Lecture 1

Consciousness - Lecture 1
B.A. Philosophy of Mind

Are there any philosophical reasons to suppose that our conscious experiences cannot be physical states of our bodies?

- What’s meant by a conscious experience?

I’m going to be focusing on one sense of ‘conscious’. Roughly: conscious experiences are mental states that it feels a certain way to be in. To use Nagel’s famous phrase, it’s like something to have a conscious experience.

Examples:
- pains
- sensory experiences
- dizzy spells
Contrast with:
- beliefs
- character traits


- What’s meant by a physical state of a body?

We’ll consider arguments that aim to show that conscious experiences must be fundamentally different from any paradigmatic state of any natural science. They would show that they’re of a different sort to physical, biological, neurological, computational…states of the body. For our purpose, a physical state of a body is a state of the same kind as the paradigm states discovered and described by (existing) natural sciences.


Type-Token distinction

Type
Is each type of conscious experience really a type of physical state?

Token
Is each token conscious experience really a token physical state of a persons body?