PHLB81H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Thomas Nagel, Consciousness, Mind
Document Summary
Conscious is just another word for awake or aware. Descartes; my essence consists solely in the fact that i am a thinking thing. Being a thinking thing amounts to being a conscious being. It is not surprising to be told that the loss of capacity for consciousness signifies the end of us as persons. But descartes may be saying something stronger: such a loss means our end as existing things. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. Nagel defines consciousness as the idea that to say that a creature has conscious experience means that there is something it is like to be that creature . Nagel claimed that for a creature to have conscious experiences there must be something it is like to be that creature. That is, there is something it is like to feel an itch, or to see, smell or touch something. Nagel provides on example regarding the consciousness of a bat.
