IB Philosophy 1.3 Consciousness Key Definitions

John Searle's Chinese Room argument challenges the claim that computers can genuinely understand or think. A person in a room follows rules to manipulate Chinese symbols without understanding Chinese, showing that syntax (rule-following) is not sufficient for semantics (meaning).

Consciousness: the state of subjective awareness in which an individual experiences thoughts, sensations, and perceptions with a first-person, qualitative character: the 'what it is like' quality of mental life.

Dualism is the metaphysical thesis that mind and body are two fundamentally distinct kinds of substance, with mental states such as thoughts, beliefs, and sensations belonging to an immaterial domain that cannot be reduced to physical processes. The position, most influentially defended by Descartes, raises the persistent question of how two radically different substances can causally interact.

Functionalism is a theory of mind holding that mental states are defined by their causal roles rather than by the physical substrate that realises them. According to this theory, what makes something a mental state is the functional role it performs in mediating inputs, outputs, and other mental states, not whether it occurs in neurons or silicon.

Logical behaviourism is the philosophical view that statements about mental states can be translated without loss of meaning into statements about actual and potential behavioural dispositions, eliminating the need to posit hidden inner experiences.

Mind-Body Problem: the philosophical question of how mental states (thoughts, feelings, experiences) relate to physical states (brain processes, bodily movements), and whether mind and body are fundamentally the same kind of thing or two distinct substances.

Physicalism is the metaphysical position that everything that exists is physical or depends entirely on the physical. Applied to the mind-body problem, it holds that mental states are identical to, or wholly determined by, brain states, encompassing both the identity theory (mental states just are neural states) and eliminative materialism (folk psychology will eventually be replaced by neuroscience).

Problem of other minds: the philosophical question of whether and how we can know that other beings besides ourselves possess conscious experiences, given that we can only directly access our own mental states.

Substance dualism, associated with Descartes, is the view that mind and body are two fundamentally different kinds of substance. The mind (res cogitans) is non-physical and indivisible, while the body (res extensa) is physical and divisible.

Transcendental Ego: in Kant's philosophy, the structural condition of all experience, also called the transcendental unity of apperception: the formal 'I think' that must be able to accompany every representation, unifying experience into a single coherent perspective without being itself an observable object.