How do you Explain Consciousness? | David Chalmers
A Ted Talk is a film created from a presentation at the significant technology, entertainment, and design conference or one of its outpost events in the world. Expert speakers on such presentations may be cover fields like education, business, and philosophy, etc. this paper discusses a Ted Talk on philosophy. The name of the presenter David Chalmers. The topic of the presentation was, “How do you explain consciousness?” The date of the presentation was 14 Jul 2014. David Chalmers was a philosopher, working at New York University and the Australian National University. He majored in mind philosophy and other fields related to cognitive and philosophy science. Many people know him for his theories on Consciousness. However, his interests were on other issues in the cognitive science foundations, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. David Chalmers firmly positioned the hard problem of Consciousness on the philosophical draw. He challenged the materialistic conceptions of the mind, claiming that there exists an explanatory gap between the qualia of human beings. Besides, he championed the ideology of the extended mind, arguing that the mind of a human is never confined to the skull or skin, but it may plausibly extend beyond these two parts.
In the Ted Talk presentation, David Chalmers explores what he refers to as the hard problem of Consciousness. This concepts means the quest of people in explaining their subjective experiences. The philosophical question here is “how do you explain consciousness?” “How can the brain machinery (synapses and neurons) generate consciousness?” Consciousness shams the most mysterious challenges in the science of brain. Conscious experience is one thing that people know more intimately. However, nothing is harder to explain than the conscious experience. In the recent years, all forms of mental phenomena have produced scientific investigations. Nonetheless, Consciousness has resisted stubbornly. Many people have tried to explain this issue, but all the explanations do not achieve the target. Some of these explanations have made people suppose that this issue is intractable; thus, there is no better explanation.
Chalmers provides a summary of a problem he refers to as the hard problem of Consciousness. David Chalmers questions on why human beings possess a feeling of self, a regularly running movie with internal chatter and sensation. He brings out two concepts on the existence and nature of Consciousness (Chalmers 00:14-01:35). He says that Consciousness is a very crucial aspect of the existence of human life. He shares some ways in for people to think about the movie running in their heads.
Consciousness is the processing of information. Some of the most compelling theories in philosophy postulate that Consciousness is some feedback mechanism. The functioning of the brain is not centrally managed. The mind does not have a central command center that directs it to make decisions. Instead, the brain does information processing, and its decisions are in a parallel and decentralized fashion. The feedback mechanism that people call mechanism is what allows the brain to operate in a unified fashion. The term awareness means that the brain assembles information regarding its past and existing conditions. It is like a schema of information that gives the brain an opportunity to getting some rest to know what the body is contemplating. Although awareness does not control the operation of the brain, it can alter the brain’s decisions.
The topic of the presentation is relatable to our class discussion on how the brain operates. Based on what we have learned in this course, there exists a feedback mechanism in the brain. Even if the internal experience were the feedback mechanism, it would not satisfy people who are challenged by the hard problem. With Consciousness as an information model and a feedback mechanism, it cannot get humans to the intuitive sense of being themselves.
Work Cited
David, Chalmers. “How do you explain consciousness?” YouTube Uploaded by Ted, 14 Jul 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhRhtFFhNzQ