Annotation
Consciousness: Contemporary Perspectives
The existence and nature of phenomenal consciousness, the familiar property of some organisms, due to which there's something it's like (Nagel), subjectively, for an organism to be in various mental and physical states, is arguably among the remaining mysteries of science and philosophy. While for much of the 20th century, partly due to the influence of behaviorism, consciousness was (in the anglophone world) viewed as unworthy of serious scientific and philosophical attention, since at least the early 1990s, there has been a growing wave of systematic interdisciplinary focus on consciousness. In our course, we will investigate consciousness by trying to understand the main debates about this phenomenon in the analytic philosophy of mind. These will include the pressing debate about whether AI systems, such as the ChatGPT, could in principle be conscious; the debate about how widespread consciousness is in nature (here two extremes are illusionism, according to which consciousness doesn't exist at all, and panpsychism, according to which primitive consciousness is ubiquitous in nature); the debate about how consciousness and intentionality (the phenomenon of mental 'aboutness') relate; the debate about whether and how consciousness can be reductively explained in terms of brain-processes; and the debate about how consciousness can be viewed as a source of prudential and moral value. By the end of the course, its participants will have gained a good understanding of how rich and varied the contemporary debate about consciousness is, and will be able to critically reflect upon the main arguments and positions in these debates.