01.25.12

Failure of neuroscience and the hard problem

Posted in General at 1:22 pm by nemo

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-consciousness-is-not

The suspicion is arising, as any New Ager might have suspected, that consciousness, pace neuroscience, won’t ever clarity itself. We can’t be sure of the future of research here, but the situation has not changed since the nineteenth century, when a number of critics saw the coming of reductionist nescience.

That is over a century, and not deep breakthrough on the ‘hard question’. It might helpt to adopt an ‘operational’ (qua Buddhist) approach, that is, to consider what we can do with consciousness, via the power of attention, and to see if we understand its latencies, which come to us operationally (meditation, and meditation in action, are variant statements of this, usually forgetfully clicheed yogic/buddhist mantras) as consciousness is jumpstarted to a higher octave, self-consciousness.
Even as the cult of scientism starts to attack buddhism, the collapse of the neuroscience pretense (hasn’t happened yet) looms at the ‘end of science’ (in the correct sense of that, for and by scientists).

The multiplicity of these questions is to be entirely expected, given that consciousness is, as Chalmers puts it,

an extraordinary and multifaceted phenomenon whose character can be approached from many different directions. It has a phenomenological and a neurobiological character. It has a metaphysical and an epistemological character. It has a perceptual and a cognitive character. It has a unified and a differentiated character.

And that’s just for starters. The mystery of consciousness is a network of mysteries, touching on the mystery of ourselves, the mystery of the intrinsic nature (if any) of the non-conscious world, and the mystery of our knowledge of ourselves, the natural world, and the human world atop it. If there is such a thing as a First Philosophy, the philosophy of the conscious mind is it. It is the ground in which every other branch of philosophy takes root.

Considering the profound importance of these questions, Chalmers’s latest book, The Character of Consciousness, ultimately turns out to be a disappointing sequel, especially given his track record of taking on the conventional wisdom that the answers to these questions are likely to defy. But it is worth considering this book at some length; for given David Chalmers’s distinctive sobriety and thoughtfulness among a field of philosophers committed to reducing its chosen subject nearly out of existence, it is striking how much his work still falls prey to the same fundamental errors. The book will thus serve as an instructive case study not only in how befuddling are questions about the mind, but in how stuck is the philosophical rudder of the prominent thinkers who study it, and how adrift they have floated.

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