I am not a selfplex

An old post I redated

In a previous post I had written:

"Now let's try a plain vanilla argument from consciousness.

1. Probably, if naturalism is true, there is no consciousness.
2. There is consciousness.
3. Threfore (probably) naturalism is false.

Now, on the face of things, it looks as if the naturalist can respond by denying 2. Ah yes, what you think of as consciousness really doesn't exist. Or perhaps they will give you a definition of consciousness which eliminates salient features of what we common-sensically think of as concsiousness, while retaining the name. I take it that's what's going on in Dennett's Conscoiusness Explained, and that is why some have suggested the title should have been Consciousness Explained Away."

Ahab on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board wrote: I don't quite understand why you think a naturalist would bother trying to deny #2. It is #1 which seems obviously flawed by its question-begging assumption that if naturalism were true there would be no such thing as consciousness.

Well, consider this from Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine.

“each illusory self is a construct of the memetic world in which it successfully competes. Each selfplex gives rise to ordinary human consciousness based on the false idea that there is someone inside who is in charge."

or Pinker from "Is Science Killing the Soul?"

"There's considerable evidence that the unified self is a fiction--that the mind is a congeries of parts acting asynchronously, and that it only an illusion that there is a president in the Oval Office of the brain who oversees the activity of everything."

Now if I am right rational inference is an inference done by some person. The same person must have the thought "All men are mortal" that thinks "Socrates is a man" and "Socrates is mortal." When I think of consciousness I mean that there is an individual, unified person who is conscious, and to tell me that there is no unified person is to tell me, in effect, that there is no consciousness. And this kind of a denial of a unified consciousness, on my view, undermines the possibility of rational inference on which the natural sciences rest. No one could prove the Pythagorean Theorem if there were no president in the oval office making the rational inference.

This is why arguments from consciousness can be part of the argument from reason family; because denials of what I take consciousness to be, denials made by major league naturalistic scientists and philosophers, have disastrous epistemological implications.

J. P. Moreland and the Argument from Consciousness

Ht: John Depoe

A post on uk.religion.christian from Danielos Georgoudis on consciousness

This is a usenet post from Danielos Georgoudis in response to a thread I started, on why the problem of consciosness is so hard for materialists, and why it is something more than just a bump in the road for materialism.

DG: Well here are some of the reasons why consciousness can't be just
another property of material systems:
1. All other properties of material systems can be described in
materialist language; consciousness cannot. It's reasonable to claim
that if a problem cannot be described within a paradigm of thought then
it can't be solved either.

2. All other properties of material systems are directly or indirectly
observable; that is there are always some means to detect whether a
property is present - or at the very least somebody can propose some
speculative idea about how to detect the presence of that property in a
material system. No so in the case of consciousness. For example nobody
has any idea at all about how to measure whether frogs have conscious
experiences or not. Or whether salt crystals growing in brine have
them. Conversely nobody has any idea about how to measure that at death
a person's conscious experience is extinguished. Or that under
general anesthesia patients are not having conscious experiences (the
fact that when they wake up they don't remember having had them is
quite irrelevant).

3. Scientific thought is about explaining observations. The problem of
consciousness refers to the fact that we observe in the first place.
That's a different kind of problem. Nobody has any idea of how
scientific thought could by applied here.

4. There are several problems that science has not yet solved, e.g. how
life started, or how the human brain produces intelligent behavior.
These are hard problems and it may take a long time to solve them.
Still nobody really doubts that these are scientific problems or that
science can in principle solve them. Also there are many scientists
actively working in solving them. Not so in the case of consciousness.
Scientists are practical people; they won't use their time
investigating a problem nobody can cast in scientific terms. It's
materialist philosophers who must try to solve this problem, and they
are really stuck.

5. Contrary to all other material properties, conscious experience is
about quality rather than quantity. Nobody has any idea how one could
test that two people who are looking at the same red wall have a
conscious experience that is in any way similar.

6. In all other problems that science has encountered it was easy to at
least achieve consensus that the problem exists. Not so in the case of
consciousness; materialists cannot even agree whether consciousness
represents a problem for materialism or not. (Which is not surprising
considering that the problem of consciousness cannot even be described
in materialistic terms.)

The above is a rather quick and dirty exposition. The best book I know
about the problem of consciousness is David Chalmer's "Facing Up to the
Problem of Consciousness". Incidentally David Chalmers is considered
one of the brightest philosophers in the field of the philosophy of
mind. You can read more about him in the following wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers


It's interesting to compare the concept of consciousness with the
concept of God. Materialists famously point out that the hypothesis
that God exists is not required to explain any objective observation.
But, equally, the hypothesis that conscious experience exists is not
required to explain any objective observation either. If the former
fact is sufficient reason for believing that God does not exist, so
would the latter fact be sufficient reason for believing that conscious
experience does not exist, which would strike most people as absurd.
Actually there are a few people who go as far as to claim that
conscious experience does not *really* exist but is only an illusion
(whatever that exactly means in this context). Quite a few materialists
claim that free will does not exist - indeed the hypothesis that free
will exists is not necessary to explain any objective observation
either, and it's easier to deny that free will exist than to deny
that conscious experience exists. In any case materialism pushes people
into making claims that to most people sound absurd. Not a good sign.
It appears that materialism is incapable or producing a coherent
worldview. (Worldview is the set of all propositions one accepts as
true.) But theism can.

> Also, re the development of materialism, you'll know doubt be aware of
> many ancient non-dualistic philosophies/religions which have no problem
> seeng mind/body as one and not transcendent/imminent.

I think the most powerful worldview is not based neither on materialism
nor on dualism, but on idealism. Contrary to what many people believe
idealism is fully compatible with science and technology (actually in
simplifies the scientific endeavor) - and is also fully compatible with
theism.