[lit-ideas] Re: Bears, oh my!

  • From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:11:12 -0700

I agree completely. I might be conflating energy with consciousness, and they might be distinct. I once thought that all this talk about consciousness is silly; there's a brain, trillions of instantaneous reactions born out of billions of years of evolution and that's the mind. The mind is the brain. 

That's what my friends in the biology department say. Most of my
philosophy colleagues are not so sure.


But how does neurotransmitter, or a gazillion of them, turn into a thought?


Indeed, how? Nobody, not even strict materialists, can explain that.
This is what David Chalmers, a few years ago, dubbed the Hard Problem
of consciousness. Most arguments against materialism t (mental
phenomena are identical with brain processes) are variations on the
notion that one could know everything that was (in principle) knowable
about someone's brain processes when they are experiencing certain
things and yet not know what the experience itself (the taste of a
mango, e.g.) was like. Things like the taste of a mango, the felt
pressure of too-tight collar, are, in the trade, known as 'qualia.' An
example of this is Frank Jackson's 'knowledge argument,' which has
been around awhile and now hardly ever appears without a peloton of
admirers, detractors, and pages torn out of learned journals.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/know-arg.htm

Robert Paul
Reed College


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