If any alternative explanation can’t be tested and falsified then it can only remain speculation. Intuition, revelation and common sense, as Nagel’s reviewers pointed out, do not have a very good track record in explaining how things actually work.
Which brings me back to my original question. If it’s your position that: Since immaterial consciousness hasn’t been yet explained by material processes that it must therefore be a product of something which is also immaterial; how is that not an argument from ignorance? If that isn’t your position, then what is it?.
People do not have to explain HOW we have free will in order to hold people responsible for their moral choices. Determinists are in the position of arguing that people cannot help but do exactly what they do but it is okay to hold them responsible because, well, we can’t help but do that, either. (As a child, I wondered why, when a defense attorney argued that his client couldn’t help but do what he did, the jury foreman didn’t stand up and say, ‘And we can’t help but find him guilty!’ Determinists expect the idea of determinism to MAKE A DIFFERENCE in how people behave, but how could it? It is not a material object and can have no material impact on the brain. Put another way, if you believe someone should NOT be found guilty because you hear his actions were wholly determined, then determinism must be FALSE! Can’t you see that?)
Materialists have never demonstrated this. They have ASSUMED this.
The ancients did not believe they had EXPLAINED consciousness; it was something that they thought a coherent view of the world must account for. The same goes for human freedom and certain laws of thought (–identity, contradiction). They didn’t argue—as many moderns do–that causality is so problematic, we might should just get rid of the notion. They did not doubt that other people have minds, as many modern philosophers have, and they avoided the disastrous mistakes about what ideas are that have bedeviled modern thought. Moderns have created all manner of problems for themselves and rather than think, ‘you know, maybe the ideas that lead to these absurdities should be re-thought,’ they double-down on error and plow dead ahead.
To your second question, if you rule out material explanations, only immaterial ones are left. Consider nominalism, one of the worst ideas ever. Nominalists deny universals. They insist that, say, there is no common essence to which the term ‘dog’ (or ‘tree’ or ‘water’) refers, and that all they have in common is the name we give them. But when you ask them to explain universal agreement about what dogs are (-as opposed to cats and rose bushes and gold bars) they cannot. They have created a huge problem for themselves–how is it we can all tell dogs and cats apart even though all that makes something a dog is that we call it that and it is impossible in principle to suggest to anyone that, say, that rosebush they are calling a dog is not really a dog because NOTHING is really a dog–where none should exist at all. There are dogs and we can all tell this and any theory of reality that makes it impossible for people to recognize something as a dog because it is one is a theory best abandoned.
But that won’t do because it might mean that the ancients and medieval got some things right after all. (Actually, it is increasingly common for philosophers to find Aristotle worth reading again.)
