The more popular perspective amongst neuroscientists today is a physical monism which assumes that the entirety of conscious experience arises from the complexity of neuronal structure and connections. This provides a very simple solution to the challenge of dualism, but at a rather high price. The issue Chalmers raised regarding qualia become a central weakness of physical monist views. In addition, it is only an assumption that the complexity of the neural net creates some new emergent property called consciousness, an entirely untestable assumption.
Various versions of physical monism have been posited including analytic behaviorism, interactionism, and purely neurological models. Each of them basically requires the emergence of consciousness from a mass of non-conscious building blocks in a manner almost as mysterious as the elusive connection between mind and brain that is the weakness of dualistic theory. This curious leap of organization is typically referred to epiphenomenalism [consciousness arising as an incidental output of a complex neural net], which will be the topic of multiple future posts.
Bishop Berkeley, in a reaction to his disdain for a materialistic version of monism described a mental form of monism which suggested that only thought was real, and the physical was an illusion. This philosophy, called idealism, was never considered seriously by the scientific community, but it does raise significant questions. In a truly monistic perspective, as physical and mental must at some level be identical, it would be actually quite difficult to fully discount the idealistic version of monism over the physical version.
Hello Dr. Brown,
Just found your blog. I share your interest in Consciousness (author of Consciousness Is All, 2006) and the website is http://www.consciousnessisall.com. You and other bloggers might be interested to read Chaps 4 and 5 from the website (they’re free, and too long to post here), and which may be a great source for discussion.
I also found your posts on Godel from earlier in the year of particular interest–specifically, as related to an article I wrote last year: The New, True Infinity, which is basically “pointing” to the same thing, yet in an entirely different way. Hopefully you’re still checking in here–please email me when convenient.
Best regards, Peter
Welcome to the blog: a Godel update coming very soon. How busy life gets sometimes. Thanks for your post!
I have a certain fascination with the subject of Consciousness and Mind. Being a monistic believer somehow brought me to your page.
It appears to me that the brain (physical) and the mind (mental) work as one entity similar with a hardwired computer (the physical brain) that runs software (mentaly stored sequences of ilusionarry reality samples that were programmed from previous perceived experiences).
Welcome. You’ve been alone here on your blog for too long. You sound sincere though, and so I welcome a few moments out from my own goings on to share and engage in a little playful repartee. To momentarily take on a neutral role regarding your latest post — given the eternalness and the infinite number of possibilities in consciousness, it’s pretty hard to “not” see how its realms of monism and its realms of dualism can each be absolutely and irrefutably correct, AND in absolute harmony with each other. The “one or the other” way of looking at them is so potaytoe / potahtoh — ya know.
Not to be contrary, but I find the Berkeley perspective to be quite useful. Admittedly there is a surprising number of folks in science who find the “physical = illusion” idea to be something they can rest their beliefs on. However, these are the same ones who have a hard time poking holes in John Bell’s observations on non-locality. It kinda tickles me to realize just how well these two brilliant minds were able to unwittingly stumble onto one of the most compelling arguments for higher consciousness yet found. Go figure!
Welcome to the blog. It’s great to have some interaction here! I actually don’t disagree with your criticism. For some odd reason, the good Bishop was allegedly refuted when someone kicked a stone, or something of that nature. I never saw that as a refutation of idealism from any serious perspective. My original post related a bit more to how traditional neuroscientists and neurologists tend to opine regarding consciousness as an epiphenomenon, but I actually don’t agree with their conclusions either.