Consciousness inside and out: phenomenology, neuroscience, and the nature of experience

摘要

Understanding consciousness has been one of the main focuses of philosophers for almost 400 years. Since John Locke's conceptualization of consciousness as self-perception in the 17th century, and Rene Descartes' dualism and the convergence of res cogitans and res extensa in the brain, many thinkers have involved their minds in its investigation. While the work in this field was dominated by theoretical approaches for a very long time, the advancements in behavioral and clinical neuroscience shed new light on the problem. This modern empirical approach to the mind-body problem not only possesses the potential to illuminate an essential human trait, but it further paves the way toward the realization of a strong artificial intelligence hypothesis, that is, the development of a conscious machine by training the context of sensory information as biophysical representation.