1.
Consciousness is the fundamental fact of human existence, from the view
point of persons examining their own experience. There are various aspects of
consciousness, such as perception, mental imagery, thinking, memory and emotions.
I believe that consciousness 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:
-Epiphenomenalism
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 interactions- 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 motherboard 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.