hard problem of consciousness

Examples of hard problem of consciousness in the following topics:

• Studying the Brain

  • Understanding the brain is of vital importance to psychologists because of its influence over behavior and mental states.
  • Studying damaged brains is one of the most useful ways to increase our understanding of the links between the brain and behavior.
  • There is an ongoing debate today over whether the mind and body are separate materials, or whether consciousness can arise from purely physiological processes.
  • This is known in psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, and artificial intelligence as the hard problem of consciousness.
  • Trace the history of brain science in the field of psychology

• Describing Consciousness

  • Consciousness is an individual's state of awareness of their environment, thoughts, feelings, or sensations; in order to experience consciousness, one must be both awake and aware.
  • The mind-body problem is essentially the problem of consciousness; roughly speaking, it is the question of how mental experiences arise from a physical entity. 
  • Today, the primary focus of consciousness research is on understanding what consciousness means both biologically and psychologically.
  • The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness by asking human subjects for a verbal report of their experiences.
  • This image shows the location of the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain heavily involved in consciousness.

• The Conflict Perspective

  • Just like how we see private property, or the right to pass that property onto our children as natural, many of members in capitalistic societies see the rich as having earned their wealth through hard work and education, while seeing the poor as lacking in skill and initiative.
  • Marx rejected this type of thinking and termed it false consciousness, which involves explanations of social problems as the shortcomings of individuals rather than the flaws of society.
  • Marx wanted to replace this kind of thinking with something Engels termed class consciousness, which is when workers recognize themselves as a class unified in opposition to capitalists and ultimately to the capitalist system itself.
  • He theorized that the policies of the power elite would result in the "increased escalation of conflict, production of weapons of mass destruction, and possibly the annihilation of the human race. "
  • Karl Marx wanted to replace false consciousness with class consciousness, in which the working class would rise up against the capitalist system.

• Social Movement Theories

  • There are two significant problems with this theory.
  • First, since most people feel deprived at one level or another almost all the time, the theory has a hard time explaining why the groups that form social movements do when other people are also deprived.
  • growth and spread of a solution - a solution to the problems people are experiencing is proposed and spreads
  • Insurgent consciousness refers back to the ideas of deprivation and grievances.
  • The insurgent consciousness is the collective sense of injustice that movement members (or potential movement members) feel and serves as the motivation for movement organization.

• Introduction to the Process and Types of Memory

  • We must locate it and return it to our consciousness.
  • Problems can occur at any stage of the process, leading to anything from forgetfulness to amnesia.
  • Explicit or declarative memory requires conscious recall; it consists of information that is consciously stored or retrieved.
  • An example of implicit learning is learning to ride a bike: you do not need to consciously remember how to ride a bike, you simply do.
  • Problems can occur at any stage of the process.

• The role of the manager

  • According to lean-thinking advocate Jim Womack, the manager's role in lean thinking is to eagerly embrace the role of problem-solver.
  • This means visiting actual situations, asking about performance issues, seeking out root causes, and showing respect for lower-level managers (as well as colleagues) by asking hard questions until good answers emerge.
  • Most importantly, the lean manager realizes that no manager at a higher level can or should solve a problem at a lower level (Womack calls this one of the worst abuses of lean management).
  • Instead, the role of the higher-level manager is to help the lower-level manager tackle problems through delegation and dialogue by involving everyone involved with the problem.
  • The lean manager also realizes that problem-solving is about experimentation by means of ‘plan–do–check' with the expectation that mistakes do happen and that experiments yield valuable learning that can be applied to the next round of experiments.

• Coping with Stress

  • Coping with stress is the process by which a person consciously attempts to master, minimize, or tolerate stressors and problems in life.
  • Coping is the process of spending conscious effort and energy to solve personal and interpersonal problems.
  • Problem-focused strategies aim to deal with the cause of the problem or stressor.
  • People try to change or eliminate the source of stress by researching the problem and learning management skills to solve it.
  • Maladaptive strategies include dissociation, sensitization, numbing out, anxious avoidance of a problem, and escape.

• Taking Corrective Action

  • One key aspect of taking corrective action is problem-solving.
  • Managers need to understand the contributing factors of a problem and how it impacts key processes; they must then figure out a workable solution.
  • Step one in the problem-solving process is identifying the problem, which can be hard to distinguish from symptoms of the problem: it can be easy to mistake repercussions of a problem for the problem itself.
  • Once the problem is identified, and a method of corrective action is determined, it needs to be implemented as quickly as possible.
  • Model the problem-solving process of identifying contributing factors, taking corrective action, and assessing the effectiveness of a solution

• The New Era

  • Harding on a promise of a "return to normalcy" after the years of war, ethnic hatreds, race riots and exhausting reforms.
  • The fanfare was short-lived, however, as the Teapot Dome scandal tainted the reputation of the Harding administration when it was revealed in 1922 that Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased U.S.
  • Suffering exhaustion and illness believed to be brought on by the stress of the controversies, Harding died of an apparent heart attack in August 1923 during a cruise to Alaska.
  • A dour, puritanical and spotlessly honest man, Coolidge’s White House stood in sharp contrast to that of Harding.
  • Hoover believed in the efficacy of individualism and business enterprise, with limited coordination by government, to cure all problems.

• Sustainability Innovation

  • Innovation is the creation of new value through the use of solutions that meet new, previously unknown, or existing needs in new ways.
  • "Sustainopreneurship" describes using creative business organizing to solve problems related to sustainability to create social and environmental sustainability as a strategic objective and purpose, while at the same time respecting the boundaries set in order to maintain the life support systems of the process.
  • In other words, it is "business with a cause," where the world's problems are turned into business opportunities for deploying sustainability innovations.
  • Entrepreneurship consciously sets out to find or create innovations to solve sustainability-related problems.
  • Solving sustainability-related problems from the organizational frame is the be-all and end-all of sustainability entrepreneurship.