Mark's A2 Philosophy Page

Legal and positive rights are the kind of rights that are created by humans inorder to creat the highest level of happuiness within sociaty, and are rights which can be created alongside typical human morality, but only when neccersary. For example, someone who follows this view may accept the killing of criminal who have killed themselves, as they focus on the consequences of actions, typically a view followed by utilitarians.

An alternative view of rights would be natural rights. someone who follows a natural view on rights would intertwine common human morality with the law, and so would not support the killing, as this action in itself is innately wrong as it takes away someone else natural rights. One kind of person that would ascribe to this view would be deontologists, and believe that everyone is entitled to the basic of human rights, as they are universal and obsolete. Insted of focusing on consiquences of an act, deontologists focus on the act itself, and wether or not it would be moraly correct, excluding all external factors. They also ascribe to the idea that these natrural rights are inalianable, which means they cannot be taken away or invalidated (either by race, gender, class, sexuality, age, previouse actions or any other factor). This also is the case if, for example, you where locked within a room. You would still have the right to freedom, even if someone was currently impeiding on this, it would just be an injustice. Believed to come from our human nature (Gewiths) or G od given (or perhaps just being self evident!).

Property dualism is the view that although there is only one kind of substance in the universe it possesses two distinct types of property. The two properties of mental and physical are possessed by the worlds substance simultaneously and consistently. This means that any single object, such as ourselves, can possess both. From this, it can be reasonable to see why some may find it hard to see the difference between Property dualism and biological naturalism.

The difference between the two arrives in the fact Searl dose not actually say our substance has two properties, one physical and one mental, but the fact that the physical actually causes the mental one which is dependant upon it, not that the two properties exists independent of each other. However this leads us to make wrong assumptions on how one causes the other which Searl objects against.

Searl explains how we have come to think of causation to happen in a distinct series of events set in time. However, not all forms of causation occur like this. Gravity for example is occurring consistently and simultaneously to everything else in the world and its states. This, according to Searl is how our consciousness operates, as they occur simultaneously at the same time as our neurons firing, not in a small series of events one after the other.

Overall what Searl is objecting from that property dualism dose not is that he dose not feel consciousness is an ‘over and above’ process, but something that can be deduced to be merely something rooted within the way our brain biologically works and happens along side the rest of our cognitive processes.

John Searle proposed a theory known as ‘biological naturalism’. Biological naturalism basically says that consciousness is real, specially located, found within the brain and functions causality as simply part of our own human biological nature. Before Searl set out to explain his theory he attempted to outline the features of consciousness more in-depth.

Firstly, the feature of conscious states being experienced in a qualitative sense. This is to say that there is a ‘what-it-feels-like’ quality to each of our conscious thoughts and experience. Just like how the taste of beer is qualitatively different to the qualitative feel of listening to beethoven’s third symphony. Basically here he is acknowledging qualia. 

Secondly, he talks about the subjective ontological nature of consciousness within humans and animals in comparison to the objective nature of tables and chairs. This is because ‘objective anthologies’ are measurable, while the conscious ‘subjective ontology’s’ are not so, as they cannot be reduced to something measurable.

The third feature of our conscious ‘subjective ontology’s’ is that we experience all of our conscious states all at once as a single unified conscious field. Although we can seem to focus mainly on one, such as our experience of touching a desk, we are still experiencing our visual stimuli and everything else picked up in our subjective experience.

And lastly, the fourth feature is that most,but not all, conscious states are intentional. This is the idea that states such as hunger and thirst are directed to correspond to actions we must physically preform, such as drinking a glass of water. While others are not, such as undirected feelings of well being or anxiety.

Searl goes on to say how consciousness, intentionality and mental states in general supervene, in an almost parasetic nature, upon physical lower-level biological states. (just without directly drawing from its host).

The Mary’s room example gives the analogy of a woman who knows absolutely everything there is to know about color. However, Mary is confined o a black and white room and has never experienced colour itself. Although when she is let out of said room, it becomes apparent that she doesn’t know everything there is to know as when she comes to experience colour she feels as if she has gained something extra, upon the basic physical objective facts.

The point of this is  to shows that a materialist response appears to overlook a very important factor, the feeling of subjective and qualitative experience. This can therefore either lead us back to dualism, or give materialism another opportunity to explain the factor of conscious experience.

The Analogy given in the text on ‘What is it like to be a bat’ to explain the unnecessary jump to making consciousness some sort of mystical process, when in reality just because we do not understand it currently, it does not mean its an extremely outrageously strange process, it may actually be perfectly simple to explain once our technology has progressed.

The the analogy:  imagine taking someone who has no idea about the metamorphosis process of a caterpillar turning over time into a butterfly and show him you putting one isolated into a safe. Then, once a significant ammount of time has passed, show him you opening it up, to see the butterfly make its grand appearence. Now, the person who is unawear of the process may make many grand explinations as to why this happened, such as …editme

David Chalmers put forward the claim that the current problems we are trying to solve with the theory of mind can be split into two different categories. The ‘easy’ problems and the ‘hard’ problems. The easy problems are the ones which address the cognitive abilities of the brain are that we are slowly working out more and more, or already know the answers too, or are close to working them out. (Easy being a relative term in this case, it will still take a century or two).

The ‘hard’ problem however is the problem of this unexplainable and extra quality of phenomenal consciousness.  And this supposedly is seperated by a large explanitory gap of something we a clearly missing between the two.