The Oracle (E-Journal)
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The Bane of Fairness
Get PDFWhat is pertinent for the purposes of this paper is to confront the very issue of how, in my estimation, capitalism betrays Rawls’ mission to establish a conception of an equal and sustainable political society. An important component of Rawls’ vision is a society in which people are given the capacity to meaningfully participate together; provided with real opportunities to enter privileged and influential institutions and alter the course of their political lives. Beyond each person being able to pursue their individual vision of a good life, Rawls also recognizes the importance of a society that maintains its cohesion. By drawing one’s attention first and foremost to Marx’s theory of the forms of alienation, I shall reveal the extent to which capitalism compromises the capacity of each person to be equal in the way Rawls defines. Furthermore, while remaining indebted to the genius of Marx, I will also draw upon the important work of Charles Taylor’s communitarian argument to articulate the manner in which Rawls’ conception of a political society is not stable long-term. Thus, it will be shown that Rawls’ conception of fairness as it pertains to equality and sustainability is incompatible with the capitalism his theory allows
THE NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: UNCOVERING THE HARD PROBLEM
Get PDFIn this essay, I will explore the hard problem of consciousness and its implications for guiding neuroscience. Firstly, I will explicate how the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century is inevitably guided by philosophical assumptions in scientific disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience, while presenting how this field has fundamentally neglected the phenomenological discourse implicit in its assumptions of consciousness. Specifically, I attempt to show that the hard problem has an explanatory gap between associating the relationship of phenomenological aspects of experience to physical aspects of the brain, as described by David Chalmers. Then, I will describe the pitfalls of prior neurophilosophical models based on “neural correlates”. Subsequently, I will examine novel models that may fulfill Chalmers’ remedy of exploring the substrates of experience, which can be invariably tied to the brain. A systematic analysis of these novel models will be provided while assessing their strengths and limitations in order to push further toward closing the explanatory gap. Building on the strengths of these models, whilst bearing in mind their limitations, altered states of consciousness will be explored in the penultimate section to understand how phenomenological experience can be manipulated to produce changes in the brain. I conclude by providing directions from which the hard problem can be approached with the appropriate discourse between phenomenology and neuroscience
