Lee Corbin writes (replying to Bruno Marchal):
> I agree the abandoning of vitalism is progress. And it is true that > natural science has explained features like self-reproduction, > animal motion, energy transformation (sun -> living matter) and so > on. But it is just erroneous to conclude that the mind-body problem > has been solved.
No, it is not "just erroneous". I know of many thoughtful people, and include myself as one of them, who believe that the so-called mind body problem is some sort of verbal or linguistic problem. We see it as arising most likely in the minds of people who think there must be a deeper explanation for why highly advanced products of natural selection can report their internal states.
> And then if we are really "digital machine", I offer a case > that materialism will be abandoned from purely rational > consideration. Matter? A lasting aristotelian superstition ...
Well, you could be right! The jury's still out! :-)
> > Observer-moments seems to arise simply from observers, > > Except that nobody has ever succeed in explaining how the 1-person > observer moment can arise from any 3-person description of an observer.
And the aforesaid "we" don't think that anything needs explaining. Almost everyone reading this believes that an AI program could be written such that even if you single-step through it, it will report on its feelings, and that they'll be no less genuine than ours. And from this, I conclude that in all likelihood, there really isn't a problem.... :-)
Lee
I don't believe there is anything fundamentally mysterious about the human brain, in that it is just a collection of a dozen or so chemical elements organised in a particular way. Some people are offended by this assertion, and believe there is some special ingredient or mysterious process involved in cognition, which is perhaps forever beyond scientific scrutiny. We could call this folk dualism and folk vitalism, and it is very common in the community. Of course, it's nonsense.
Having clarified that, I still think there is a real issue when considering consciousness and the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction. The problem is that it is possible, in theory, to collect, record and communicate information about any aspect of the physical universe *except* one's conscious experience. A person who is blind from birth might learn everything about light, how the eye works, how the brain processes sensory data from the optic nerve, and so on, but still have *no idea* of what it actually feels like to see.
I don't believe there is some "deeper explanation" for why we have conscious experiences; manifestly, it is something that happens when certain electrochemical reactions occur in our brain, just as travelling down the road at 60 km/h is something that happens when controlled explosions occur in the cylinders of a car's engine. But this does not mean that the unique, private nature of conscious experience should be ignored or denied.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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