The Christian Vanguard

Chalmers suggestion for addressing the hard problem is to posit that consciousness is a fundamental feature or law such as space, time, mass, and change in that it is not reducible or explained in terms of more basic entities. So it will have its own rules and regulations, like the other basic or fundamental features of our world do. He wants to call them psychophysical laws. This wouldn’t be without precedent for Chalmers as he notes that electromagnetic phenomena couldn’t be explained by previously known physical features and laws, and so they had to posit electromagnetic charge as a new basic feature of the world since nothing in the physical world could explain it. Likewise with consciousness, since there seems to be no already existing theories which encompasses it, then something new is required.

The easy problem of consciousness is figuring out how we receive information and how we respond. Some questions that fall under the easy problem are “How does the brain integrate information?” and “How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal state?” This is not to say that figuring out the answers to these questions are easy to do or are trivial, but that they are easy compared to the hard problem. And the hard problem asks how do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience, or consciousness, at all? How experience works is the easy problem and why we have experience at all is the hard problem. One needs to figure out how to cover that explanatory gap.

A few days ago, I wrote about multiple streams of consciousness and split brains . I gave reasons to think it wasn't the same that there were multiple streams of consciousness, but further into my reading from Richard Swinburne, he presents this thought experiment which I thought was interesting, but he gets it from someone else. Suppose prior to your splitting of the brain, a mad scientist tells you that after your operation, in which he will put one half of our brain into one body and the other half into another body, he will torture one and set the other free with a million dollars. He then gives you the option of who to torture and who to let go. So the question here is, does it matter who you chose? If bundle theory is correct, then it wouldn't matter, because neither would be true. But that doesn't seem to be true. It does seem that it would matter who is tortured and who isn't, because you have a sense that you would be one of them, and you don't want to be...

In my Metaphysics textbook, there is an article by David Parfit describing split brain experiments and its implications for the philosophy of mind. So, the experiments go something like this. You take a brain and you split it into the two hemispheres. Each part of the brain controls a different part of the body. Next, the patient is shown a card that is half blue and half red. Now, say the right eye is focused on the red, and the left eye is focused on the blue. Then ask the patient which color he sees, and his right arm will write red, and his left arm will write blue, but the patient cannot comprehend both at the same time. He thinks he only sees blue and he also thinks he only sees red. He cannot conjoin the two beliefs.  What Parfit says this proves is that our conscious is not a unified thing. Consciousness is supposed to  unify all beliefs, and this unified consciousness is what we call the self. But since we know that a single patient can have two streams of consci...