What do you think about quasi-materialism--viz the idea of being by default a materialist because anything one would ever know about consciousness, or the mind, is going to come through the material brain?
I rather warm to John Horgan; he's what I think of as a fairly non-dogmatic materialist and as such appears to be a worthy interlocutor--certainly one with whom it's actually possible to have a fairly productive dialogue. One feels he might conceivably give ground in light of evidence, and anyone capable of holding Rupert Sheldrake in high regard can't be all that bad.
Let's face it, if you're going to be a sceptic, he's gone as far as it's possible to go without capitulating. His reservations are ones that I myself sometimes feel--until I think of the brain and try to imagine everything we know and don't know as existing only within its limited physical volume and innate capacity. Strangely, materialists don't marvel at the fact (as they see it) that this relatively small, off-white mass of neurons is what, effectively, creates a whole universe.
They might claim it doesn't create, so much as merely witnesses, but on that, they're on shaky ground. We know that ultimately what we think of as the universe is decidedly nebulous. We see a galaxy, for example, and interpret it as a distant agglomeration of stars, those stars being massive radiating bodies like our own sun. All our interpretations are the result of the particular way we perceive reality, even when that perception isn't direct (e.g. of non-palpable electromagnetic radiation), but rather conceptual. Indeed, there's much more that is indirectly rather than directly perceived, and the latter itself isn't strictly speaking concrete reality. It's more the result of the limited way in which we see the world and construct detection devices based on our perception/interpretation.
We're forever changing our interpretation of reality, and in large part science is about that interpretation remaining consistent with what our detection devices tell us (when we're not indulging in speculative theory, that is). Whenever an inconsistency arises, that's when we start coming up with altered interpretations and perhaps new devices for detection or taking advantage of those interpretations. At the end of the day, detection devices and new inventions are all funnelled through the filter of our senses: we have to create some kind of signal we can agree we recognise in order for phenomena to be considered as real.
When it comes to the brain, in science we may look at it from a detached point of view, as if in a sense we don't have anything to do with our inner appreciation of the world. That's all well and good, but it in no way explains why that inner appreciation apparently exists, and in fact why it constitutes the basis for all interpretation. Why is there such a thing as interpretation? Why are we interpreting beings at all?
Central to the concept of interpretation is the fact that nature isn't self-evident and that we feel impelled to understand it. Science is one of the ways we go about that, and that would be fine and dandy if we didn't elevate it to being the
only way. As soon as we do that, we trap ourselves in materialism, which becomes the only explanatory filter; nothing else can exist, and that's such an impoverished interpretative framework.
Impoverished it may be, but for some people, like John Horgan, it's the only thing they can bring themselves to completely rely on. They're perhaps not
entirely closed to at least the notion that present-day science hasn't yet explained everything, but that doesn't extend to the possibility that it won't--even though they may write novels about a brain implant turning someone into a buddha. On the one hand, he seems to be accepting the concept of a buddha, but on the other, he thinks of that state being the possible result of a brain implant of some sort. What kind of implant? Organic, from someone else's brain, or a man-made, mechanical device? If a device, was it consciously designed to do that, or was it just an accident?