Q
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Many atheists or agnostics subscribe to a materialist world view and believe that our consciousness and mind are *wholly *accounted for by the actions of the material brain and is merely something “generated” by the brain, like light generated from a light bulb. Over the last half century numerous cracks have opened up in this materialist paradigm and a strong case can now be made that consciousness is not as wholly reducible to the physics and material of the brain, as a matter of fact we’re close to that point where the old materialist view of man and mind starts to look nearly untenable.
For starters there is the Gödelian argument initially proposed by Oxford philosopher John Lucas in 1961 in his paper Minds, Machines and Gödel demonstrating the fact that we now know from Gödel’s Theorem that human minds can analyze any formal system (which includes any conceivable mechanistic systems or computers) and then find the Gödel proposition of that system demonstrates that the human mind itself does not also act as a formal system and can not be considered as a type of machine (or a “computer made of meat”, as has been said). This appears to eliminate a completely materialist explanation of “mind”. The Gödelian argument was expanded on by the renowned mathematical physicist Roger Penrose in his two books in the 1990’s; *The Emperor’s New Mind *and Shadows of the Mind. Penrose points out that it’s the human mind’s quality of “understanding” and it’s ability to form judgments and have insights that is something that can never “in principle” be encapsulated by *any *type of computer or mechanical system, when we form judgments and have insights our minds appear to be operating outside any known laws of physics.
Then we have what is known as the “Mary problem”, from the argument first proposed in 1982 by philosopher Frank Jackson which poses some serious problems for a reductive explanation of consciousness. Mary is a super-scientist, locked in her black and white room, which is devoid of any color. She has spent her whole life in that black and white room never seeing any colors, she’s even got black and white TV. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and has studied the science of the perception of color and learned everything science can possible know about perception of color; she know every minute detail in the chain of how electromagnetic radiation of a 700 nanometers wavelength on the visible spectrum of light is passed through the lens of the eye and received by the 7 million cones within the back of the retina and transmitted via the optic nerve to the visual cortex and to it’s associated neurons to produce the perception of the color “red” within the brain. Mary knows everything we can conceivable know about perception of color. Then one day she leaves her black and white room and actually experiences seeing the color red for the first time in her life. Did Mary learn something new about the perception of color when she left the room? One would think so, she learned what seeing and *experiencing *red is really like and if she did indeed gain new knowledge materialism and physicalism appear to give an inadequate explanation of our consciousness. Since Frank Jackson first proposed the “Mary’s room” argument in his paper Epiphenomenal Qualia nearly 30 years ago, it has left materialists thinkers scratching their heads and looking for a way out of the enigma.
The Mary problem is based on Mary’s new knowledge which was gained from her subjective conscious experience, or “qualia” or “phenomenal experience”. Explaining these qualia has been termed as “Hard Problem of consciousness” by the philosopher David Chalmers in his seminal paper *Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness *published in 1995. In this paper and others Chalmers has made what many feel is a convincing case that the hard problem of consciousness, the subjective experience of persons, i.e. “qualia”, can never be explained in materialist terms, the most a material object should produce are non-phenomenal experiencing “zombies”, robot people with no inner life of subjective experience.
In his book *The Conscious Mind *Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe, like mass or energy, which can not be further reduced to an end product of something else, like for instance water can be reduced to hydrogen and oxygen atoms, consciousness is a fundamental entity. This idea coincidently (or not so coincidently, if it’s simply the truth) puts him along the same train of thinking as seen in the writings of such well known and highly respected quantum physicists such as Henry P. Stapp, John Archibald Wheeler, and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner to name a few, in papers such as *Remarks on the mind-body question *and Mental Causation.
continued in next post . . .
For starters there is the Gödelian argument initially proposed by Oxford philosopher John Lucas in 1961 in his paper Minds, Machines and Gödel demonstrating the fact that we now know from Gödel’s Theorem that human minds can analyze any formal system (which includes any conceivable mechanistic systems or computers) and then find the Gödel proposition of that system demonstrates that the human mind itself does not also act as a formal system and can not be considered as a type of machine (or a “computer made of meat”, as has been said). This appears to eliminate a completely materialist explanation of “mind”. The Gödelian argument was expanded on by the renowned mathematical physicist Roger Penrose in his two books in the 1990’s; *The Emperor’s New Mind *and Shadows of the Mind. Penrose points out that it’s the human mind’s quality of “understanding” and it’s ability to form judgments and have insights that is something that can never “in principle” be encapsulated by *any *type of computer or mechanical system, when we form judgments and have insights our minds appear to be operating outside any known laws of physics.
Then we have what is known as the “Mary problem”, from the argument first proposed in 1982 by philosopher Frank Jackson which poses some serious problems for a reductive explanation of consciousness. Mary is a super-scientist, locked in her black and white room, which is devoid of any color. She has spent her whole life in that black and white room never seeing any colors, she’s even got black and white TV. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and has studied the science of the perception of color and learned everything science can possible know about perception of color; she know every minute detail in the chain of how electromagnetic radiation of a 700 nanometers wavelength on the visible spectrum of light is passed through the lens of the eye and received by the 7 million cones within the back of the retina and transmitted via the optic nerve to the visual cortex and to it’s associated neurons to produce the perception of the color “red” within the brain. Mary knows everything we can conceivable know about perception of color. Then one day she leaves her black and white room and actually experiences seeing the color red for the first time in her life. Did Mary learn something new about the perception of color when she left the room? One would think so, she learned what seeing and *experiencing *red is really like and if she did indeed gain new knowledge materialism and physicalism appear to give an inadequate explanation of our consciousness. Since Frank Jackson first proposed the “Mary’s room” argument in his paper Epiphenomenal Qualia nearly 30 years ago, it has left materialists thinkers scratching their heads and looking for a way out of the enigma.
The Mary problem is based on Mary’s new knowledge which was gained from her subjective conscious experience, or “qualia” or “phenomenal experience”. Explaining these qualia has been termed as “Hard Problem of consciousness” by the philosopher David Chalmers in his seminal paper *Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness *published in 1995. In this paper and others Chalmers has made what many feel is a convincing case that the hard problem of consciousness, the subjective experience of persons, i.e. “qualia”, can never be explained in materialist terms, the most a material object should produce are non-phenomenal experiencing “zombies”, robot people with no inner life of subjective experience.
In his book *The Conscious Mind *Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe, like mass or energy, which can not be further reduced to an end product of something else, like for instance water can be reduced to hydrogen and oxygen atoms, consciousness is a fundamental entity. This idea coincidently (or not so coincidently, if it’s simply the truth) puts him along the same train of thinking as seen in the writings of such well known and highly respected quantum physicists such as Henry P. Stapp, John Archibald Wheeler, and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner to name a few, in papers such as *Remarks on the mind-body question *and Mental Causation.
continued in next post . . .
