"A recent attempt to catalog all theories of consciousness identified 350 distinct approaches (Kuhn, 2024). A recent contest for the best essay in consciousness studies produced 3,000 diverse submissions. Such theoretical splaying is typical in the arts and humanities. In science, it's what you get when you're stumped, grasping at straws, almost like alchemy. More and more, consciousness studies seem like the proverbial blind men who can't make heads or tails of the elephant."
"Consciousness studies is a relatively new field that seeks to address millennia-old unresolved philosophical and theological questions, which were formerly addressed in terms such as soul, spirit, free will, and phenomenology. Science strongly suggests that we live in a physical universe composed of atoms or molecules, particles of inanimate matter that attract and repel one another. If we're nothing but atoms in motion, there shouldn't be feelings and thoughts. Yet here we are having them. AI spurs a new urgency to find an explanation."
Consciousness studies has proliferated into hundreds of competing theories and thousands of essays, producing theoretical splaying similar to arts and humanities. The field struggles to produce a unified scientific explanation despite advances in biology and medicine. Physicalism implies a universe of atoms and molecules without subjective experience, yet humans have feelings and thoughts. AI's apparent cognition intensifies the urgency to explain consciousness. Popular frameworks like the four E's—Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended—describe features of cognition but do not explain why subjective experience arises. The field may suffer from a contextual blind spot that prevents convergence on an explanatory theory.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]