The Soul.

Interesting topic/disscusion



Mzzls

 

The brain is certainly an interesting little piece of meat integrated with all the other task oriented pieces contained and operating within sentience, particularly the beating heart, without which all the aformentioned tasks end abruptly. The soul---who really knows? Oh, the mystery.

 

I don't think Chalmers goes that far. He is agnostic on the subject of whether or not consciousness is a fundamental force that exists on its own. He only claims that it could be--unlike atheist "Horseman" Daniel Dennett who simply denies the phenomenal, subjective aspect of human experience because it doesn't fit with his physicalist, behaviorist model of reality. Chalmers (lead singer for the rock band Zombie Blues.)is famous for his "zombie" analogy. From an evolutionary standpoint, zombies, with the exact physical and behavioral machinery as us, could get by well enough that they could pass for humans if you met one on the street. (Of course, they'd have to clean up their act a little from the staggering corpses encountered on TVs The Walking Dead". They might be able to carry out the basic functions of survival and reproduction (you don't see the latter on family television). What ain't they got? An inner life, the immediate experience of being subjectively aware. As Chalmers puts in his rock concerts: "I act like you act, I do what you do / But I don’t know, what it’s like to be you / What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue / I got the zombie blues". Kinda like Data on Startrek Next Generation. Or as Chalmers puts it in more academic language: "even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?"
Consciousness is our most immediate, accessible encounter with reality--the one thing we can be sure of. Solipsists can deny the existence of other minds, (you could be a zombie for all I know, or some kind of delusion, but their own is undeniable as a result of their consciousness.) I infer the existence of your and other people's consciousness from basic similarities between your own behaviors and my own--and assume that there's something going on between your ears that gives you qualia--subjective or internal phenomenal experiences similar to my own. It's of course an inference on my part, but I proceed on the bet that it's true.

Nagel is making a similar point about bats, with which he seems to have lots of contact in his home, wherever that is--Transylvania, maybe. Anyhow, he's willing to make a leap of faith in extending Chalmers' proposition from humans to other sentient species, but recognizes the fundamental impossibility of actually appreciating what the experience of reality is like for them. I think. Any value would be in countering a purely materialistic, mechanistic, reductionist mentality which reduces humans to a glorified machine and implies that we have it all figured out, or soon will. Chalmers and Nagel think that's unlikely. Of course, the real significance of this is that without consciousness the grandeur of reality--all those galaxies, life forms, grand canyons, etc.--would go unappreciated by the zombies. Does that matter?"

I might mention that Alfred North Whitehead, who collaborated with Bertrand Russell in writing the Principia Mathematica, developed a theory of consciousness based on Leibniz's theory of monads--a form of panpsychism, the notion that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe. Basically, these monads are units of proto-consciousness, universal substances that are common in rudimentary form, to rocks, trees, vegetation, etc., and animals and ultimately humans, and evolve into ever more complex levels of awareness in living organisms, culminating in humans; happiness, joy, love, etc. This is metaphysics, of course, that goes well beyond present capabilities for empirical verification or refutation.

 

That of course is beyond empirical confirmation. Maybe so, maybe not. I suspect that my level of subjective self-awareness exceeds that of a rock, although I'm not sure that's true of some of the other posters on these forums.