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Consciousness In Rene Descartes's Zombie Argument

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Consciousness is awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc. Consciousness is central part of our life. Consciousness is the absolute reality. Consciousness is omnipresent and omniscient. The concept of consciousness is ambiguous. It is one of the most mysterious aspects of our life. From a very long time scientist and philosophers are trying to explain nature of consciousness. It is surprising that consciousness is a something that we all experience but it is deemed a ‘hard’ problem to explain. It is widely assumed that consciousness is a thing that is intractable to the human intellect. The difficulty comes in describing the “what it’s likeness” that characterizes consciousness. Whenever a person is in a particular …show more content…

Descartes said that his mind can exist in absence of his body. David charmer used exactly opposite of Descartes argument. The argument made by charmer goes like this-
1. Zombies are conceivable.
“Zombie” is a creature physically identical to a human, functioning in all the right ways, having conversations, playing cricket, but simply lacking all conscious experience.
Conceivable means that if something is conceivable then we can confidently picture it, imagine it without any obvious contradiction.
2. In the world we live in zombies are impossible to exist given the laws of nature.
It does not seem any obvious contradiction about the idea of zombie’s existence and the things that are conceivable then there is a possibility then that thing can exist. Since there is no problem in conceiving things because inventions are made by conceiving things as somebody have to picture it first imagine the world in something that is not that way and then they try to make it that way. Therefore using these two arguments we can say that Physicalism is false because it is possible for zombie to exist.

2 Knowledge …show more content…

Higher Order Theory: Higher-order (HO) theories describe the notion of a conscious mental state in terms of reflexive meta-mental self-awareness. According to higher order theories a mental state M is a conscious mental state if it is accompanied by a simultaneous and non-inferential higher-order (i.e., meta-mental) state whose content is that one is now in M. So if a mental state lacks the relevant higher-order states then that mental state is considered unconscious. If a person is unconscious then it means that that person is not reflexively and directly aware of being that mental

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