[MaFLA] CEU Institution for Advanced Study

[Istvan Bodnar]

The Institute for Advanced Study at CEU is pleased to invite you to the next lecture in the Institute`s Wednesday Seminars

Katalin Balog
Senior Core Fellow at IAS CEU

Consciousness, Illusion, and Value
Wednesday, 30 October, 12:30 p.m.
Nádor u. 15, Room 103 (Tiered Room) and online

The belief that we are conscious is the last remnant of the premodern concept of the mind. Not so long ago, most people in the West thought of the body as mortal flesh commanded by the soul. They thought of the soul as immortal, free in its action, and exempt from the laws of nature. Creativity and intelligence were believed to be traits of the soul that no mere mechanism could replicate. But over the course of the last couple of hundred years, and especially in the 20th century, it has become common understanding that all of our behavior has a purely physical explanation and, as the principle of the causal completeness of physics became mainstream among philosophers and scientists, it also became common understanding that all of our behavior has a purely physical explanation. There is not much about the premodern conception that survived these changes except the view that we are conscious, i.e., that there is something it is like to be us, of which we can be directly aware. It is precisely this view that has come under attack lately by a movement that their adherents in philosophy, neuroscience, and AI call ‘illusionism’.  According to illusionism, the qualitative character of our experience that we seem to be directly aware of is a mere illusion. It appears to be an innocent theoretical claim; however, I argue that it has potent practical consequences regarding what we value and how we relate to human beings that demand consideration.

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Image: Digital Asset Library, Rutgers University





Katalin Balog is a philosopher of mind interested in the self, consciousness, subjectivity, and value, as well as the history of these concepts. She writes scholarly articles and essays for a general audience. Her public-facing work has appeared in The New York Times and in the magazine 3 Quarks Daily. Currently she is working on a book called What is left of the mind. She has come to the US to study philosophy from her native Budapest in 1989. Katalin Balog got her PhD at Rutgers, New Brunswick, she has been teaching at Rutgers University–Newark since 2010, before that, she taught at Yale for 10 years.



RSVP Agnes Bendik at bendikag at ceu.edu<mailto:bendikag at ceu.edu>


Agnes bendik
Senior Administrative Officer

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