Originally posted by Royce
Why can we rule out the subjective state having a causal relationship with the physical brain or body. Pychosamatic (sp?) illnesses and good old Frued's hysteria symptoms were/are all evidence of subjective disorders causing the physical to malfunction.
Strictly speaking, these phenomena are not evidence of the subjecive having a causative effect on the physical. They are only evidence that the things we experience subjectively are highly correlated with the physical events and phenomena of our body. For instance, it is said that depressed people are more susceptible to illness. Why? Is it the subjective experience that causes the susceptibility to illness, or is it that the subjective experience is indicative of a disorder in the physical organization of the brain that propogates throughout the body and winds up somehow suppressing the immune system?
The flaw with your argument is that psychosomatic illnesses and the like are equally explicable assuming the subjective experience has a direct causal power, or assuming that the subjective experience is an epiphenomenon that expresses or mirrors the state and condition of the underlying physical substrate but itself has no causal powers. In fact, the evidence in my last post seems to indicate it is the latter; the causal chain of reaction that culminates with you lifting your arm is initiated before you yourself are aware that you have made such a decision. It therefore seems more likely that your conscious experience of choosing to lift your arm is a
depiction of the causal chain of neural activity rather than a participant in the causal chain.
Is it possible that the pure subjective thought occurs - causes the chemical reactions to take place which then cause us to become conscious of the thought and finally to pick up the glass? Surely it is far more complicated than we think. Possibly the structure of the brain is necessary for the subjective to influence and control the chemical reactions at the molecular level.
You are saying that we are robots without free will, control or purpose responding to acausal random chemical reactions. Seems to me that life is chaotic enough without that randomness controling even our thoughts intents and purposes. If it isn't random then what controls it? Thought?
So you are proposing that an initial thought takes place, initiates the neural activity, which in turn causes our consciousness of that thought? If we are not conscious of this 'pure subjective thought,' then what have you gained? It essentially functions the same as the physicalist description. Either way, the power is out of our conscious hands. One paradigm attributes it to dead, unseeing chemical reactions, the other to dead, unseeing 'thought.'
I don't pretend that science tells us, or even
can tell us, all there is to be known about consciousness. Not for a second. But it sure can tell us a lot, and it would be foolish not to take into account the understanding we can develop of consciousness through scientific inquiry.
I don't understand why people equate a physical description of the processes of consciousness with an interpretation that we are dead, robotic, purposeless, without control, without wonder. Well, let me qualify that; I understand it, but I think further thought will show you that a physical understanding of human consciousness is not irrenconcilable with a full appreciation for the human condition: our purposefulness, creativity, and yes, even our control over ourselves. I think I'll expand on this in a future post since it is such a basic and, I think, misunderstood component of this argument.
], the question arises, if consciousness and thought are more than the sum of the pattern of electrochemical reactions in the brain, then what are they. Obviously they would have to be able to exert influence over matter, to trigger the electrochemical events in the brain, and it begs the question why would structural problems in the brain (Alzheimers, for instance) interfere with thoughts and consciousness, if the thoughts caused the actions in the brain? Would it be (meditated by) a fifth force? Just some thoughts to chew on.
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