Idealism. The idealist philosopher George Berkeley argued that physical objects do not exist independently of the mind that perceives them. An item truly exists only as long as it is observed; otherwise, it is not only meaningless but simply nonexistent. The observer and the observed are one.

In order for an observation (or measurement) to be made the object being observed must interact with the observing sensor. Particles are not sentient and do now”know” things. They don’t change their behavior.

Light is created by the movement of electric or magnetic charges, so if there were no light, nothing could be moving, because there are electric charges in atoms, so you could say that time wouldn’t be passing because nothing would be happening, including the movement of photons, which otherwise would define the …

Schrodinger constructed his imaginary experiment with the cat to demonstrate that simple misinterpretations of quantum theory can lead to absurd results which do not match the real world.

When a quantum “observer” is watching Quantum mechanics states that particles can also behave as waves. Once an observer begins to watch the particles going through the openings, the picture changes dramatically: if a particle can be seen going through one opening, then it’s clear it didn’t go through another.

In a solipsistic position, a person only believes their mind or self is sure to exist. This is part of self-existence theory or the view of the self. Individuals experiencing solipsism syndrome feel reality is not ‘real’ in the sense of being external to their own minds.

The basic argument for solipsism is that, because the mind can not conclude the existence of anything external, therefore nothing external exists, only the appearance of it.

Solipsism is sometimes expressed as the view that “I am the only mind which exists,” or “My mental states are the only mental states.” However, the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust might truly come to believe in either of these propositions without thereby being a solipsist.

Qualia are the subjective or qualitative properties of experiences. Qualia have traditionally been thought to be intrinsic qualities of experience that are directly available to introspection. However, some philosophers offer theories of qualia that deny one or both of those features.

Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky.

The experience of emotion is a ubiquitous component of the stream of consciousness; emotional qualia interact with other contents and processes of consciousness in complex ways. Recent research has supported the hypothesis that important functional aspects of emotion can operate outside the conscious awareness.

Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character.

details. One standard objection to the view that phenomenal experience is functionally determined is based upon what has come to be called ‘The Absent Qualia Hypothesis’, the idea that there could be a person or a machine that was functionally exactly like us but that felt or consciously experienced nothing at all .

The mind-body problem exists because we naturally want to include the mental life of conscious organisms in a comprehensive scientific understanding of the world. On the one hand it seems obvious that everything that happens in the mind depends on, or is, something that happens in the brain.

Jackson describes himself as a ‘qualia freak. ‘ By this he just means that he believes that qualia exist. But what are qualia? Roughly, qualia are properties of having a certain conscious state — like feeling a pain or an itch, or having a reddish visual sensation — which are not identical to any physical property.

The most powerful argument against epiphenomenalism is that it is self-contradictory: if we have knowledge about epiphenomenalism, then our brains know about the existence of the mind, but if epiphenomenalism were correct, then our brains should not have any knowledge about the mind, because the mind does not affect …

In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that “everything is physical”, that there is “nothing over and above” the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Both the definition of “physical” and the meaning of physicalism have been debated. Physicalism is closely related to materialism.

The knowledge argument (also known as Mary’s room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982) and extended in “What Mary Didn’t Know” (1986).

On Jackson’s version of the knowledge argument, the assumption that Mary knows the complete physical truth about the world does not guarantee that she will be able to figure out the complete truth about human color vision. His reasoning involves the idea of the complete physical truth.

Jackson spent much of his career at ANU (1986–2014) and he was a regular visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton University (2007–14)….Frank Cameron Jackson.

The causal argument in favor of physicalism roughly states that all physical effects are due to physical causes, hence anything having physical effects must itself be physical (cf. Papineau 2002).

Descartes was a substance dualist. He believed that there were two kinds of substance: matter, of which the essential property is that it is spatially extended; and mind, of which the essential property is that it thinks.

Minimal physicalism (a caveat) Throughout the following discussion the specific view of interest is minimal physicalism, 3 i.e., the minimal thesis one can endorse while remaining a physicalist. Consider the fact that most (if not all) physicalists once equated being physical with being mechanistic.