Consciousness - Hard Problem.

• “Experience is the most central and manifest aspect of our mental lives, and indeed is perhaps the key explanandum in the science of the mind. Because of this status as an explanandum, experience cannot be discarded like the vital spirit when a new theory comes along. Rather, it is the central fact that any theory of consciousness must explain. A theory that denies the phenomenon “solves” the problem by ducking the question.”
• If consciousness needs to explained by a scientific theory of mind, first question we should ask is WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

What is it like to be a bat? – Nagel

• An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. Nagel (1974)
• Consciousness is the subjective character of experience
• “There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience” Chalmers
• Esoteric description of consciousness - “If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.” Louis Armstrong

• Conscious Experience refers to –
o the felt quality of redness
o the experience of dark and light
o the quality of depth in a visual field
o the sound of a clarinet
o the smell of mothballs.
o the feeling of pain
o the felt quality of sadness.

• What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them.
• Consciousness is not the red seen in the world, it is not the wavelength, it is not the capacity to detect or discriminate red
• It is the first person qualitative experience of feeling red

Nagel -

• He distinguished between objective fact and subjective fact in his paper
• Nagel claimed that there are a whole load of facts about bats, which we can spell out objectively from a third person perspective and are good in terms of our scientific theories.
• In addition to objective facts about the bat there are also subjective facts and those facts are no less factual
• They are objective in the sense that they really...