Dear Friends,
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Love and Light.
David
Avshalom C. Elitzur
CONSCIOUSNESS MAKES A DIFFERENCE: A RELUCTANT DUALIST’S CONFESSION
To Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne
Introduction: Advancing the Mind-Body Problem into the Realm of Science
If something odd persists, would its mere persistence make it natural?
That would be the case with the layperson, but the scientist and philosopher should know better. Commonness should never mislead us to get used to the incredible.
Such is the phenomenon known as “consciousness,” underlying the age-old “Mind-Body Problem.” That consciousness exists At all is as odd today as it has been in ancient times. But here too, familiarity breeds
contempt; the presence of consciousness at every moment in our waking lives often makes us forget how incredible it is.
For more than two millennia, the study of this problem (Block et al.,1997) has made no scientific progress. Physicalism,1 dualism, and all other isms keep debating on it without being able to propose any decisive argument, not to mention experimental test, which could conclude the debate in favor of one theory or another.
But is this stalemate inevitable? I believe I have a scientific argument (Elitzur, 1989, 1996) in favor of one of the rival parties. Unfortunately, this party is interactionist dualism, which I dislike most. Indeed my argument comes with the expected penalty on this option, namely, entailing violation of a very basic physical principle. Being a physicist,
this violation upsets me most.
Yet the argument is scientific, in that it derives, from a philosophical statements, an empirical prediction via the following reasoning:
1. By physicalism, consciousness and brain processes are identical.
2. Whence, then, the dualistic bafflement about their apparent non identity?
3. By physicalism, this nonidentity, and hence the resultant
bafflement, must be due to error.
4. But then, again by physicalism, an error must have a causal explanation.
5. Logic, cognitive science and AI are advanced enough nowadays to provide such an explanation for the alleged error underlying dualism, and future neurophysiology must be able to point out its neural correlate.
This prediction, if rigorous, is falsifiable and therefore turns both physicalism and dualism into scientific theories in the full Popperian sense. Now, can this prediction further be falsified? I believe it can, even
before the above disciplines respond to the challenge. This can be done with the aid of another powerful scientific procedure, namely, thought experiment (Brown, 2007). Employing this procedure, I will show that no logical, cognitive or neural failure can produce the brain-consciousness nonidentity and the resulting bafflement as expressed by many humans. Ergo, bafflement about consciousness is a case where consciousness, as
non identical with brain processes, exerts a causal effect of its own.
Introduction: Advancing the Mind-Body Problem into the Realm of Science
If something odd persists, would its mere persistence make it natural?
That would be the case with the layperson, but the scientist and philosopher should know better. Commonness should never mislead us to get used to the incredible.
Such is the phenomenon known as “consciousness,” underlying the age-old “Mind-Body Problem.” That consciousness exists At all is as odd today as it has been in ancient times. But here too, familiarity breeds
contempt; the presence of consciousness at every moment in our waking lives often makes us forget how incredible it is.
For more than two millennia, the study of this problem (Block et al.,1997) has made no scientific progress. Physicalism,1 dualism, and all other isms keep debating on it without being able to propose any decisive argument, not to mention experimental test, which could conclude the debate in favor of one theory or another.
But is this stalemate inevitable? I believe I have a scientific argument (Elitzur, 1989, 1996) in favor of one of the rival parties. Unfortunately, this party is interactionist dualism, which I dislike most. Indeed my argument comes with the expected penalty on this option, namely, entailing violation of a very basic physical principle. Being a physicist,
this violation upsets me most.
Yet the argument is scientific, in that it derives, from a philosophical statements, an empirical prediction via the following reasoning:
1. By physicalism, consciousness and brain processes are identical.
2. Whence, then, the dualistic bafflement about their apparent non identity?
3. By physicalism, this nonidentity, and hence the resultant
bafflement, must be due to error.
4. But then, again by physicalism, an error must have a causal explanation.
5. Logic, cognitive science and AI are advanced enough nowadays to provide such an explanation for the alleged error underlying dualism, and future neurophysiology must be able to point out its neural correlate.
This prediction, if rigorous, is falsifiable and therefore turns both physicalism and dualism into scientific theories in the full Popperian sense. Now, can this prediction further be falsified? I believe it can, even
before the above disciplines respond to the challenge. This can be done with the aid of another powerful scientific procedure, namely, thought experiment (Brown, 2007). Employing this procedure, I will show that no logical, cognitive or neural failure can produce the brain-consciousness nonidentity and the resulting bafflement as expressed by many humans. Ergo, bafflement about consciousness is a case where consciousness, as
non identical with brain processes, exerts a causal effect of its own.
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