(April 25, 2015 at 7:27 am)robvalue Wrote: ...
Personally I'm a methodological naturalist, so I feel no need to deny the existence of that which we can't measure.
I asked my wife yesterday if I was stubborn (not randomly, it was part of a conversation) and she says not normally, but I can be when it comes to things like ghosts. Of course, she is confusing being stubborn with being sceptical. I don't claim there are no ghosts either.
Consciousness really is the fly in the ointment for little piss ants like me. I have to admit it very much feels exactly like some sort of "extra" thing, existing in its own place. I feel helpless to try and properly explain it using science, to say "where" it is, or if I'm even asking the right questions. With this, there are a lot of alternatives which I don't rule out, and I feel much less confident about smoothing it over with science as I do ghosts and religion. I have to resort to "No idea". I can only offer guesses. I don't even know what the default position is, as the only evidence I have about it appears to contradict any scientific position I put forward. I can't pretend there is no evidence like I can say about other things, just that I cannot properly assess the evidence.
I think consciousness is a process, not a thing or substance. An analogy for this is fire. Primitive people thought that fire was a thing, but the modern understanding of it is as a process, not a substance. Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (called "fuel"). Stop the process, and you stop the fire. There isn't any nonphysical part of it, but it isn't a substance; it is a process.
When one thinks, one thinks about something, and there is, for want of a better expression, constant movement, rather like a fire.
This, I think, best fits with our understanding of consciousness.
If, on the other hand, thinking were some non-material thing, how could it possibly interact with physical stuff? Why would it be that, when alcohol is in the brain, one's thinking is affected, if one had an immaterial mind?
Of course, alcohol in the brain affects the processes of the brain, and so if thinking is a brain process (or processes), then it makes perfect sense that alcohol in the brain would affect thinking.
Examining people with damaged brains helps further this idea, that one's mind is a subset of the processes of the brain, rather than some immaterial substance that is magically connected to a physical body.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
