.8 The "cognitive map"and the neural basis of perceptual space . 263 8.9 Bibliography . 267 8.10 References . 267 9 Behaviourism and Consciousness 279 10 Models of Access Consciousness 281 10.1 Neural networks . 281 10.2 Quantum information processing . 281 11 Contemporary Explanations of Consciousness 283 11.1 Introduction . 283 11.2 Identity theory of mind . 283 11.3 Functionalism . 283 11.4 Dualism . 284 11.5 Intentionalism . 285 11.6 Higher order thought . 285 11.7 Eliminativism . 285 11.8 Mysterianism . 286 11.9 Idealism and panpsychism . 287 12 Scientific Theories of Consciousness 289 12.1 Theories of Consciousness . 289 12.2 Table of theories . 290 13 Bps model 293 14 The Ontology of Physics 295 14.1 Dynamics: Velocities in a Four Dimensional Universe . 295 14.2 Electricity and Magnetism in a 4D Universe . 299 15 The Origin of the Metric Tensor 303 15.1 Gauss's Analysis of Curved Surfaces - The Origin of the Metric Tensor . 303 15.2 Full analysis of the constants in Gauss' analysis . 311 16 Action, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics 313 16.1 More on the origins of physics . 313 16.2 Action . ..
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