John Freestone
Graduate Poster
Hi
I'm probably stepping into the lion's den with this one. Maybe it's been discussed here before. I would like to know what people make of the problem of subjectivity. I could have said 'consciousness', but I said 'subjectivity' to make the point that our experience of consciousness is subjective. While I accept that human consciousness has physical correlations in brain activity, I understand that science has so far failed to make sense of the subjective experience of it.
Let me put it another way: I had a conversation with my sister about 20 years ago when I was putting forward my ideas about spirituality and she was countering them from a scientific viewpoint. All that is needed to explain consciousness, the scientific argument goes, is that dirt and energy slosh about for billions of years until by chance some form of replicating system is formed, which we call life. Then, through random mutation and the interaction of these life systems with the environment, life becomes increasingly complex, and gains greater and greater means of monitoring and manipulating the environment, and the simple brain stem develops more and more systematic processing power until consciousness results, perhaps with the advent of abstraction, symbols, language. She put all that to me, and I understood that it could make perfect sense, no God required.
But, said I, how did one of those resulting consciousnesses become the centre of experience I call my consciousness? How did I get in here, talking to you out there? It is that question that keeps bringing me back to consider different views of the world from the materialist one.
I suspect that many scientific materialists don't consider the mystery of their own consciousness much from that absolute perspective. The more I consider it, meditate and read spiritual philosophies, the more sense a world view makes that includes Consciousness as fundamental, perhaps Cosmic, a priori, given. Scientists are happy to imagine a universe in which matter or energy-matter or space-time are fundamental, and indeed lap up the weirdness of all of that exploding out of a singularity behind which is no past (since time was created) or place (since space was). Yet I have heard no convincing explanation of consciousness that does not describe it in third-person, out-there, functional-material language, utterly missing the philosophical problem of its subjective quality - it is not an it, but an I.
Further doubt about science comes from the reasoning that all of the 'empirical evidence' that is so revered by scientists must eventually be made sense of in the individual consciousness, the nature of which is mostly ignored, perhaps because it is such a mystery. If the observer is not known, any theories about the observed stand on much shakier ground than scientists usually like to admit.
It seems to me, also, that 'scepticism' on this forum is often used to mean 'scientific materialist' (although no doubt some will have other ideas about what it means to them), and I wonder if actually scientific materialism is merely a philosophy - one might even say an atheistic religion, since it has tenets and assumptions, axioms - and rather than 'sceptic' (or skeptic) what is meant is 'believer'. This seems to allow 'sceptics' to assume that their position is natural, and dissenters are either stupid, mad, or at least must show evidence for their belief. No-one seems to expect materialists to prove that material is real, but all manner of 'religious' people (dare I call them mentalists?) are expected to prove that mind is real.
This brings me full circle. Stop for a moment and experience your consciousness. Now which is more absolutely undeniable, you (subject), or all that stuff out there you believe in?
I'm probably stepping into the lion's den with this one. Maybe it's been discussed here before. I would like to know what people make of the problem of subjectivity. I could have said 'consciousness', but I said 'subjectivity' to make the point that our experience of consciousness is subjective. While I accept that human consciousness has physical correlations in brain activity, I understand that science has so far failed to make sense of the subjective experience of it.
Let me put it another way: I had a conversation with my sister about 20 years ago when I was putting forward my ideas about spirituality and she was countering them from a scientific viewpoint. All that is needed to explain consciousness, the scientific argument goes, is that dirt and energy slosh about for billions of years until by chance some form of replicating system is formed, which we call life. Then, through random mutation and the interaction of these life systems with the environment, life becomes increasingly complex, and gains greater and greater means of monitoring and manipulating the environment, and the simple brain stem develops more and more systematic processing power until consciousness results, perhaps with the advent of abstraction, symbols, language. She put all that to me, and I understood that it could make perfect sense, no God required.
But, said I, how did one of those resulting consciousnesses become the centre of experience I call my consciousness? How did I get in here, talking to you out there? It is that question that keeps bringing me back to consider different views of the world from the materialist one.
I suspect that many scientific materialists don't consider the mystery of their own consciousness much from that absolute perspective. The more I consider it, meditate and read spiritual philosophies, the more sense a world view makes that includes Consciousness as fundamental, perhaps Cosmic, a priori, given. Scientists are happy to imagine a universe in which matter or energy-matter or space-time are fundamental, and indeed lap up the weirdness of all of that exploding out of a singularity behind which is no past (since time was created) or place (since space was). Yet I have heard no convincing explanation of consciousness that does not describe it in third-person, out-there, functional-material language, utterly missing the philosophical problem of its subjective quality - it is not an it, but an I.
Further doubt about science comes from the reasoning that all of the 'empirical evidence' that is so revered by scientists must eventually be made sense of in the individual consciousness, the nature of which is mostly ignored, perhaps because it is such a mystery. If the observer is not known, any theories about the observed stand on much shakier ground than scientists usually like to admit.
It seems to me, also, that 'scepticism' on this forum is often used to mean 'scientific materialist' (although no doubt some will have other ideas about what it means to them), and I wonder if actually scientific materialism is merely a philosophy - one might even say an atheistic religion, since it has tenets and assumptions, axioms - and rather than 'sceptic' (or skeptic) what is meant is 'believer'. This seems to allow 'sceptics' to assume that their position is natural, and dissenters are either stupid, mad, or at least must show evidence for their belief. No-one seems to expect materialists to prove that material is real, but all manner of 'religious' people (dare I call them mentalists?) are expected to prove that mind is real.
This brings me full circle. Stop for a moment and experience your consciousness. Now which is more absolutely undeniable, you (subject), or all that stuff out there you believe in?
