RE: On naturalism and consciousness
August 17, 2014 at 5:03 am
(This post was last modified: August 17, 2014 at 5:16 am by bennyboy.)
For those who have produced, and inevitably will continue to produce, "it's in the brain" as an explanation for consciousness, I would say two things:
1) You can assume that everyone already knows what you're saying, and should infer that there's a deeper philosophical argument. If you are explaining the basics of brain function, you might want to consider that you aren't "getting" the point of the OP.
2) Being convinced in a physical monist model has caused you to ignore the addage: "correlation is not causation." Nobody (I think) doubts that there's a very strong relationship between the brain and the content of mind. This is very different than understanding why mind exists and what it is about any arrangement of particles that supposedly causes it to come into existence. Even a perfect correlation between brain function and qualia does not serve as an explanation for how a mind comes into being.
Physicalism requires explanation for mind, but has no good explanation, while idealism requires merely classification-- those ideas which are personal, and those which are shared by others; in idealism, the physical universe and all its interactions are still perfectly consistent as ideas rather than entities. Idealism is therefore the simpler model.
1) You can assume that everyone already knows what you're saying, and should infer that there's a deeper philosophical argument. If you are explaining the basics of brain function, you might want to consider that you aren't "getting" the point of the OP.
2) Being convinced in a physical monist model has caused you to ignore the addage: "correlation is not causation." Nobody (I think) doubts that there's a very strong relationship between the brain and the content of mind. This is very different than understanding why mind exists and what it is about any arrangement of particles that supposedly causes it to come into existence. Even a perfect correlation between brain function and qualia does not serve as an explanation for how a mind comes into being.
(August 17, 2014 at 4:53 am)Michael Wrote: And yet, I have to say, I find the opposite argument, the philosophy of idealism, equally compelling, that what we call matter is a product of consciousness; matter only has any meaning within consciousness.I put it this way. We need to explain all experiences-- those which are clearly internal, and those which are related to the objective world which we all share. Physical monism has a serious problem-- viewing ideas and experiences as physical is a totally broken view-- because it adds to physical monism the exact property that it is designed to circumvent: subjective awareness. An idealist monism has no such problem. All our physical interactions and knowledge exist for us only as experiences anyway. Even doing science, even listening to a professor talk about physical monism, even looking at cells under a microscope, or smashing atoms. . . all these are experiences.
Physicalism requires explanation for mind, but has no good explanation, while idealism requires merely classification-- those ideas which are personal, and those which are shared by others; in idealism, the physical universe and all its interactions are still perfectly consistent as ideas rather than entities. Idealism is therefore the simpler model.
