Thursday, March 26, 2009

PHIL 450 has the peculiar feel of...

...apple pie, hard work, cherry blossom, utter bewilderment, impending graduation, an AA session, PHIL 101 on steroids, etc.

Please be brief, but pay attention to nuance: surely, reading Dreyfus on Heidegger must feel different than reading Chalmers on the hard and easy problems of consciousness, or Siewert on Merleau-Ponty's theory of sensorimotor intentionality or Polger's rethinking of the evolution of consciousness, and still different than Garfield's endorsement of the Madhyamaka's commitment to a non-reflexive view of awareness or your professor's twice-weekly perorations on the inescapability of phenomenology.

7 comments:

  1. According to Chalmers an "easy" problem of consciousness is "a mental state may be conscious when its verbally reportable or internally accessible by access of internal state"(power point, Chalmers). Philosophy 450 has a particular feel of riding a roller coaster because sometimes the information is hard to grasp and other times not so hard. The class is pretty interesting may be it should be taught and offered more often?

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  2. One could see Phil 450 as similar to a consciousness operating as a version of Selfridge’s Pandemonium model, as laid out by Schneider in the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness p.316-17, with dozens of demons screaming at one another to be heard, and perhaps Dr. Coseru as representing the uppermost level of ‘decision’ demons. Or is our professor the long sought after homunculus - he does seem to have power over the contents of the projector operating in the center of our collective attention.
    Maybe it has the feel of an entity such is described in Dennett’s multiple draft theory (see Schneider, BCC 314), a key feature of which is the massively parallel nature of information processing. Given Dennett’s insistence on decentralizing agency, this theory may do well in explaining the semi-erratic manner in which we’ve shifted our center of gravity or spotlight of attention - Phil 450 as representative of the loosely-banded amalgamations we take to be our ‘selves.’ Also like a 'self,' Phil 450 certainly has a unique character.

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  3. Phil 450 has the peculiar feel of...

    sap oozing from the wound of a tree and catching us like mosquitos in its bitter syrup. Whatever information is preserved in the orb might shed future insight on consciousness problems (or help us open up a real-life Jurassic Park, anyone?)

    So much of what we describe as our everyday experience only produces a metaphor or analogy. What it is like to be anything is just a perpetuation of this. Is it language that prevents us from getting to the essence of experience? Or does the nature of our everyday experience remove us from that essence?

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  4. My own stream of thought, drifting between external and internal conversations and ideas.

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  5. I like Blake's version, but I can recall being out and about and telling people that the class is like my brain spawned a pair of testes and they get kicked around a few days a week.

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  6. it is like listening to music in another language, the idea's are beautiful, but at times impossible to understand. But you know there is some underlying order and rationality that produces the sounds.

    It's also like dreaming. You see things in very different perspectives, then when class ends you snap back into reality.

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  7. PHIL 450 is like undergoing retrograde amnesia. You forget everything you knew before and had to learn all over again. With this class, I've had to "forget" everything I've learned or thought I knew about consciousness before and start anew.

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