Comment by cortesoft
4 hours ago
I feel like these are separate things... neural activity being necessary but not sufficient for consciousness does not mean reductionism is wrong, it just means the fundamental building block is not a neuron.
It might not even be possible to fully understand the physical mechanisms that underlie consciousness, but that doesn't mean there has to be something more than physical mechanisms.
I didn’t say it was wrong, I said it was lacking and unpopular among modern philosophers of science. If you want to explain consciousness as arising from interaction with the environment (like Ted Chiang did in yesterday’s article) holism is a much better approach, same if you want to use evolutionary explanations, like Daniel Dennett did at the turn of the century.
I think reductionism is simply to limited of a philosophical framework for modern science and philosophy.