Alien Subjectivity and the Importance of Consciousness

Resumen

IntroductionWhy are we interested in studying consciousness 2 ?One reason is that it is peculiarly difficult to understand.There is no consensus over what basic type of thing it is (is it a special kind of representation of the world?A kind of self--representation? A primitive contact with sense--data?).More fundamentally, it is mysterious to us how it relates to physical phenomena -it seems very different from say, a complex pattern of neural firing.There is therefore an interesting project of figuring out what it is, and how it fits into the natural order of things (this is, of course, a major part of the mind/body problem).A second reason why we are interested in it though, is that we think of it as objectively significant, in several senses.I would distinguish a descriptive, epistemic and moral sense in which it seems significant (the first may encompass the others).It seems descriptively significant, in the sense that if someone were to give a characterization of the universe we live in -in particular, that region of space--time occupied by humans and other sentient life forms -they would not have adequately described it if they didn't mention the presence of consciousness: consciousness seems like a deep joint in nature, or a highly natural property.It seems epistemically significant in the sense of being a special way of getting epistemically connected to things.Conscious perceptual acquaintance with an event can justify beliefs about the event, and seems to be special kind of epistemic state in its own right.Furthermore, conscious mental events themselves seem to be epistemically accessible in a peculiarly intimate way: consciousness seems to be self--illuminating.Finally, consciousness appears to be a source of much of what is valuable in the universe.Retaining consciousness is necessary for retaining what is valuable in living, and beings that lack consciousness would appear to lack something necessary for treating them as intrinsically worthy of moral respect.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Lee, G. (2019). Alien Subjectivity and the Importance of Consciousness. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9196.003.0014