A Conscious Universe

[Mudhammam]

It's also a straw man. I've explicitly talked about the relationship between brain and mind. Since I see all of reality as the complex expression of ideas and the interaction among ideas, I have no problem with the brain-- as the expression of underlying ideas.

Fair enough, but just so I don't misrepresent you, because I think your injection of "ideas" as fundamental throughout the debate is confusing and unhelpful when you actually mean some principle of nature or substance that matter dissolves into at its most primeval state, no longer possessing, or represented by any terms identifiable with, anything we could possibly describe as physical---given our perceptive and conceptual survey of the world---can you clarify what relationship you think the fundamental "stuff" "under the hood" has with your understanding of mind?

What you do not have is a reason why the mind exists at all, and what properties a brain has that a rock doesn't have, that allows/causes/necessitates this existence. And this is the sum total of the physicalist view on mind: it can't really define mind, can't establish whether a system experiences qualia, cannot explain the mechanism of the creation of mind, and cannot even prove that mind exists.

Since I'm not an expert geologist or brain chemist, I won't waste any time comparing the two, but if you're asking me to offer a specific mechanism that allows a brain to experience the world in such-and-such a way, and you think this is the portal to the soul, or mind, then I think you'd be correct that nobody can really define such a thing. It's as if you were to say (to quote Dennett imagining "some vitalist who says to the molecular biologist"): "The easy problems of life include those of explaining the following phenomena: reproduction, development, growth, metabolism, self-repair, immunological self-defence... There are not all that easy, of course, and it may take another century or so to work out of the fine points, but they are easy compared to the really hard problem: life itself. We can imagine something that was capable of reproduction, development, growth, metabolism, self-repair and immunological self-defence, but that wasn't, you know, alive. The residual mystery of life would be untouched by solutions to all the easy problems..." In response to your accusation (hock that "this is the sum total of the physicalist view on mind: it can't really define mind, can't establish whether a system experiences qualia, cannot explain the mechanism of the creation of mind, and cannot even prove that mind exists," I simply insist, you're wrong, perhaps not in practice but in principle. I don't find any reason to define mind as anything other than the trillions of nerve connections between billions of neuron cells (with probably many other complicated systems involved) functioning with the efficiency to which they evolved to map out their surroundings, gaining advantage when the proto-type with an analyzing process that is by definition everything it is to be an experiencer of sights, sounds, memories, etc., converting the particles and the surfaces they reflect off before entering the retina into the visualizations we signify as colors, etc., developed.

Granted, this is a grotesque oversimplification, but I see no reason for mind to remain such an elusive concept because we unnecessarily carry over all the philosophical baggage of generations that had virtually no grasp on how the world actually works; we no longer envision matter in terms of dead lumps of clay, but rather an elaborate play of ethereal masses and energies, why continually think of mind as this "other thing" that can't be included in our extensive picture of nature's fabric, that is one particular arrangement of electrical inputs and outputs in a self-referential strange loop that evolved like anything else? Why is your framework, not simply more or less pragmatic, but even remotely viable apart from all of the easy appeals that must inevitably result in solipsism or something like the soul of ancient thinkers, those mystical and almost theological notions of consciousness?

And yet, after all this, "It's in the brain. . . obviously." I want to know how you go from direct experience to this level of confidence in this view. What non-arbitrary steps did you take from solipsism, to objectivism, to confident statements about the nature of mind? If you claim your view on mind is obvious, then please, tell me how to see it for the obvious truth that it is, WITHOUT making the choice to accept it to be so merely because this choice feels pragmatic.

Everything boils down to the measure of success a theory has. Idealism finds traces of its humble beginnings in the Greeks, and I'm not aware of anyone, from Plato to Kant to the quantum physics revolution, who has ever made one suggestion as to how we might discover the nature of mind if it is this mysterious substance "under the hood." You might fairly say that materialists throughout the ages deflected on the issue while science continually opened up black box after black box in other fields of inquiry. But attention has recently turned to the structure of the brain, and as technology has advanced in the past century, allowing us to probe deeper than ever before, and we are becoming more acquainted with the relationships between us and other animals and the world at large, I think the old debate of mind-matter, body-soul, is largely anachronistic.