Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and Art - extra credit

I attended the Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and Art discussion on Wednesday, April 8th at the Chicago Cultural Center. When I walked in, practically all the seats on the floor were filled so I had to find a place on the window sill. To be honest I really wasn’t expecting it to be that crowded. There were four different speakers that had backgrounds in four different fields of study: Psychology, Philosophy, Evolutionary Theory, and Art History. They all related their fields to consciousness. One speaker talked a lot about Artificial Intelligence and its differences from human/animal intelligence. He mentioned the “binding problem” which I wrote down in my notes so I could later look up what it is. There are two different interpretations of that term- one being how the brain segregates elements into complex patterns of data and the other being how the unity of conscious perception is brought about by the distributed activities of the central nervous system. One of the other speakers talked how the mind was OF the body, not just in it. He mentioned the term “qualia” which, among many others, I didn’t know what it meant. I now know it is a term of art used in philosophy for sensory occurrences of all kind. I found that very interesting, like thought experiences versus real experiences. The speaker who majored in Art History was very much into surrealism and talked a lot about a novel titled Nadja written by a French surrealist, André Breton. She even brought the novel with her and passed it around the room for everyone to flip through and take a look at it. One last thing that was said that I found interesting was that real events, emotions, ect, result in unconscious thoughts and not vice versa. It seems very simple and almost like common sense, but thought-provoking. After all the speakers finished, there was time for a question/answer session when people can bring up any questions they had about anything that was said. Overall, I really liked it but I didn’t have the capacity to fully understand what they were talking about, which is why I wrote a few things down. They were also speaking fast but i’m sure that was only because they had a limited amount of time to talk.