Greetings all, This coming Monday, August 4, in the philosophy common room at 1.00 -2.30, John August will talk to us all about consciousness.
I won't be there, but David BM has kindly agreed to chair the session. Abstract: David Chalmers first defined the "easy problem" as the search for the neural correlates of consciousness. I'll review some of the insights which are mostly derived from empirical research, including how our consciousness (or whatever we might label as "goes on") is in fact a cooperation between disparate modules. Equally, we can learn a lot from brain injuries and neurological deficits. There are many interesting aspects to review; an important one is the "synfire theory", which is the most tantalising approach for bridging the gap between firing neurons and memory in the brain. I'll also consider the "hard problem", the question of why consciousness awareness exists at all, and why the information processing does not go on "in the dark". As a part of this review, I'll consider some contemporary issues such as Searle's Chinese Room, the Cartesian Theatre, the worth of introspection, zombies and zimboes. My explanation for consciousness draws from Dennett's "Zimbo" approach - that for a sufficiently complicated information processing machine, able to analyse its own experience, the experience of consciousness will naturally arise. Dr. Kristie Miller Australian Research Council Post-doctoral Fellow School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and The Centre for Time The University of Sydney Sydney, Australia Room 411, A18 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph: (work) 02 9036 9663 Ph: (mobile) 0432 275 286 http://homepage.mac.com/centre.for.time/KristieMiller/Kristie/Home%20Page.html _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list [email protected] List Info: http://lists.arts.usyd.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/sydphil NEW LIST ARCHIVE: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
