Here are some jigsaw prompts from the Consciousness chapter in Gazzaniga's Intro text. Feel free to steal, alter, and/or critique these to your satisfaction.
Do you know about the transporter device in the Star Trek
universe? From Wikipedia: “Transporters convert a person or object into
an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization), then
"beam" it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter
(rematerialization).” Let’s say we actually invent this technology. Do you
think you would be the same person after transporting? If you do, then you are
a materialist, not a dualist. Can
you figure out what this means?
ANSWER: presumably the transporter does not dematerialize, beam,
and rematerialize souls because souls are not a material substance (they are
spiritual). Thus either a transporter would strip away your soul – making you a
different person – or it creates an identical version of you in the new
location, meaning it would be you. Most psychologists are materialists, meaning
they don’t believe there is a soul; everything is material, real, substance,
including our consciousness. We are not dualists.
Search YouTube for “The New Science of Psychedelics”, produced by
Penguin Books. The person in the video, Michael Pollan, has written a new book
called “How to Change Your Mind”. Describe the content of the video and compare
how Pollan talks about hallucinogens with how the text talks about them.
ANSWER: Pollan speaks
of them as both beneficial as well as harmful, while the book is mostly harmful.
