PSYC 100 Lecture 7: Psychology Lesson Week 7

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Christopher Miners

Document Summary

The science of consciousness and how it may explain or predict behaviour. Evaluate what it means to be conscious. Identify and evaluate how well psychology contributes to our understanding of consciousness. Consciousness is the awareness of subjective experience [insight]. This view is dualism: the philosophical belief that reality consists of two distinct entities: mind and matter (body) Ren descartes consciousness must depend on a substance with properties distinct from physical matter it does(cid:374)(cid:859)t take up space, weigh anything, etc. ) Physicalism (the view that everything that exists is no more extensive than its physical properties) or monism (the view that only one kind of substance exists) Debate on if consciousness is specific brain states, or various computations performed by a system. For science we assume that consc. has a physical bias, and is a function of the brain, so we can ask testable questions.