The Consciousness Myth - Galen Strawson.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1523413.ece

"Many historians of philosophy, with all their intended praise, . . . attribute mere nonsense . . . to past philosophers”, as Kant pointed out in 1790. The history of ideas is a zoo – of myths about what happened and what people said. I used to think the mythologizing was a relatively slow process, because the passage of time was needed to blur the past. Twenty years ago, however, an instant myth was born: a myth about a dramatic resurgence of interest in the topic of consciousness in philosophy, in the mid-1990s, after long neglect."
 
What a verbose way (I guess motivated by his emotional attachment) to express one's belief in the notion that consciousness is a product of the physical. A notion made stupid by not defining what one means by consciousness. Thankfully I was conscious enough to read only the concluding paragraph.
 
Good to know that everyone skims these papers and then blows them off because they do not reach the desired conclusion. In this case the perfectly harmless conclusion is:

"The mistake is to think we know enough about the nature of physical reality to have any good reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical."

~~ Paul
 
Saiko, Strawson thinks consciousness is fundamental, so what's the problem? On a related note, is any post that doesn't chime with the stringent ciretorion of the echo chamber this place has become, now verboten. Or, cannot be discussed seriously without the scoffing attitude of someone who hasn't fucking read it?
 
At the root of the muddle lies an inability to overcome the Very Large Mistake so clearly identified by Eddington and others in the 1920s – not to mention the lovely Irishman John Toland in 1704, Anthony Collins in 1707, Hume in 1739, Joseph Priestley in 1777, and many others. The mistake is to think we know enough about the nature of physical reality to have any good reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical. It seems to be stamped so deeply in us, by our everyday experience of matter as lumpen stuff, that not even appreciation of the extraordinary facts of current physics can weaken its hold. To see through it is a truly revolutionary experience.

This. This entirely.
 
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