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The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive
- pmoriarty 8y agoAlmost the entire article is biased towards Analytic philosophy.. as if that's all there was in philosophy. Only in a couple of paragraphs does the author acknowledge the fact that Continental philosophers had anything to say on consciousness. "Phenomenology bodied-forth most notably in the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, and, to a lesser extent, that of Sartre and Camus." In fact, the most significant phenomenologist post Husserl was Heidegger. It was he and Merleau-Ponty who had the most to say about consciousness. The author does not even mention them.
- olivermarks 8y agoCould there be a more pretentious article title than 'How to crack consciousness'?
- smilespray 8y agoIt’s a Will Self article. Par for the course.
- olivermarks 8y agoI used to enjoy his early musings but he is spectacularly jumping the shark regularly these days...
- quotemstr 8y agoWhy is this subject so fraught? The brain is a wet computer. Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Consciousness is what thinking feels like. When the brain ceases to function, the individual is destroyed. So what? There's no mystery here. The knowledge to be gained has to do with the operation of the brain, not the nature of "consciousness", whatever that is. As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical. Actually, I'm wrong: philosophy does have an occupation these days. It's complicit in the creation of utter nonsense like continental thought and critical theory, all of which amounts of sophistry that justifies us in exercising our world impulses toward magical thinking. Why bother?
- Swizec 8y agoIn ancient greece they were just as certain that consciousness comes from the liver. It's hard to know which facts that are completely obvious and self-evident to us today, will be considered silly and misguided in the future as you new evidence arises.
- quotemstr 8y agoSure, and they also used a geocentric model of the solar system. Should we weigh our certainty of the truth of the heliocentric model the same as they weighed the truth of the geocentric model despite our vastly superior scientific methodology and body of evidence?
- fiatjaf 8y agoYou only think you know so much because you don't know what you don't know. For example, a "model" cannot be "true". A model is a model, reality is a different thing.
- akvadrako 8y agoYou don't know that. Models could be just as real as non-models, whatever those are.
- BalinKing 8y agoTrue, but we don’t have nearly the same amount of evidence for the nature of consciousness as we do for the structure of the solar system... instead, we’re relying largely on philosophy and “self-evident” facts.
- ddtaylor 8y agoThis title really reads like something from The Onion.
- sarreph 8y ago> When I read philosophy at Oxford in the early 1980s there wasn’t a lot of talk about consciousness. Is it really necessary to put your prestigious alma mater in the first line?
- komali2 8y agoA lot of things in this article have made me wish for some sort of literary brutalism movement. Even now, after second read, I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of the article was, or the author's goal in me reading it. It's also littered with a bunch of commad and parenthesised asides that I didn't get the point of. Not that I didn't find it interesting, just, I feel it could have gotten the job done cleaner.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoI like that term: Literary Brutalism. I think it's crucially needed, as the volume of content out there worth reading is massive. Unfortunately, non-fiction authors are told to write in narrative form (narrative non-fiction) by editors because that seems to be what sells best and is most engaging. On the other side are mathematical papers which QED and ibid their way to illegibility.
- mcfunk 8y agoI'm glad I'm not the only person who rolled my eyes at this (and in my case, decided there were other things I could be doing with my browser). Perhaps it's good communication in that it signaled to me that what followed wouldn't be from a perspective that would resonate with me.
- sarreph 8y agoYeah, it’s interesting how you point out it being a signal. And in that case I do wonder quite who it would resonate with...
- fahadkhan 8y agoIn this case I see reason. Philosophy is often seen as a soft subject in the UK, saying that he studied at Oxford removes any doubt that it was a serious degree. I might be biased though, I've enjoyed reading a fair few Will Self books.
- carapace 8y agoOut of one eye the world seems blue-er, while out of the other it seems red-er. I must be slightly off in one eye, but I don't know which. Or maybe both eyes are off. But of course, both eyes are off. There is no redness in the world nor blueness. When I look out through both at the same time I see the "same" colors of things, even though each eye individually reports slightly different colors.