Lincoln
Member
This is a blog post by Steve Novella in regards to an article posted on The Conversation.
Thought I would post it here to see what you guys thought. A lot of assumptions on both sides. Me personally I am agnostic when it comes to God, I am also not part of any religious sect.
Novellas piece on dualism should probably be a good conversation starter.
Thought I would post it here to see what you guys thought. A lot of assumptions on both sides. Me personally I am agnostic when it comes to God, I am also not part of any religious sect.
Novellas piece on dualism should probably be a good conversation starter.
Dualism
He writes:
How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence, human consciousness?
It is a mystery that lies beyond science.
This is utter nonsense that I have already dealt with extensively. Nelson is just playing a word game, and relying on philosophers like Plato who struggled to understand the universe prior to any knowledge of science, and specifically neuroscience.
Consciousness is not itself a thing, it is a process of the brain.
He then doubles down on dualism, not sure if he is counting this as a separate argument:
Recognizing that he could not reconcile his own scientific materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a leading atheist, Daniel Dennett, in 1991 took the radical step of denying that consciousness even exists.
This is a straw man. Dennett is not simplistically saying that consciousness does not exist, but only that it is not a separate phenomenon of the universe that requires new physics or new dualist phenomena. Consciousness, rather, is simply what the brain does.
Looked at another way, Dennett is saying there is no hard problem of consciousness, it is made of all the easy problems. If you just keep following the activity of the brain it just keeps going, talking to itself, taking in information, etc. That ongoing process is consciousness. There is no separate thing required.
I think that Dennett is probably right, or at least he is close to the truth. Neuroscientists may discover some network in the brain that has some function essentially to consciousness that we are not currently taking into account. But that is the how, not the what. It is clear that consciousness is what the brain does.