– Summer 2023, In Person.
A survey of dominant theories of the conscious mind, ranging from substance dualism, logical behaviourism, brain reductionism, computational functionalism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, eliminative materialism, enactivism, and phenomenological philosophy of mind. Moreover, it assessed how adopting each of the above theories influences how we think about the possibility of artificial consciousness and how we assess the prospects of a scientific explanation of conscious experience. The course brought into dialogue and contrasted phenomenological approaches to formulating and addressing the problem of consciousness (centered around Husserl’s so-called “paradox of subjectivity”) with approaches in the Analytic tradition (centered around Chalmers’ so-called “hard problem of consciousness”). Along the way, the course explored how philosophers’ and cognitive scientists’ choice of metaphors and imagery shapes their foundational assumptions and their starting points for theorizing about the mind.