Braaains

[pw201]

According to the Steven Novella's Neurologica blog, the Intelligent Design people (specifically the Discovery Institute) are getting interested in neuroscience (see also part 2), attacking the idea that consciousness has a physical basis and advocating Cartesian dualismThis seems to have been rumbling away for a while, but people are writing about

Comments

[ext_63014]

it does fit in with the wider strategy of looking for ways to undermine physicalism.

It seems that Chalmers does indeed think that the problem of consciousness undermines physicalism, according to his blog posted to which you've linked.

[pw201]

My understanding is that Chalmers thinks that there may be laws which produce consciousness which are independent of physical laws (i.e. laws which pertain to physical things). This is rather different from Cartesian dualism. For example, in worlds which have such laws, gradually replacing all your neurons with silicon would not prevent you from being conscious at any point (section 3, "Fading Qualia"). Presumably he'd allow that building machines with the appropriate configuration for these laws to apply would produce conscious machines.

This position differs from physicalism in that consciousness is a product of these bridging laws (that is, the laws specifically pertaining to consciousness) rather than an outworking of physical laws. The zombie world is a possible world (in some sense of the world "possible", the exact meaning of which is the subject of many philosophy papers) just like our own except it lacks the bridging laws. Because, like the parallel postulate, you can't get the bridging laws from the existing laws and

[scribb1e]

a world which includes laws of consciousness we could expect a complete "physical" description of the world to include those laws

You could come up with a physical configuration that produced conscious behaviour and yet didn't cause it, if the consciousness 'lived' somewhere else.

For example, a phone, mobile, internet-linked computer or remote-control robot could all act as if conscious, but only because they are controlled by a human at a distance. So I suppose you could come up with a theory that a particular combination of neurons acted as a receiver for consciousness, but the conscious bit was in another universe with different physical laws. And you'd have to come up with a way of communicating between the universes... But the new physical laws would be of inter-universe communication, not consciousness.

Oh no, shouldn't give them ideas :-)

[ext_63014]

I think at least one "mainstream academi[c]" quoted in the New Scientist article won't agree with with Carrier's definition, given that he says "we might have to posit sentience as a fundamental force of nature [...] But what we do discover will be natural, not supernatural". As I understand Carrier's view, if "sentience" is "fundamental", that would be supernatural, not natural.

It is a bit odd for Christians to adopt [Chalmers] as some sort of mascotIt's not clear to me that this has happened. If you read the Michael Egnor article that Novella references, you'll see that he only cites Chalmers as part of an argument against materialism, and explicitly states that Chalmers is "best described as a property dualist" (which seems fair). Apparently this isn't enough for Novella, who demands that Egnor also provide a definition of property dualism and contrast it with Cartesian dualism, despite the fact that Egnor hasn't mentioned Cartesian dualism in his article, or even positively stated his own view at all. I take it not all

[gareth_rees]

It's just a case of finding a gap in our knowledge and putting a god in it. Pretty much everyone these days laughs at intelligent falling, intelligent atoms, and so on. There are not many remaining problems that are both comprehensible to the masses and unsolved by science. So I predict intelligent dark matter, intelligent memory, intelligent arrow of time, etc.

[gareth_rees]

There used to be a scientific question of what made living things live. One proposal was that living things were alive by virtue of their possession of a vital force.

This question has long since been solved in other ways, but this traditional and elegant solution rather reminds me of Chalmers' dualist physics.