A Sense of Free Will: the consciousness quagmire (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 00:43 (3083 days ago) @ David Turell

Another essay on 'emergence' as a physical quality. Emergence is not explained by the material substrates of that new property. A special look at the problem of consciouness:-http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/11/emergence-and-formation-"But consciousness is perhaps an example more easily grasped. And, just to refresh our memories, we should recall how many logical difficulties a materialist reduction of mind entails. -"The most commonly invoked is the problem of qualia, of that qualitative sense of “what it is like” that constitutes the immediate intuitive form of subjectivity, and that poses philosophical difficulties that even the tireless and tortuous bluster of a Daniel Dennett cannot entirely obscure. There is also the difficulty of abstract concepts, which become more dazzlingly difficult to explain the more deeply one considers how entirely they determine our conscious engagement with the world.-***-"And of course, there is the problem of reason: For to reason about something is to proceed from one premise or proposition or concept to another, in order ideally to arrive at some conclusion, and in a coherent sequence whose connections are determined by the semantic content of each of the steps taken; but, if nature is mere physical mechanism, all sequences of cause and effect must be determined entirely by the impersonal laws governing the material world. One neuronal event can cause another as a result of physical necessity, but certainly not as a result of logical necessity; and the connections among the brain's neurons cannot generate the symbolic and conceptual connections that compose an act of consecutive logic, because the brain's neurons are connected organically and interact physically, not conceptually. And then there is the transcendental unity of consciousness, which makes such intentionality possible and which poses far greater difficulties for the materialist than any mere neurological “binding problem.” -***-" Then, of course, there is perhaps the greatest difficulty of all, intentionality, what the great Franz Brentano regarded as the supreme “mark of the mental,” inseparable from every act of consciousness: the mind's directedness, its “aboutness,” its capacity for meaning, by which it thinks, desires, believes, represents, wills, imagines, or otherwise orients itself toward a specific object, purpose, or end. On the one hand, the mind knows nothing in a merely passive way, but always has an end or meaning towards which it is purposively directed, as towards a final cause; yet, on the other hand, there is absolutely no intentional reciprocity between the mind and the objects of its intentions (that is, thoughts can be directed towards things, but things, at least taken as purely material events, cannot be directed towards thoughts). -***-"Not that there is room here to argue these points. Nonetheless, there are very good reasons why the most consistent materialist philosophers of mind—when, that is, they are not attempting to get around these difficulties with non-solutions like “epiphenomenalism” or incoherently fantastic solutions like “panpsychism”—have no choice in the end but to deny that such things as qualia or intentionality or even consciousness as such truly exist at all. The heroic absurdism that, in differing registers, constitutes the blazingly incandescent core of the thought of Daniel Dennett, Alex Rosenberg, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and other impeccable materialists of the same general kind follows from the recognition”not very philosophically sophisticated as a rule, but astute nonethelessthat consciousness can exist within the world of nature only if matter is susceptible of formation by a higher causality, one traditionally called “soul.” And the soul, as such a formal cause, is precisely that which cannot simply “emerge.”" -Comment: I couldn't have stated it better. Romansh?--?