Intro

• Perception is the process or result of becoming aware of objects, relationships, and events by means of the senses, which includes such activities as recognizing, observing, and discriminating.
• These activities enable organisms to organize and interpret the stimuli received into meaningful knowledge and to act in a coordinated manner.
• Sensation is the experience produced by stimulation of a sensory receptor and the resultant activation of a specific brain center.
• Producing basic awareness of a sound, odor, color, shape, or taste or of temperature, pressure, pain, muscular tension, position of the body, or change in the internal organs associated with such processes as hunger, thirst, nausea, and sexual excitement.
• Subjective experience is particular to a specific person and thus intrinsically inaccessible to the experience or observation of others.
• Consciousness is an organism’s awareness of something either internal or external to itself.
• David Chalmers (1995) proposed what are known as the easy problem and the hard problem of consciousness.
• Easy Problem refers to the explanation of mental phenomena that are testable by standard methods of science.
• This includes the recognition of stimuli, cognitive processes, and the processes involved in wakefulness and sleep.
• Easy problem is solved once its neurobiological mechanisms are specified.
• Hard Problem is what remains once the neurobiological mechanisms of a phenomenon have been explained.
• Certain aspects of bat (and other animals) consciousness may be inherently beyond human understanding, given the constraints of our own sensory experiences.
• Mary is a brilliant scientist who is forced to investigate the world from a black-and-white room via a black-and-white television monitor.
• Mary specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky and use terms like "red", "blue".