Dancing David said:
I believe that consiousness has arisen from a series of reverberating circuts in the biochemical mess in my head. I have yet to see any proof that there is consiousness outside of the material which houses it. Challenge one: so you think that consiousness is some sort of metapsychic phenomena, debate me.
yes, this has been argued round the clock on the "materialism" thread but I agree that there were many sub-arguments going on at the same time, so it might be worth returning to the central issue regarding the role of consciousness.
When one tries to find proof that consciousness is somehow separate from the physical world you inevitably enter into a situation where the particular fundamental philosophical position you take determines whether you can be allowed to find the answer to this question.
For example, most poeple can distinguish between the two concepts of matter and mind. Mind is the "inner" world and matter is the other "outer" world of physical reality, separate from the world of our experience. This might be regarded as a dualistic perspective of reality and I think its a perspective that we naturally fall into when going about our everyday lives without thinking what it really means. If one is to acknowledge that there is a real distinction between these two realms then one has to try to explain what the "mind" realm actually is and how it differs from the "matter" realm and also how the two interact (because from this perspective, matter clearly affects mind, eg, drugs).
If your question is phrased within this philosophical framework then there is a huge problem trying to show that the world of experience is separate from the matter of the brain because we can't start to describe mind in mathematical terms without refering to the other realm of matter.
Another approach is to accept that there is only one realm to reality. A materialistic position (debated to the death in the other thread) proposes that our subjective experience is
the same thing as the physical process going on in the brain. So, if we were to have a complete description of the neuro-physical processes going on that correlate with a certain experience, there would be nothing left to explain. However, I see problems with the explanatory power of this approach that I will post when I have a bit of time for clarity.
Perhaps the only other approach is to propose that again there is only one realm but here the world we distinguish as the "objective" physical world is actually an intrinsic part of the mental world. There is no world "outside" of our experiences, so to ask whether there is evidence that consciousness is separate from the physical brain is to misunderstand the nature of reality itself (under this philosophical framework).
rove to me that I don't have free will.
