journal entry ppt

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Conscious Experiences

Why can other people not see my conscious experiences or measure them

Consciousness is not like any other scientific subject in any significant way. Among other things, this is because consciousness cannot be observed directly. Prying their head makes it impossible to know another person's experiences, thoughts, or feelings. We would not be able to postulate awareness if we only used third-person observations. The scientific community is accustomed to working with the inexplicable. The thing that has to be explained cannot be seen in the unique situation of consciousness. Being conscious is when we can experience it directly and know it to be real without influencing other things.

Could a robot feel conscious experiences?

Even if a robot is a perfect copy of a human in every way, it will not be able to share in the human's conscious experiences. It's not that we can read other people's minds (we can't), but rather, because we find other individuals to be like ourselves, we attribute conscious behavior to them. Thinking of our awareness gives us a sense o what we interpret when we say something. Feelings and emotions are rooted in the two fundamental stances a living thing can take: either an attraction to or a rejection of a stimulus. In human beings, feelings of anticipation underlying feelings of excitement and terror or pleasure and pain are represented. For a robot to be conscious, its body would need to be similar to those of sentient beings in that it would need to generate emotional responses and cognitive processing.

What are conscious experiences?

According to Chalmers, there is a vast array of distinct types of experience (Chalmers, 182). A conscious experience is a mental event, such as the perception of a state of a thought, a moment in time, mind sensory data, or a feeling perceived by the individual having the experience. In its most basic form, consciousness is your awareness of who you are and where you are in the world. Your current state of consciousness is entirely personal. Something is a part of your awareness if you can give it a name and explain it to someone else. Your awareness is a dynamic construct that is constantly changing.

Intention and Imagination

The intent might be defined as merely a mental process, and The phrases "aim" and "objective" are essentially synonymous with "intention" in the popular and fact-based scientific and economic definitions of the word. Imagination is the tug from the extra-future, whereas intuition is the messenger from the intra-past. The intent is the glue that holds together one's intuitive understanding and creative visualization concerning other people in the here and now. Intention lies between one's imaginative becoming and one's authentic intuitive being. If one is ready to put in the necessary time and effort, one can conjure an image in one's mind of what was intuited or heard. Humans have never made anything that didn't originally exist in their imaginations. 

Conscious experiences of the mind as a kind of computer or Turing- Machine

The primary idea behind the computational theory of mind is that the brain operates similarly to a computer. Another way to state it is chain of modules, the last of which is awareness, which gathers and processes data from the environment to generate a desired mental state or behavioral outcome. A certain self-awareness comes with describing one's brain as a Turing machine or computer (Chalmers, 186). At other times, though, it may seem as though there is something more fundamental to conscious experience than all these particular aspects put together; a kind of background hum, for instance, is there even when the other components are not. This phenomenology of the self is profound and elusive so that it can be misunderstood as an illusion.

References

Chalmers, David, J. "A catalog of conscious experiences." in Keith Frankish, ed., consciousness. 2nd ed. Open University (2010), pp. 182-7.