Consciousness

The raw 'what-it's-like' feel of an experience — the redness of red, the sting of pain.

There is something it is like to be you, from the inside — an inside feel a rock lacks.

You could know every brain fact about a bat and still not know what it's LIKE to be one — physics leaves out the feel.

Mary knows all the physics of colour but still learns something on first seeing red — so the feel is a fact physics left out.

Complete physical knowledge still leaves out the inside feel — Nagel and Jackson's shared move.

She gains a new ability (to recognise red), not a new fact — so there may be no real gap.

Outside facts (brain, wavelengths) never seem to add up to the first-person feel of the experience.

Third-person = the outside facts anyone can measure. First-person = the inside feel only the experiencer has.

Following rules to output Chinese without understanding it — processing symbols isn't understanding.

Indian view: awareness is the basic 'witness' behind all experience, not something built from matter.

Acting smart (behaviour) is not the same as feeling (experience) — the heart of the debate.

The 'aboutness' of the mind — every experience is OF or ABOUT something beyond itself.

No — it means aboutness: the mind is always directed at something, whether you plan it or not.

The careful study of experience exactly as it is lived, first-person — a world of meaning, not brain-states.

We live in a world (a face, a room, a task), not inside a skull full of nerve signals.

Behind every experience is a pure awareness — the witness — that observes all thoughts and feelings.

Pure awareness that watches all your thoughts and feelings without being any of them.

Consciousness is like an arrow — it always points at something. Advaita turns it round to the awareness that holds the arrow.

One studies what consciousness is OF (looks out); the other points to the awareness it appears IN (looks in) — Western + non-Western range.

Is a person one thing (a body) or two (a body plus a separate mind)?

You are two things: a physical body and a separate, non-physical mind (Descartes).

You are one thing: a physical body; the mind just IS the brain at work.

I can doubt I have a body but not that I'm thinking — so mind and body must be two different things.

If the mind is non-physical, how could it ever move the physical body? Dualism's deepest weakness.

It fits the feeling that thoughts aren't physical — you can't weigh a thought or scan a feeling directly.

It fits brain science: damage the brain and the mind changes, so mind and brain seem tightly linked.

It struggles to explain the inside feel of experience (Nagel's 'what it's like'; see 1.3.1).

How to justify believing anyone else is conscious, when all you see is behaviour, never their inner feel.

You have direct access to exactly one mind — your own. Everyone else you know only from the outside.

In me, behaviour goes with a feel; others are like me; so they probably feel too — they're conscious.

It generalises from ONE case (yourself) — a shaky basis for a rule we'd distrust anywhere else.

An imagined being that behaves exactly like a conscious person but has no inner feel at all.

If a zombie could behave the same with nothing inside, behaviour never guarantees an inner feel.

Doubting all other minds is impossible to actually live — seeing others as conscious may be built into how we perceive people.

The inner feel (qualia) is exactly what you can't observe in others — the private feel is the whole difficulty.

Our everyday, common-sense way of explaining people using beliefs, desires and feelings.

The view that our everyday mind-talk is a flawed old theory mature brain science may replace.

'Beliefs' and 'feelings' may go the way of 'evil spirits' — replaced by better science (germs).

Easy = how the brain sorts info, attends, wakes up. Hard = why any of it FEELS like something.

Explaining WHY there is any inner feel at all, rather than the brain just processing in the dark.

A perfect brain map gives WHAT happens, never WHY it feels like anything — the feel is left out.

Churchland: science will explain/replace the feel. Chalmers: the feel is a new kind of problem no brain map dissolves.

Exploring and weighing several views on the stimulus and reaching a reasoned conclusion — not describing one.