A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

I don't think the evolutionary narrative proves anything. It shows a relationship between brain and behavior, but I don't think it allows us to establish in a philosophically satisfying way whether a given physical system is or isn't experiencing qualia. It doesn't define qualia, give a mechanism for it (other than a vague sense that it's in the brain, somewhere, cuz 'where else?'), or explain why any organism would need to be aware of the processes in the brain in order for it to respond to its environment.

Sure, it's not a silver bullet for everything we would like to understand regarding the neurophysiology of mental experiences but that mind has a physical basis --- a perspective that analogously coincides with individual growth and development of brain, and simultaneously qualia --- I think it's more than adequate evidence.

It's also a straw man. I've explicitly talked about the relationship between brain and mind. Since I see all of reality as the complex expression of ideas and the interaction among ideas, I have no problem with the brain-- as the expression of underlying ideas.

What you do not have is a reason why the mind exists at all, and what properties a brain has that a rock doesn't have, that allows/causes/necessitates this existence. And this is the sum total of the physicalist view on mind: it can't really define mind, can't establish whether a system experiences qualia, cannot explain the mechanism of the creation of mind, and cannot even prove that mind exists.

And yet, after all this, "It's in the brain. . . obviously." I want to know how you go from direct experience to this level of confidence in this view. What non-arbitrary steps did you take from solipsism, to objectivism, to confident statements about the nature of mind? If you claim your view on mind is obvious, then please, tell me how to see it for the obvious truth that it is, WITHOUT making the choice to accept it to be so merely because this choice feels pragmatic.