180106 VO Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (2015S)

Thorough introduction to the contemporary consciousness, brain, and cognition debate. Since the issues discussed are no longer confined to one or two single core disciplines, not only philosophical, but also recent psychological and neuroscientific approaches to the problem of consciousness will be discussed.
Structure: In the first part, a brief introduction to the core issues of the mind-brain problem will be offered to those who are new to the field. We’ll look at what appear to be three closely related problems of consciousness: (1) conscious experience, (2) mental causation, and (3) free will. In the second part, a number of recent experimental findings relevant to these issues will be discussed, among them the general mind-brain-dependency problem, research with split brain (forebrain commissurotomy) patients, and Libet’s experiment on conscious and/or unconscious causation of volitional behaviour. We’ll probe the philosophical relevance of these findings and investigate what they might (or might not) tell us about consciousness and the mind. In the third and last part, we’ll discuss some recent attempts to solve the mind-brain problem for good, such as Elitzur’s bafflement argument. And if time allows for it, we’ll also have a careful and critical look at some of the more extravagant theories of consciousness proposed during the past few years, such as Penrose’s and Hameroff’s OrchOR-Model and Deikman’s epistemological interactionism.