Is Consciousness Physical?
I’m supposed to be on holiday but couldn’t resist doing a little response video to Skydive Phil’s recent video defending physicalism, on my YouTube channel @PhilipGoffPhilosophy. A bit of a deep dive, but hopefully an accessible route to the core of the academic philosophy debate. Let me know what you think!
Come and see me in discussion with William Lane Craig, Jessica Frazier, and Joe Folley 1st May in the Royal Institution Theatre in London: https://www.thepanpsycast.com/reserve-books/joe-folley-live-event-william-lane-craig
My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765
Please subscribe and support my public work financially if you’re able.
I agree that physicalims is false because it discounts our qualitative experiences as a source of knowledge.
However, it always seemed to me that physicalim has many more "open flanks", so to speak, where it obviously has to rule out whole fields of stuff that is obviously worth knowing about, but it is easy to see that physialism can never say anything about.
Examples are:
Normative stuff (what is good? What is valuable? What should we do? - obviously physicalim can never say anything about this)
Mathematics (what theorem follows from what set of axioms? - obviously physicalim cannot say anything about that, that's why the vienna circle has to add maths)
Aesthetics (what is beautiful? Obviously physicalim cannot say anything about that, but here one could perhaps most easily say that aesthetics has no truths worth knowing)
Sematics (what concept implies what? How do our concepts relate to the world? - again, physicalism obviously cannot say anything about that because there are no experiments about concepts. This is the most wide topic, but it might be the most important flaw of physicalism, because it shows that physicalim has trouble with meaning in general).
Do you think all these other flaws are weaker that the flaw with regards to consciousness? Or just less discussed?
Watched part of the video, interesting so far!
I think any defensible conception of dualism is going to explicitly deny that the physical world is a causally closed system. If dualism is accurate, then the laws of physics are violated somewhere in the human brain. Are there actually dualists who accept this premise, that the physical world is a causally closed system?
But to understand this intuitively, I like to use a video game analogy. Imagine you are playing a video game and the game has a physics engine, and everything in the game other than the player characters is governed by the in-game physics engine. The player characters are still in some part affected by the in-game physics engine, but some component of their action is determined by the user-interface and, ultimately, the person behind the keyboard.
To dismiss dualism because it violates physics is just induction gone too far. We can play the game and use inductive reasoning to discover the rules of the in-game physics engine, but once we have discovered the rules, to try to use the in-game physics engine to completely explain our own behavior is a little bit absurd to me, considering that the physics rules are deterministic and we have free will.