(September 1, 2021 at 11:11 am)Angrboda Wrote:(September 1, 2021 at 9:20 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: I take Nagel's challenge from "Mind and Cosmos" seriously: "Materialism requires reductionism; therefore the failure of reductionism requires an alternative to materialism."
Except that you can't show the failure of reductionism except by an argument from ignorance, which is invalid. So Nagel's challenge leads nowhere.
What about qualia? Qualia are not explained by brain states. I think that's one of Nagel's main points.
To return to Searle, conscious states are causally reducible to brain states (I agree with that). But they aren't ontologically reducible (because of qualia). So the point is: reductionism fails here. Searle believes it is simply a gap in our scientific knowledge, and that the reductionism fails simply because of our ignorance of the natural world... ie... it doesn't necessarily fail. I'm not sure I completely agree with Searle here. But I like his analysis.
I'm also interested in your take on the dualism paper, Angrboda, if you happened to read it.
