Comment by pegasus
11 hours ago
There's definitely a sizable contingent of people who desperately want to believe consciousness is just electrical impulses in our brain. Because "what else could it be"? The fact is that we just don't know, and "abiding in the not-knowing" is for many the most uncomfortable thing ever. Especially for the curious- and rational-minded people this forum tends to attract. I'm one of them, too.
It is basically reductionism, or in the extreme atomism, and (as I understand it) it has largely fallen out of fashion both in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of mind, since it heyday in the 1970s. And I don’t see it coming back into fashion any time soon.
I can definitely see why reductionism would appeal to an educated public. We learn about the periodic table; we are able to break sentences down to words, down to letters; to break an executable down to binary code, to machine instruction, to electrical currents flowing through semiconductors. Why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with conscious thoughts? It is certainly an appealing thought process.
As I understand it, reductionism started to fall out of favor because of the rise of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, where we have a lot of weird phenomena which cannot be explained by reducing the particles down to the sub-sub atomic (or rather they are better explained by describing the interactions directly).
Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory don't preclude reductionism, and I wouldn't say it has fallen out of favor as a whole. Certain types certainly have, but not the overall idea.
Also, nothing about the idea of the mind only being made up of physical processes means things have to be deterministic.
It doesn’t preclude it correct, however it provides a pretty strong examples of where reductionism is lacking, which what I believe has turned a lot of philosophers of science against pure reductionism (I am probably oversimplifying here. An expert science historian [which I am not] could probably write a whole book about why reductionism is not as popular today as it was in the 1970s).
There are a whole lot more physical processes going on in our bodies then just neural activity. And my best guess is that is exactly where reductionism fails. It is possible that neural activity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness. It is also possible that we are looking in the wrong direction, that consciousness arises via interactions with the world. In either case (of which I find the former quite convincing) we will never be able to describe the mind by just looking at neural activity.
I am actually of the opinion that cognitive scientists are doing an excellent job describing the mind with our current theoretical models which excludes the tough questions of consciousness.
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