[ExI] Raymond Tallis: You won't find consciousness in the brain

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 11 13:42:02 UTC 2010


--- On Sun, 1/10/10, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> <http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527427.100-you-wont-find-consciousness-in-the-brain.html>

This author seems to argue for metaphysical dualism; for the existence of a mental world distinct from the world of matter.

As he writes:

> but my argument is not about
> technical, probably temporary, limitations. It is about the 
> deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if 
> you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have
> demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science
> such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly
> is.

In other words, he argues like Descartes that matter in the brain does not have consciousness, that it must come from somewhere else and exist in some way above, beyond or outside matter. I suppose he must think mental phenomena come from god rather than from its neurological substrate, though he never says so explicitly.

> This disposes of the famous claim by John Searle, Slusser
> Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley:
> that neural activity and conscious experience stand in the same
> relationship as molecules of H[2]O to water, with its properties of
> wetness, coldness, shininess and so on. The analogy fails as the
> level at which water can be seen as molecules, on the one hand, and
> as wet, shiny, cold stuff on the other, are intended to correspond
> to different "levels" at which we are conscious of it. But
> the existence of levels of experience or of description
> presupposes consciousness. Water does not intrinsically have these
> levels.

Here he misrepresents or misunderstands Searle. In my reading of Searle, he uses the example of the solid state of pistons in an engine as analogous to the conscious state of the brain (I thought I invented the water analogy on my own, admittedly a poor one now that I think of it, but here Searle is said to use it too). In any case, the property of solidity does not as this author tries to argue "presuppose consciousness". Solid objects have the physical property of impenetrability no matter whether anyone knows of it. Likewise liquid states have the property of liquidity and gaseous states have the property of gases independent of consciousness, and these are the sorts of analogies that Searle *actually* makes. This author either does not know this or else hopes the reader will not, and his entire argument depends on this false characterization.

As I have it, consciousness has a first-person ontology and for the sake of saving the concept it ought not be *ontologically* reduced. However it may nonetheless be *causually* reduced to its neuronal substrate, something this author has a problem with. But in fact medical doctors do this all the time when discussing drugs and cures for illnesses that affect subjective experience.

I have a tooth-ache this morning for example (I really do). I can take a pill for the conscious pain, and science can rightly concern itself with explanations as to why the pill works to kill the pain. Consciousness is in this way causally reducible to its neuronal substrate, even if it makes no sense to reduce it ontologically. 

Much confusion arises as a result of not understanding the need for a distinction between ontological and causal reduction. When considering almost anything else in the world aside from conscious experience, we simultaneously do an ontological and a causal reduction. 

-gts






      



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