Az "Ismeretelméleti műhely-szeminárium" következő rendezvénye 2017. február 28-án 13.30-tól a 1097 Budapest, Tóth Kálmán utca 4. VII. emeletén a Filozófiai Intézetben lesz
Vitaindítót Kondor Zsuzsanna tart Illúzió és intuíció a tudat-kutatásokban címmel.
Absztrakt:
The mind-brain split seems unavoidable in consciousness studies – at least because of the associated vocabulary. In the recent literature, we can often encounter expressions such as “mental states”, “mental events”, “state of mind”, etc., even when the authors are explicitly committed to materialism and consider mental life as being an illusion among other beliefs. Nonetheless, establishing a relation between the mind and brain seems to be a challenging enterprise. There have been numerous attempts: some devoted to the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995); some are efforts to relate the two seemingly radically different phenomena (Humphrey 2000, 2008a); some emphasize the hopelessness of the enterprise because there is no common ground for discussing their relation (Baars 2003, Harnad 2000); and some emphasize the only existent part of the pairing is the brain, and all that is left is rather an illusion (Frith 2007, Dennett 2005) – just to name a few often-expressed views. The fact that at varying points in the discussions of the problem we can see both divergences and convergences in the proponents’ arguments makes the scene even more colourful.
In the present paper I will not try to argue either for the truth of materialism nor a kind of dualism, but rather focus on some convictions which are seemingly consistent but entail strange and ambiguous consequences. I will attempt to illuminate the tension between the effort to abandon intuition, as suggested by Dennett, and the hard work of unconscious processing of the brain that sometimes seems to be the basis of intuition. As an extension of this curious situation, I will cast a glance at the often discussed phenomenon, or illusion, of qualia, which expresses the uniqueness and ineffable character of the first person point of view. I will follow up Humphrey’s effort to reconcile mind and brain and compare it with a proposal which is less demanding regarding materialism versus dualism issues and suggests a point of departure that similarly anchors qualia in hard-wired experiences, but proposes extending the scope of consciousness studies beyond the skull.
