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Micheal Graziano thinks that consciousness, the apparent ability of human beings to have qualitative experiences, is not mysterious, at least it can't be explained by mysterious methods. By mysterious, he means any method of enquiry that is not a hard science: The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy, opinion, or religion . It’s a matter of hard science. It’s a matter of understanding the brain and the mind—a trillion-stranded sculpture made out of information. It’s also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, then we can build the same functionality into our computers. Artificial consciousness may just be a hard problem within our grasp. Grazanio is an optimist about the hard sciences and thinks it is in no need of assistance. It is better off left alone. Although the problem consciousness has not be solved by the hard sciences yet, Gra...

David Eagelman's suggestion that judicial systems should be re-organized to reflect known environmental and physical conditions that diminish the responsibility of criminals for their actions has been on my mind lately. I wrote about it a few years ago ( here ). The basic story is as follows: A man is convicted of pedophilia discovers that he has a brain tumor. The tumor is removed and the man says he no longer has any impulses for pedophilia. After his release he forms a normal life until he begins to feel the return of his impulses. He goes to the doctor and discovers that the tumor has returned. The story shows us that conditions that are not up to the person are determining actions that are criminal. Since the man bears no responsibility for his tumor it follows that he bears no responsibility for his criminal actions.  The implication  of the story is that conditions should play a greater role in criminal justice. Being brought up in certain conditions, envi...

A physicalist wants to be able to say the following: (A) There are no mental properties.  (B) S believes p. There is an apparent inconsistency in these two claims. Most physicalists consider it implausible to suggest that (B) is false and so concede that (A) is false. In order to maintain the physicalist worldview they say that mental properties are nothing over and above physical properties. This is usually stated in terms of  supervenience,  something like this: a set A of properties supervenes on set B of properties if for any change to A properties there is a corresponding change to B properties and in every possible world in which A properties and B properties are instantiated there cannot be a change in A properties without a corresponding change in B properties.

Are we living in a machine? Mechanism is the view that the fundamental substance of the world exists independently of anything else. It is physical and independent of minds or other psychological properties. It is analyzed according to physical properties, causes and a like. If one is a mechanist one can either be a dualist or a materialist. Either there are entities that operate over and above the material or matter is all there is.

All is Physical and Physics is All Physicalists say that all facts are fixed by physical facts. Whatever physics tells us there is - that's it. And physics tells us that there are no non-physical things. This creates two questions: What are qualities and what are mental properties? If physicalism, of the strongest kind, is true, then qualities are identical to quantities and mental properties are identical to physical properties.

J.P Moreland argues that irreducible human consciousness provides compelling evidence for the existence of God. Moreland argues that naturalists ignore much of the background evidence for theism. Philosophical argument is favorable to theism, but these kinds of arguments are not forcing naturalists to raise the background probability of theism. Given the high probability of theism, the probability of consciousness being a mental property or substance is much higher (a theistic ontology admits mental substances/properties). On the other hand, given naturalism, the probability of mental properties is greatly diminished. To postulate mental properties on a physicalist ontology appears ad hoc and implausible.

J.P. Moreland argues that certain features that we take to be part of what it means to be human are incompatible with naturalism but are every bit accounted for by Biblical Theism. Naturalistic views usually have three components – a commitment to an empirical epistemology, a historical account (“Grand Story”) reliant upon causal theory and emergenitism, and a constitutive account restricted to an ideal physics explainable with reference to causal theory. Moreland argues that consciousness, free will, rationality, an enduring soul, objective morality and human intrinsic value are all incompatible with naturalism. Moreland concludes by suggesting that the best the naturalist can offer is a dismissive strategy that takes human features for granted without explanation but he is pessimistic about the success of such a strategy. Moreland’s argument appeals to the most common conception of human features without which we would be caused to wonder if there is anything left that counts as...

Thomas Nagel argues that if you are committed to a reductive materialism/physicalism and a darwinistic historical narrative you have a problem - consciousness. A darwinist is one who holds to the evolutionary story. It is a description of history that attempts to explain how we have emerged to be rational, moral, conscious human beings through natural selection and laws of nature. A materialist holds to a set of presuppositions that imply that reality is fundamentally reducible to what is physical. Nagel says that darwinistic materialists are committed to a set of presuppositions (a constitutive account) that is reductionary (all is physical) and a story (a historical account) that is emergent (all that is emerged through natural selection). His gripe with this combo is that neither the constitutive account nor the historical account can account for human consciousness. Consciousness is neither purely physical (and cannot be reduced to physicalism without absurdities like ...