🔮 Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness

In 1983, Libet monitored participants with EEG as they flexed their wrists whenever they wanted. They were supposed to note the position of a clock hand when they felt the “urge” to move. Result: electrical activity (readiness potential) began 350–500ms BEFORE they became conscious of the intention.

The readiness potential (Bereitschaftspotential) is an electrical wave in the motor cortex that precedes voluntary movements. If the brain "prepares" an action before conscious awareness of the intention, the expected order (I want to, therefore I do) is reversed: the neural process comes first, consciousness follows.

Libet himself found that participants could “veto” the movement after the readiness potential began. Consciousness does not initiate the action, but it can cancel it. Free will would then mean the power to veto unconscious impulses, not the power to initiate. “Free won’t” instead of “free will.”

If neural processes precede conscious experience, consciousness would be an epiphenomenon: a side effect with no causal power, like an object’s shadow. It accompanies brain events but does not cause them. Most philosophers contest this radical position, but Libet forced them to take it seriously.

Later research questioned the method’s accuracy (the timing of awareness is imprecise). Schurger (2012) suggested that the readiness potential may be stochastic neural noise, not preparation for action. Haynes (2008) decoded intentions up to 10s in advance with fMRI, but with limited accuracy (~60%). There is no consensus.

Law: criminal liability presupposes conscious agency. Mental health: treatments for compulsions assume the capacity for self-direction. Education: teaching presupposes the student’s plasticity and agency. If free will is a veto, all three fields need to rethink their foundations.

Easy problems: explain how the brain discriminates between stimuli, integrates information, and controls behavior. They are "easy" not because they are simple, but because they allow answers in terms of mechanisms. The hard problem: WHY does neural processing generate subjective experience? Why aren't we "philosophical zombies" that process without feeling?

Qualia are the subjective qualities of experience: “what it’s like” to see red, feel pain, taste coffee. Science explains the processing of wavelengths (700nm = red), but not why that processing generates the EXPERIENCE of seeing red. The explanatory gap between mechanism and experience is the core of the hard problem.

Dennett and the Churchlands: consciousness as we understand it does not exist. What we call qualia are patterns of information processing, not some extra "substance." When neuroscience is complete, the "hard problem" will dissolve just as the "élan vital" dissolved with biochemistry. A minority but influential position.

Integrated Information Theory (Tononi): consciousness = systems that integrate information in a unified way, measurable by Phi. Global Workspace Theory (Baars/Dehaene): consciousness emerges when information is "broadcast" to a broad, distributed space in the brain. Both attempt to operationalize consciousness without solving the hard problem.

If consciousness cannot emerge from the purely physical, perhaps it is a fundamental property of matter, present in degrees. An electron would have infinitesimal “proto-experience”; complex brains would have rich experience. An old position (Spinoza, Leibniz) revived by Chalmers, Strawson, and Koch. Problem: combination (how do micro-experiences form macro-consciousness?).

Bruzzo: we can create systems that process, recognize patterns, and generate coherent text. But are they conscious? Do they feel? AI solves easy problems (processing, patterns, language). The hard problem remains human, for now. Without solving what consciousness is, we cannot say whether a machine possesses it.

Bruzzo draws on Peirce's semiotics and the Tartu tradition (Lotman) to think of the mind as a sign system. Culture works as a modeling system that mediates the human-world relationship. We do not access reality "directly"; there is always a system of signs between us and the world.

What distinguishes humans is not processing capacity, but the imaginary surplus: dreaming of what does not exist. AI recombines what exists (patterns in the data). Humans envision the impossible, the unprecedented, the without-reference. Imagination as an excess that goes beyond adaptive function.

Universal tendency to project intentions, emotions, and a soul onto objects. From primitive animism (spirits in a tree) to contemporary examples (Alexa, ChatGPT "understands"). We attribute agency where there are only processes. Technological animism is the same cognitive structure with new objects.

Technology isn’t just a tool. It’s a symbolic system, a cultural act with a collective imagination. Each technology brings a worldview (McLuhan: "the medium is the message"). The smartphone isn’t just communication; it’s an epistemology, a way of knowing and inhabiting the world.

"As machines become more autonomous, we become less necessary. The risk isn't that we will be surpassed, but that we will reduce ourselves to the predictable functioning that machines imitate." (Bruzzo, Seremos Dados). The danger isn't AI replacing us, but our shaping ourselves to the machine's logic.

A defense of productive uselessness: art, leisure, writing without a purpose, play, contemplation. Not as a luxury, but as resistance against reducing humanity to functionality. What serves no purpose (profit, optimization, efficiency) is precisely what the machine cannot replicate.