Mind/matter duality

[bennyboy]

There are a lot of good posts to answer, but let me just say this-- it's weird that we're trying to "fit in" consciousness into various models, or waiting for new data to come back before we can say what consciousness is. This is a reversal of the role of observation. The reality is that you wake up and open your eyes, and that's consciousness. All the rest is stuff that you've made up based on the experiences you've had-- and that even includes models of the universe in which consciousness is nothing more than an accidental byproduct of brain chemistry.

As an aside, my intuitive answer to the mind/body split is that there is no mind or consciousness. There is nothing hiding behind the physical. And I say "intuitive" because the notion that there is no mind is an experience of existential relief for me.

This is the extreme position of physical monism-- there is no mind at all, and therefore no apparent duality to solve.

The other extreme position is to say there's no physical universe at all-- that it's all idealism. If you want to choose a complete monism, this one is better, because it's much less difficult philsophically. If you say that all the physical universe is in the Matrix or the Mind of God or whatever, then there's little contradiction in saying that everything we take as objective reality can be a subset of an idealistic universe, which also allows for the existence of mind. It also makes sense of some of the issues with QM and the effect of observers (monkey is going to disagree with that for sure though).

However, if you want to go with a physical monism absent consciousness, then you come up pretty fast against the idea of consciousness as a brute fact. I'm conscious because I am conscious-- no further conjecture or understanding is really required, and until you can get people to ascribe to a Buddhist or hindu meditation of "not self," very few people are going to say, "Hmmmm. . . I think there's no mind. Wait. . . where did that idea come from?"