حکمت معاصر

Analysis of the Notion of Consciousness Mulla Sadra's perspective and connectionism

حکمت معاصر October 3, 2020 Zohre Salahshur Sefidsangi

Consciousness is a central problem in philosophy, often divided into phenomenal, access, self-, and monitoring consciousness. Mulla Sadra, associating consciousness with the soul, argues that all types refer to something beyond the material and cannot be reduced to matter, based on his concept of knowledge by presence. In contrast, physicalist theories like connectionism attribute consciousness to matter, claiming it can be explained by artificial neural networks. However, connectionism fails to account for types and characteristics of knowledge, mistakenly equating consciousness with information processing. Mulla Sadra holds that while consciousness involves processing information, information can be processed without consciousness, so the two cannot be equated.