Wandering through the virtual annals....

[novapsyche]

I came across a very close approximation of my philosophical stance concerning the mind tonight. It was unbelievable to find such a resonant opinion out there in the ether. My gnostic psyche could only smile.

Modern analytic philosophy (with a few exceptions) doesn’t take dualism seriously, but it does offer a set of other proposals with which to either explain the link between the mental and the physical, or else make the problem go away by attempting to show that there is no real problem – that the only problem is that we are using words incorrectly, asking nonsensical or meaningless questions, or some variation of these ideas. The philosopher Colin McGinn has parsed the current set of proposed answers into four types, which he calls the DIME shape – "D" for "domestication," the claim that consciousness is really no big deal, that a sufficient understanding of neurophysiology (or perhaps computer science) will explain it, much as digestion and other physiological processes have been explained; "I" for "irreducibility," the idea that consciousness is just a basic feature of reality, like space and time, and can’t be explained in terms of anything simpler; "M" for mysticism, the idea that consciousness is literal magic (an idea McGinn and in fact all analytic philosophers reject almost by definition, but one which I don’t believe can be tossed aside so easily), and finally "E," for "elimination," which is the claim that consciousness does not actually exist, so there isn’t any problem to be addressed. This last position may strike readers as incredible, and they may be excused if they believe that no one could possibly take it seriously, but, in fact, it is currently one of the most popular views in philosophy of mind – a fact which demonstrates just how badly modern philosophy of mind, in its desperate desire to emulate science, has gone astray.

[...] The core of the mind-body problem is that there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the psychological and the physical. We cannot comprehend how causality might leap across this gap. Not only do we not understand the nature of the psychophysical link, we do not even know what such an answer would look like – something which may be true of philosophical problems generally. Theories that substitute behavior for consciousness, explain behavior, and then claim to have explained consciousness (e.g., Dennett’s) abound, but they do us no good when it comes to unraveling the deep mystery of the mind-body problem. Explaining behavior is not philosophically problematic. It may be difficult indeed to explain the complex behavior exhibited by human beings, but we can see, in principle, what such an explanation would consist in. But such an explanation, however complete, would not in any way clarify the nature of the psychophysical link. Behavior is not experience.

I can't wait to wade into the recommended works.

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[myelectricsheep.livejournal.com]

I spend waaaay too much time doing that. Ha.