On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect consciousness.
That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious, unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day. The myth that consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.
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