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Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos  It solves it as long as you think "poof! it works" is a solution. There isn't even a glimpse of a theory of how the mental might operate. And I daresay there never will be. |
Perhaps. The same is true for materialism, though. It is hard to see how you could ever explain consciousness arising from physical processes. Furthermore, explaining how matter arises from nothing seems equally difficult (even though this isn't technically a scientific problem, as you can only explain
properties of fundamental forces of nature, not how they arise).
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Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos What materialism denies is that consciousness is a separate thing, therefore leading to dualism. |
That's the problem. All attempts to say consciousness is the same thing as physical processes fail in my opinion, because these are clearly two different things. You have to posit that nature has dualistic properties if you're ever going to explain consciousness in physicalistic terms. How could there else be conscious experience? Why wouldn't everything "go on in the dark"?
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Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos You people all talk about consciousness in a dualistic manner, as if it is surely a separate thing that materialism has to find. If consciousness is a collective term for a set of brain processes, then there is no separate thing. |
Let me ask you this: Why do our brains give rise to consciousness "now" and not sometime else? According to relativity theory, there is no universal now (that is, my "now" can be someone else's past or future), so our brains shouldn't know when to be conscious.