What Are Chalmers Problem Of Consciousness As Related To Cartesian Dualism

Chalmers’ Problem of Consciousness as Related to Cartesian Dualism, Revisited

In Meditations one and two, Descartes famously proposed the mind-body problem in which he postulated that a non-material substance mind which constitutes our consciousness exits in tandem with a material body that by itself is not capable of consciousness. David Chalmers challenges the biological and functional basis of consciousness as proposed by his contemporaries, and points out that every attempt so far to explain consciousness in terms of the material body has failed. Chalmers’ take on the problem of consciousness is more sympathetic to that of Descartes’ in that when drawing from both Descartes and Chalmers, one could conclude that the reason that functional

Due to advancements in neurophysiology and biology, it is commonly accepted that the brain, if nothing more than a mass of tissue containing intricate networks of neurons and synapses, is responsible for coordinating and controlling basic life functions and processes. A mixture of chemical and electrical reactions are single-handedly responsible for sustaining bodily processes as well as taking in and interpreting information perceived through the senses. While these processes have proven useful in explaining how, for example, electro-magnetic radiation in the form of visible light enters the eye, reacts with light sensitive rod and cone cells which then transmit information to the occipital lobe of the brain via an optic nerve where it is interpreted and ultimately made available to our consciousness, they leave an important part of the question unanswered; that is why these reactions translate into conscious experience in the first place. The hard problem, according to Chalmers, is that physiological attempts at explaining experience fail to account for how the biological registration and interpretation of events translates into us having the experience, and thus leave an “extra ingredient” to be desired4. This missing ingredient, though highly contested, has eluded cognitive scientists and led some to

It wouldn’t be entirely correct that to say that either the mind or the body interacts causally with the other, but that the mind enables the perception of the body and the body facilitates the manifestation of the mind and its physical representation. This can perhaps best be demonstrated with the thought experiment involving a teleportation device. The scenario goes as follows: suppose there exists some type of device that can teleport an individual from one point in space to another. However, to do so would require that the individual be essentially broken down to the most basic constituent parts and then reassembled again at the second location from entirely new, but qualitatively identical, atoms. Suppose also that the individual would retain all memories, characteristics and personality traits. Would the individual be the same person as he was before he was teleported? In short, the answer is yes. While the physical body itself would be made up of entirely new atoms, the new atoms would be identical to the atoms that previously composed the individual (after all, our bodies are constantly losing and gaining atoms at such a rate that the body will be composed of entirely new atoms within 7 years). Furthermore, since the “substance” that defines an individual supersedes the physical