The Secret You

What does it mean to be you? How is it that the physical matter making up the many neurons in your brain somehow produce your subjective, conscious experience? Are your neurons themselves conscious? While we're at it, what exactly is consciousness? Where does your sense of self come from? Do you actually have a self? Can you be made to experience your self from outside your body? Can your consciousness be transferred to an inanimate object, or to someone else's body? If you are your consciousness somehow, do you get to consciously make your own choices, or are these determined by factors over which you have no conscious awareness and control?

Those are just some of the fascinating questions that Marcus du Sautoy explores in the following mind-bending documentary that gets right to the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience:

For more, check out the Brainspotting tag.

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The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

The rise of computers in the 20th century, and especially their exponentially increasing computational capacity and speed, has gotten many curious minds to speculate as to whether it is possible at some point to create computers that can think. Those who believe in things like the computational singularity, such as David Chalmers, think it's just a matter of time before we have to bow down to our new mechanized overlords.

Here is a Philosophy Bites interview with Chalmers on just such a question:

Others, like philosopher John Searle, however, think that, given everything we know about computation, it is impossible, even in principle, for computers ever to think, no matter their computational capacity. To prove this point, Searle came up with what has come to be regarded, by supporters and detractors alike, as a classic thought experiment: the Chinese room, which you get to learn about in the following 60 seconds.

For more on questions of mind, consciousness, personal identity, etc., visit the Brainspotting tag.

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Lecture 8 - Personal Identity

Science is great when it comes to discoveries and studies about the physical world. It requires lots of work and dedication, analytic skills to test various hypotheses, and a wealth of creativity to figure out how to conduct experiments to tell the merits of one explanation from those of another. For all of that, however, and without implying any denigration, it's also somewhat easy because you have the physical world itself to check your results against. If you think dropping heavy objects will float, the universe itself will let you know you're wrong...

Philosophical research, on the other hand, is more difficult because the object of our studies is concepts, and concepts will not smack you upside the head when you're wrong. Take one simple example for comparison: in science, you might study how something changes, and you can easily imagine the set of tools you might need to do the job. In philosophy, you'd study the nature of change itself. How on earth do you do that???

And the investigation of change is one of the philosophical questions par excellence, tracing its history all the way back to Heraclitus and Parmenides. In this final lecture, Professor Millican explores the question of personal identity: assuming that you do exist, what does it mean to say that your past self and your present self are the same person? How can it be the case that something that changes is still the same thing? That sounds like a logical contradiction, and yet pre-reflectively at least, this is what we all assume to be true.

Click here to see the course slides

And more awesome stuff on this and related questions, check out the Brainspotting tag.

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