Week and lecture topic 

Description

PART ONE

CONSCIOUSNESS

1. Introduction

A general introduction to the topic of Consciousness and Selves. Covering a brief history of Western philosophical and scientific investigations of the topic. Providing a precis of the rest of the course and course assessments and details. No Tutorial this week

2. The Hard Problem

We begin our exploration of consciousness by examining some of the central problems: What is qualia? What is the relationship of consciousness and the physical body? Why does the physical configuration of our brains and mechanisms performing cognitive functions give rise to conscious experience? Can conscious experience be accounted for by a physicalist description of the universe? Or do we need a revision to cognitive science and our metaphysical conception of the world?

3. The Science of Consciousness  

Having examined some of the core problems of consciousness we turn this week to surveying the recent cognitive science and neuroscientific investigations and models of consciousness. We consider the core questions for how and whether a science of consciousness is possible. In particular, the search for neural correlates of consciousness, what these are, and what these tell us about the nature of consciousness. This will push forward the debates from week 2 on whether we can have a reductive physicalist account of consciousness articulated in terms of a mechanistic explanation.

4. Predictive Processing and the Self

Cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy of mind have long been beset by questions of theoretical unity. A very recent approach to the structure of the mind is predictive processing. This is the claim that our mind-brains are predictive engines: rather than our minds passively waiting for incoming stimuli they actively try to predict what the incoming sense stimuli will be. Our brains then assess the predictive error between the incoming stimuli and the prediction. This is a very hot topic in both philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. Some philosophers have claimed that it is a new grand unified theory of the mind (GUT). This is especially important given that there are wide ranging debates about how all the various differing sciences of the mind come together, and whether they can be unified into a single framework. Predictive processing accounts have been applied to a range of philosophical and psychological topics. Recently, philosophers and scientists have proposed that predictive processing can also give an account of the nature of consciousness and tackle the various philosophical and scientific problems here.

5. The Unconscious Mind

How much of our mind is beyond conscious experience? What is the nature of the unconscious? This week we survey a range of philosophical and scientific approaches to the unconscious. We will cover and compare psychodynamic and cognitive approaches to the unconscious. In particular, we will look at the topics of mind-wandering and sleep as phenomena that raise serious questions about a clear-cut distinction between wakefulness and consciousness. And as case studies demonstrating the productive ways in which philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive neuroscience come together.

PART TWO

SELVES

6. Theories of the Self

Questions on consciousness are intimately tied to questions on the self; it seems there needs to be a self that is having the conscious experience. In the second part of the course, we turn to the nature of the self and examine its metaphysical and practical implications. We begin with the classical approaches and compare them to modern accounts which place an emphasis on the importance of narratives. We’ll look whether there is a continuous unitary self that is the subject of conscious experience, whether the self is best characterised by psychological or bodily continuity, or whether the self is a narrative construction. We’ll also consider the wider philosophical, scientific, and ethical implications of these views.

7. Distributed and Embodied Selves

A modern line of research in cognitive science and philosophy stresses the importance of how minds are embodied and embedded in the world. In this week we examine the arguments and evidence that supports the claim that selves are distributed across brain, body, and world. The possibility that the self is not only embodied but also partially constituted by parts of the world raises a range of ethical questions about the status of these external features. For example, if one can argue that the self can be partially constituted by an external object, such as a smartphone, then what is the moral status of any interference on a person's smartphone?

Mid Semester Break (Take a well-earned break)

8. Disruption of the Self

Cases of neuropathology and psychiatric conditions have often been used in the history of psychology to inform us about the mechanistic organisation of the mind and the brain. But what do these disruptions tell us about the nature of the self? In this week, we will look at certain disorders of the mind, such as schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, to explore what they can reveal about the elements of self-conscious experience, the unity of consciousness, and our sense of subjectivity and agency.

9. Agency & Free will

We typically experience our own intentional actions as being caused by our own thoughts. But is this experience an illusion? Scientific investigations show that both thought and action are caused by prior unconscious mental events (i.e., neural activity). We will look at the interpretations of such findings and examine the implications this has on agency, free-will, and moral responsibility.

PART THREE

OTHERS

10. Understanding Other Minds

In the final part of the course, we turn to the question of other conscious beings and investigate the nature of the self and consciousness from an evolutionary perspective. We begin with a detailed discussion of social cognition with a focus on mental state attribution or ‘mindreading’. We will look into the nature of mindreading and its evolutionary significance in enabling us to understand other individuals as having their own conscious experiences and mental states. Then we will examine whether mindreading is a product of biological or cultural evolution, and whether mindreading is prevalent in our everyday social engagements as traditionally thought.

11. Evolution of the Self and Consciousness

In this week, we will look at the evolution problem: Why and when did consciousness evolve? Is consciousness a biological adaptation with a deep evolutionary history? If so, then what is its function and how did it evolve? We will look at recent accounts that consider consciousness as evolving gradually over hundreds of millions of years from ocean dwelling organisms.

12. Animal Selves and Consciousness

Having spent much of the course examining philosophical and scientific questions regarding human consciousness and sense of self, in this lecture we branch out to consider the minds of other animals. Do other animals have a concept of self and self-awareness? What kinds of consciousness is present in other animals? Do they have conscious experiences or an understanding of the minds of other conspecifics? We conclude the taught material on the course by demonstrating how philosophy can help to articulate and investigate these questions.

13. Essay Writing Week

The final week of the course is set aside for research in which students will research and write their essay for the final assignment. No Tutorial or Lecture in this week.