How can objective things like brain cells produce subjective experiences like the feeling that ‘I’ am striding through the grass? This gap is what David Chalmers calls ‘the hard problem.’ ...It is a modern version of the ancient mind/body problem – but it seems to get worse, not better, the more we learn about the brain... The objective world out there, and the subjective experiences in here, seem to be totally different kinds of things. Asking how one produces the other seems to be nonsense. The intractability of this problem suggests to me that we are making a fundamental mistake in the way we think about consciousness – perhaps right at the very beginning.
Susan Blackmore, ‘What is consciousness?’, Big Questions in Science, in Harriet Swain (ed.), Big Questions in Science, (Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 29-40.
6 comments:
Why such defeatism? People seem so eager to give up the effort to understand consciousness even before they have really begun. Instead of talking about theories of consciousness, we have theories for why consciousness is impossible to explain. It's almost as if these people do not want to explain consciousness, as if they are afraid somehow. What could be stopping them?
I dunno. Maybe Blackmore has a supernaturalist bias. :)
ohn Moore said...
Why such defeatism? People seem so eager to give up the effort to understand consciousness even before they have really begun. Instead of talking about theories of consciousness, we have theories for why consciousness is impossible to explain. It's almost as if these people do not want to explain consciousness, as if they are afraid somehow. What could be stopping them?
reductionist are not explaining consciousnesses at all, they reducing it to brain function then denouncing it as phenomena, we should resist explaining it when it;merely being explaimned away
reductionist want to reduce it to brain function because if consciousnesses is immaterial then materiliasm is wrong,
Yes, Blackmore is a spiritualist and believes in the paranormal.
have you read Chalmers?
ohn Moore said...
Yes, Blackmore is a spiritualist and believes in the paranormal.
July 28, 2017 4:06 AM
>>what do you think SN means where did the word come from?
did the church fathers believe in the SN?
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