Consciousness practice questions.

Mary knows every physical fact about colour vision while confined to a black-and-white room, and then sees red for the first time. What is the knowledge argument meant to establish?

• That physical science will eventually explain colour experience completely
• That she learns something new, so not every fact is a physical fact
• That colour experiences are identical with states of the visual cortex
• That she could not have learnt the physical facts without seeing colour

Answer: That she learns something new, so not every fact is a physical fact

Jackson's conclusion is that complete physical knowledge leaves something out, so physicalism is false; the ability reply answers that she gains a know-how rather than a fact. It is not a claim about how far future science can reach.

A view holds that conscious states are caused by brain processes but themselves cause nothing, so that a wince is produced by the neural event and not by the pain. What is the standard objection to it?

• It cannot explain how brain processes could produce experience at all
• It denies that mental states exist, contrary to everyday observation
• It requires two substances, and so inherits the interaction problem
• It makes our reports of our own experiences impossible to explain

Answer: It makes our reports of our own experiences impossible to explain

If pain causes nothing, it cannot cause the utterance 'that hurts', so the epiphenomenalist's own testimony about experience becomes inexplicable. The interaction problem belongs to substance dualism, and it is eliminativism, not epiphenomenalism, that denies the states exist.

A philosopher argues that a belief is always a belief about something and a fear always a fear of something, whereas no purely physical state is of or about anything. Which conclusion is the argument used to support?

• That directedness has no physical analogue, so the mental resists reduction
• That beliefs and fears are simply dispositions to behave in specified circumstances
• That the subjective character of experience escapes objective description
• That mental kinds can be realised by many different physical structures

Answer: That directedness has no physical analogue, so the mental resists reduction

The mark being appealed to here is intentionality rather than phenomenal character. Nagel's argument turns on what experience is like, and multiple realisability is an objection to type identity rather than to physicalism as such.

Ryle claims that the doctrine of the ghost in the machine rests on a category mistake. What exactly is his charge?

• That the mind has been located in the wrong part of the body
• That mental states have been wrongly supposed to be unobservable
• That mind and matter have been treated as members of one logical type
• That the doctrine cannot be tested by any observation we could conceivably make

Answer: That mind and matter have been treated as members of one logical type

The complaint is logical rather than empirical: 'mind' belongs to a different logical type from 'body', so asking whereabouts in the body the mind is repeats the error of the visitor who has seen the colleges and asks to be shown the university as well.

A philosopher argues that since experience cannot be got out of wholly non-experiential ingredients, and since the physical world is fundamental, some form of experience must already be present in its basic constituents. This position is

• panpsychism, which locates experiential properties at the fundamental level rather than positing a second substance
• substance dualism, since it holds that minds exist in addition to the physical world and interact with it
• eliminativism, since it denies that folk psychological categories such as belief pick out anything real
• logical behaviourism, since it analyses statements about experience into statements about dispositions to behave, and nothing more

Answer: panpsychism, which locates experiential properties at the fundamental level rather than positing a second substance

Panpsychism is a monism: there is one kind of stuff, and it is credited with an experiential aspect all the way down. Its standard problem is the combination problem — how many micro-experiences would compose one unified subject — not the interaction problem that troubles dualism.

On a higher-order thought theory of consciousness, what makes a mental state a conscious one is that

• the state is realised in a biological brain rather than in some other physical material
• the state has a distinctive feel that its subject cannot be mistaken about
• the state disposes its subject to report it accurately whenever the subject is asked about it
• the subject is in a further state that is about the first one, so the first is thought about

Answer: the subject is in a further state that is about the first one, so the first is thought about

The theory locates consciousness in a relation between states rather than in an intrinsic property of a single state, which is why it predicts unconscious mental states of exactly the same kind. Its standard objection is that a higher-order thought could misrepresent the first-order state, and it is unclear what the subject would then be conscious of.