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

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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 mascot

It'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 accusations of "quote mining" are as spurious as this one?

Chalmers says in his blog post:

traditional theism requires that materialism be false, but the falsity of materialism does little to positively suggest that theism is true

I think that's right (although we might disagree over just how "little"). However, it's possible to argue that once one has adopted something like Chalmers' position, one ought to move on to substance dualism proper, as William Hasker does in this excellent article: http://www.iscid.org/papers/Hasker_NonReductivism_103103.pdf (yes, it's the same ISCID)