Lincoln
Member
Because we don't seem to have any evidence of mental fundamentals and the mechanisms by which they would give rise to the external world. And I'm not yet willing to blow off neuroscience, even with everyone complaining that they haven't solved consciousness in the 100 or so years they've been working on it.
But I'm not as adamant about this as I was 10 years ago. So I'll keep discussing it and see where we go. It's quite the ride, no?
~~ Paul
Understandable.
The weakness I see with materialists is the dismissal of consciousness. Neuroscience or neurology is highly beneficial in regards to understanding things like how vision works and cognitive diseases like Alzheimer's. The glaring problem I see is the way they talk about consciousness. Novella sees it not as a hard problem but a misunderstanding of a bunch of easy problems (he loves quoting Dennett). He also always pulls out that old standby "we just don't know the mechanism yet".
I watched this video recently with Sean Carroll about consciousness and I was a little baffled I will link it here. I don't know if it was a synchronistic event;),but the first comment by arbenboba stole the words out of my mouth. Sean thinks all this talk about consciousness is a huge misunderstanding, it's just the way we talk about our experiences. If that is not a hand wave, I don't know what is.
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