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March 5, 2022
We have now completed the lecture series on Indigenous Canada. Our next topic will be a study of the biology of consciousness, in this course offered by World Science University (https://worldscienceu.com/courses/the-biology-of-consciousness-chistof-koch/)
As we have done in the past, we will be watching the course videos in Zoom, interspersed with moderated group discussion.
This online course is available for free - participants are welcome to sign up individually, to catch up on missed lectures, or to investigate more of the learning resources provided.
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OVERVIEW:
Science has yet to explain how the brain gives rise to the mind.
Science has allowed us to understand many physical aspects of the universe extraordinarily well, from the large-scale structure of the cosmos to the microscopic processes of chemistry and biology. Yet nowhere in these fields of knowledge is there any description of how consciousness arises.
There are some philosophers who reject the notion that consciousness depends on physics at all, often using the zombie argument, which states that we can imagine a world that is fully compatible with the laws of nature and in which consciousness is absent.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz discussed the difficulty of solving this problem in his 1714 work La Monadologie. He argued that if we could enlarge a brain and inspect it, we “will only find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception.”
Today this is known as the hard problem of consciousness, a term introduced by philosopher David Chalmers. It refers to the problem of explaining how and why the physical processes of the brain result in subjective conscious experiences.
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This meeting is presented as an online teleconference using Zoom. The link will be provided to those who RSVP.
If you have technical problems or questions, please email techsupport@centreforinquiry.ca, or post a message in the comments below.
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