I start off the morning, now 12:13 or so thus perceptibly pushed towards the most scant entrance of afternoon-ness, reading an article on the potential irreducibility of mind-body dualism, although not put exactly into those terms. Substitute consciousness for soul and you have a general idea of what essentially breaks down the modern equivalent of the ongoing concern. I'm not sure how convinced I am, although years ago I would have taken on the negating position.
Put succinctly: we are organic creatures, body, brain, heart, lungs, intestines and the shit contained therein. We exist in a physical world, and, our body, the multi-stimulus-sucking antenna that is, absorbs the offshoots, the radiations, sound waves, reports and smells and lights of things bouncing and colliding with one another. But what is it that makes sense of it? I smell dog poo, which signals a series of brain bursts that eventually lead to me checking my shoe, but at what point do the words "Stinky, not cheese, I hate Fido"? come into being for me. For the dualist, that can't be measured. For the materialist, it can and eventually will.
More succinctly: Say Geof is eating a cookie. Delicious, gooey, chocolate-spattered fingers and jowls, the whole shebang. Now, Zombie-Geof comes along, thinks this looks delicious, and eats Geof's brain. First off, he is going to only taste brain, even though at the time the brain was experiencing the joyful deliciousness that was that cookie at the time. Now, not ever having tried Geof-brain before, I can make this even more hypothetical -- say I could taste the cookie on Geof's brain, the shambling decomposing festering version of myself. What I would not experience would be Geof's version of that cookie, it would be my own version of the cookie from the moment it hit my taste buds. And that was definitely a fine cookie.
[Ed. note: This is actually a paraphrasing of an argument made in philosophical circles. I cannot lay claim to it.]
So what was the fallacy of the Tallis argument (the linked one, I mean)? 1) I think in some ways he belittles the evolutionary arguments, and as thus doesn't really advance the dialogue much. 2) He doesn't seem to be asking -- or answering -- much of anything.
Get me started on this point in a little bit. I've got an entire theory of consciousness in the human species, and as should be expected from this otherwise curmudgeonly opiner, it's not pretty. And -- also a symptom, but of something probably more disturbing -- probably being conflated with another issue entirely. Stay tuned, kids.
