Thanks for the link, but I find it decidedly underwhelming. It seems as if he just threw up his hands and said “naturalism can’t explain it, so only God can.”
The problem is, he didn’t properly explore naturalistic explanations. For example:
’ “How can mere matter originate consciousness? How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness? Consciousness seems like a radical novelty in the universe, not prefigured by the after-effects of the Big Bang; so how did it contrive to spring into being from what preceded it?” ’
He asks, via this quote, how consciousness can be explained by physical means, but doesn’t wait for the answers!
He then goes on to say:
“If we limit our options to theism and naturalism, it is hard to see how finite consciousness could result from the rearrangement of brute matter; it is easier to see how a Conscious Being could produce finite consciousness since, according to theism, the Basic Being is Himself conscious. Thus, the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it.”
Just because something is hard to see does not mean it is not there to be seen, and just because something is easy to see does not mean it is correct. Some of the most successful scientific theories and observations are counter-intuitive, so the bias of the individual being able to accept one hypothesis over the other more easily is totally irrelevant.
I think the biggest problem here is that the author assumes an organism is either conscious or not. However different animals show different levels of awareness, and hence consciousness. For example, a chimpanzee is capable of self-awareness and simple critique of their actions to aid learning. Many animals can solve simple problems, such as which lever to press to get food from a chute. In my work with the disabled, it is readily obvious that some are more conscious and self-aware than others. Consciousness is not a state that you either have or you don’t.
I also find his five points of why mental states cannot be physical misleading.
(a) there is a raw qualitative feel or a “what it is like” to have a mental state such as a pain;
There is a raw qualitative feel, or a “what it is like” to use a Windows based or an Apple based computer. The qualitative feel of a system is a human approximation used to handle large amounts of data, but on the simplest level it is still a physical process. A computer program is encoded in binary data, and consciousness is encoded in neuron discharges. A qualitative feel tells us nothing about the fundamentals that compose the phenomenon in question.
(b) at least many mental states have intentionality—ofness [not sure what that was meant to say] or aboutness–directed towards an object;
Humans have always attributed intention to physical processes. Thunder used to be thought of as angry gods before we discovered the physical process behind it.
(c) mental states are inner, private and immediate to the subject having them;
How does this imply a non-physical interpretation? If you sprain your ankle no one else feels the pain, but no one argues that the tendon and the nerve endings are non-physical entities. Besides, fMRI and rtfMRI scans are able to tell researchers low level thoughts of patients. Researchers can tell which of a series of images a person is looking at purely from the physical response in the brain and the emotions we know are associated with those responses.
(d) they require a subjective ontology—namely, mental states are necessarily owned by the first person sentient subjects who have them;
Back to the computer example. If I run a program, my computer is necessarily the one on which the program runs, but that by no means implies that the program is running anywhere but on the hardware.
(e) mental states fail to have crucial features (e.g., spatial extension, location) that characterize physical states and, in general, cannot be described using physical language.
This point is demonstrably false. Mental states such as love, anger, phobias, moral reasoning, and even analysis of other peoples’ thoughts have been localised to specific brain regions, and as such can be described as either how it feels to the subject or how it appears to the researcher. A phobia can be seen as either a strong aversion to object X, or as a strong activation of the amygdala when the visual cortex identifies object X.
A lack of complete physical explanations does not mean that physical explanations cannot exist, and it is no reason to appeal to the supernatural to fill in the gaps in our understanding. Thanks for the link all the same.
