Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[Angrboda]

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.

I'm only part way through it. Having read the summary, it seems to ignore the inductive argument from brain interaction (drugs, trauma) and evolution and focuses on arguments which are not as strong to begin with. I assume he's responding to the literature, so maybe those arguments aren't popular in philosophy for one reason or another. I think ultimately the main arguments are going to revolve around whether one posits mental events a place in one's ontology or not. The problem with that is that consciousness observation (phenomenological observation) and other forms of observation aren't equivalent. I don't accept observation of one's mental states a place in my ontology, so I would have a seemingly intractable disagreement with someone who does.