Talk by Dr Niki Young: Where is Consciousness ?

The talk: Where is Consciousness ?

Consciousness is arguably what is most familiar to us, yet it also proves to be remarkably elusive when it comes to explaining, or even describing, its reality. This difficulty has led David Chalmers to argue that even if we were to solve many of the “easy problems” related to how the brain processes information, they could not ultimately answer the “hard question” of why such processing would be accompanied by experience. Philosophers who are more partial to reductive explanations of consciousness however question Chalmers’s view. Patricia Churchland, for instance, calls the hard problem a “hornswoggle problem,” while Dan Dennett claims that consciousness – at least as we generally understand and even experience it – is in the end just a strange illusion. In the first part of this talk, Niki Young will take stock of different views on consciousness in order to illustrate their potentials and limitations. In the second part, he will then use the shortcomings of such theories in order to advance the somewhat counterintuitive claim that consciousness is not in fact in the brain.

The Speaker

Dr Niki Young, PhD,  lectures Philosophy at the University of Malta. His areas of interest include 20th and 21st Century Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Aesthetics, Deconstruction, as well as the various forms of New Realism and Materialism currently being developed by a number of contemporary thinkers. He has contributed to a number of publications related to philosophy, ecology, and contemporary art. Young’s current research focuses on the points of intersection between realism and deconstruction.