I've just finished reading that essay.
Some of the more disagreeable things I noticed;
1. He fails entirely to acknowledge that while the mechanisms that lead to the sense of self are not well understood we have demonstrated as well as anything can be that altering the brain alters the very sense of self a person experiences. We can isolate/disrupt certain regions of the brain and then subject people to certain sensory stimuli; In one study a sudden noise, bright lights and electric shocks all caused the persons in the experiment to react just as they were aware of the stimuli yet they reported absolutely no experience of events during the time in which the electrodes were interfering with the activities of certain parts of their brain - Another study using fMRI scans reported that the brainwave patterns associated with sensory experience and the sense of self are very much distinct.
https://www.weizmann.ac.il/neurobiology/...vation.pdf
This alone is damning to his entire argument as he places sensory experience at the forefront of the sense of self - what we have demonstrated is that reaction to sensory stimuli is mechanical, a case of cause and effect, and that awareness of said sensory stimuli is simply superfluous.
2. He uses patently silly characterizations of materialism, specifically what he calls "strict materialism"; "Strict or ‘radical’ materialists deny the existence of first person experience at all. The underlying argument goes something like this: There is no such thing as sense experience. There can’t be, because everything must be made of matter, sense experience can’t be made of matter, and therefore it doesn’t exist!"
It's completely disingenuous bullshit, even the most hardened materialist philosophers suggest nothing of the kind. Furthermore, the term "strict materialism" is a mainstay not of any materialist literature, but creationist/intelligent design propaganda. There are no "strict materialists" as he defined them.
3. He argues that materialists switch between accepting and then later rejecting self-awareness; "More often materialists are self-contradictory about the existence of first person experience - there can be at one moment an acceptance of the existence of first person experience but later on a denial. The acceptance will show an awareness of the importance of acknowledging first person experience in everyday life. The denial is usually in the context of a philosophical argument about problems with the use of language, or with concepts, when referring to sense experience."
And how does he support this accusation? Quote Mining! He uses two quotes by Philosopher Gilbert Ryle from a 1949 book "Concept of mind".
a) "Much of our ordinary thinking is conducted in internal monologue or silent soliloquy, usually accompanied by an internal cinematograph show of visual imagery."
b) "In short, there are no such objects as mental pictures..."
What Ryle meant by "there are no such objects as mental pictures" was not that the internal monologue does not exist, but that it, and in this case specifically mental pictures, do not exist as distinct objects but are distributes across the brain, it is not a thing in and of it's self, an 'object', but the coalescence of many processes. For a claim about neuroscience by a philosopher in 1949 it has held up extremely well, we now know and have an abundant amount of evidence that the brain is very much a distributed system, especially where it pertains to consciousness. The brain's modelling/mapping process is fairly well understood;
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=...tTRDoc.pdf
4) He's admits that materialists who believe that first-person-experience is a product of the brain (READ: All of them) avoid the "Pinocchio problem" so he goes about for the rest of the article pretty much exclusively attacking his made up category of "strict materialists". Not only that but he would actually have you believe that "Strict Materialists" are the garden-variety type and it is the other materialists who are the rare ones...
EPIC FAIL.
Some of the more disagreeable things I noticed;
1. He fails entirely to acknowledge that while the mechanisms that lead to the sense of self are not well understood we have demonstrated as well as anything can be that altering the brain alters the very sense of self a person experiences. We can isolate/disrupt certain regions of the brain and then subject people to certain sensory stimuli; In one study a sudden noise, bright lights and electric shocks all caused the persons in the experiment to react just as they were aware of the stimuli yet they reported absolutely no experience of events during the time in which the electrodes were interfering with the activities of certain parts of their brain - Another study using fMRI scans reported that the brainwave patterns associated with sensory experience and the sense of self are very much distinct.
https://www.weizmann.ac.il/neurobiology/...vation.pdf
This alone is damning to his entire argument as he places sensory experience at the forefront of the sense of self - what we have demonstrated is that reaction to sensory stimuli is mechanical, a case of cause and effect, and that awareness of said sensory stimuli is simply superfluous.
2. He uses patently silly characterizations of materialism, specifically what he calls "strict materialism"; "Strict or ‘radical’ materialists deny the existence of first person experience at all. The underlying argument goes something like this: There is no such thing as sense experience. There can’t be, because everything must be made of matter, sense experience can’t be made of matter, and therefore it doesn’t exist!"
It's completely disingenuous bullshit, even the most hardened materialist philosophers suggest nothing of the kind. Furthermore, the term "strict materialism" is a mainstay not of any materialist literature, but creationist/intelligent design propaganda. There are no "strict materialists" as he defined them.
3. He argues that materialists switch between accepting and then later rejecting self-awareness; "More often materialists are self-contradictory about the existence of first person experience - there can be at one moment an acceptance of the existence of first person experience but later on a denial. The acceptance will show an awareness of the importance of acknowledging first person experience in everyday life. The denial is usually in the context of a philosophical argument about problems with the use of language, or with concepts, when referring to sense experience."
And how does he support this accusation? Quote Mining! He uses two quotes by Philosopher Gilbert Ryle from a 1949 book "Concept of mind".
a) "Much of our ordinary thinking is conducted in internal monologue or silent soliloquy, usually accompanied by an internal cinematograph show of visual imagery."
b) "In short, there are no such objects as mental pictures..."
What Ryle meant by "there are no such objects as mental pictures" was not that the internal monologue does not exist, but that it, and in this case specifically mental pictures, do not exist as distinct objects but are distributes across the brain, it is not a thing in and of it's self, an 'object', but the coalescence of many processes. For a claim about neuroscience by a philosopher in 1949 it has held up extremely well, we now know and have an abundant amount of evidence that the brain is very much a distributed system, especially where it pertains to consciousness. The brain's modelling/mapping process is fairly well understood;
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=...tTRDoc.pdf
4) He's admits that materialists who believe that first-person-experience is a product of the brain (READ: All of them) avoid the "Pinocchio problem" so he goes about for the rest of the article pretty much exclusively attacking his made up category of "strict materialists". Not only that but he would actually have you believe that "Strict Materialists" are the garden-variety type and it is the other materialists who are the rare ones...
EPIC FAIL.
.
