Category: Perspectives

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Zombies and the problem of consciousness

Seeing as it’s Halloween, I’m going to play devil’s advocate with the help of some zombies and explore the Gordian knot of consciousness. I think most scientists would hold a physicalist view when it comes to their view of how the world ‘really’ is. That is to say, objectively speaking, all there is to the universe are the various interacting fields and particles of physics. The problem with such a view is that our conscious selves prove very difficult to incorporate into this picture. We are subjective beings. Finding out how consciousness came about is known as the hard problem of consciousness.

David Chalmers, a philosopher of mind, formed a clever thought experiment to illustrate the difficulty. Okay, so imagine a world where everyone has the outside appearance of being conscious, for instance they laugh when you tell a joke,  shirk away from pain, gaze at sunsets etc., the only difference is that they have no internal subjectivity, they’re automata or zombies. I don’t see any problem with conceiving of such a place, so it looks like a possibility. But if these automata are indistinguishable from us on the outside in terms of their behaviours and actions then evolution won’t be able to distinguish between them and us, so why consciousness? It looks like an unnecessary extravagance. It also suggests that there is something more to the world than the physical, because our world isn’t like that, we, or at least I, know I’m conscious.

It seems to me that our theories as to how and why consciousness evolved have fallen short in their efforts. A lot of work is dedicated to finding the neural correlates of consciousness, but that doesn’t get us anywhere! Neurons are made up of the same material as the rest of the cells in our body, but heart cells don’t generate conscious beings so why treat neurons differently. So we’re really left with two questions. How do physical things generate subjective thought? And once we get there, why is it advantageous to be conscious? It’s called the hard problem for a reason.

Author

kanead[at]tcd.ie

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wikimedia commons


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Darwin’s insects, Dodo skeletons and macaques with braces

macaque braces

The Natural History museum in Dublin is one of my favourite places in the city. It has a very Victorian feel to it, none of this pandering to the X-box generation, just cabinet upon cabinet of mounted skins and skeletons revealing the diversity of nature. Some of the taxidermy is pretty hilarious and you can see the bullet holes in some of the skeletons, but that adds to the charm of the place!

I did a lot of museum based work during my PhD and absolutely loved using museum collections, so now I have my own students they all have museum collection aspects to their projects (whether they like it or not!). They will be using the collections in the Dublin museum, so today we had a tour behind the scenes of the museum, and a look at the storage areas with one of the curators Nigel Monaghan.

It was awesome! In the space of a few hours we saw insects collected by Darwin during his time on the HMS Beagle, a Dodo skeleton, a macaque skull with orthodontic braces (the original owner was apparently a dentist, though no-one is sure whether the macaque had braces in life or was just used for practice after it died), an entire room full of Irish elk crania and antlers, some wild Irish grass snakes (Ireland historically has no snakes of any kind), a DNA bank for every Cetacean stranded on the Irish coast, a huge selection of bird parts collected from birds that accidentally flew into lighthouses, and probably the funniest interpretation I’ve ever seen of what a guinea pig should look like.

As we went around, many of the things Nigel told us got me thinking about what an under used resource museum collections are. Certainly many people use the big collections in London, Paris, New York and Washington DC, but few of us would think to look in our local museums. For example, Nigel told us that a geneticist did a piece to camera in the museum recently and mentioned how wonderful it was that they had managed to extract Dodo DNA from a specimen in France. They seemed completely unaware of the fact that the Dublin museum has a beautiful Dodo skeleton in its collection. So my message is go out and use your local museum collections (or at least ask the curators if they have what you’re looking for)! They’re wonderful sources of information and inspiration, whether you’re a first year undergraduate student or a tenured professor. Right, now where did I put my calipers…

Author 

Natalie Cooper: ncooper[at]tcd.ie

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Natalie Cooper

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A vision for the 21st century workplace

I feel a bit of a fraud complaining about the discrimination of women in science because in my current job I’m one of four women in a discipline with only nine faculty members, our head of school is female and so is our head of discipline. I also don’t have any children so I haven’t had to deal with the problems that go along with that. However, I’m not blind; I can see there is a problem! I don’t want to re-hash the problems women in science face in this post; particularly as they’ve been so well covered elsewhere (there have been lots of really cool blog posts about this following the recent Moss-Racusin et al. paper in PNAS). Instead I want to think about potential solutions. Continue reading “A vision for the 21st century workplace”