So I sat down and got through the 30 pages of the introductory chapter today. I will write down a summary.He explains how the study of consciousness is something extremely new that essentially took off in the 90s and had been very academically stigmatized before that point.He gives definitions of the various phenomenological positions on consciousness>physicalism/materialism - consciousness is a physical process>idealism - consciousness is the source of reality rather than the other way around >dualism - conscious experience is immaterial and exists on a separate field altogether >panpsychism - consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and exists everywhere (I don't get what makes this that distinct from regular dualism desu)>mysterialism - consciousness like many other asects of reality is something fundamentally incomprehensible to human logic>functionalism - not a distinct category but more a subset of psyhicalism that assumes conscious experience is tied to the processing of information rather than the brain itself (so essentially people that think consciousness can be simulated) - he is skeptic of this despite being a physicalist himself He talks about how P-zombies are a retarded non-argument.He explains the easy and hard problems of consciousness>easy problem - describing the various physical processes that give rise to consciousness >hard problem - explaining how consciousness can arise from physical processes in the first placeAnd he is of the opinion that the hard problem will be chipped piece by piece by solving the easy problem, like how the property of being "alive" was able to be explained very clearly by chemistry and biology and outdated theories like vitalism vanished from the scientific field over the 19th and 20th century.He explains the neural correlate methodology (NCC) with which the data pulled by fMRIs and EEGs can be mapped to specific subjective experiences thus allowing study.
funny he ignores how consciousness is semantic
>>25173147I think he defines being conscious as experiencing anything whatsoever and views it as separate from possessing a sense of self.
