[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
... I have a real question for you?  "What about consciousness?"  ... "the problem of consciousness" ... RMP's approach just sweeps it under the rug.


dmb says:
Not sure you've asked an actual question here. What is the problem of consciousness, exactly? What's being swept under the rug by RMP's approach? 

But let me remind you that James' Essays in Radical Empiricism basically consists of two central essays and all the rest are expansions and qualifications of those two main essays. One of them is titled "Does Consciousness Exist?" and in it James answers "no", not if you mean a thing, an entity that has the thoughts. There is no Cartesian self, no mental substance. And then you see how subjects and objects are demoted from primary ontological categories to secondary concepts at the end of chapter 29 in Lila. 
As you're reading Chalmers ask yourself if he's operating with the subject-object metaphysical assumptions. Do you think you could spot such a thing? It'll probably mean reading between the lines just because assumptions are like that. They tend to go without saying. If anyone is likely to be explicit about such a thing, it'll be a philosopher. But still. 

By the time James was all pumped up about radical empiricism in 1904 and 1905, a period of explosive creativity for James, he was also very excited about a philosophical wild man named Gustav Fechner. (Krimel is gonna love this.) An idea of his that James found very appealing was "the view that the entire material universe, instead of being dead, is inwardly alive and consciously animated ..in diverse spans and wavelengths, inclusions and envelopments". This isn't too far from the MOQish notion that the laws of physics are better conceived as patterns of preference. Even the physical is inwardly alive and consciously animated to some extent. The "its" count as one of the spans and wavelengths in this living universe. As James himself put it, "..it is easy to believe that consciousness or inner experience never originated, or developed, out of the unconscious, but that it and the physical universe are co-eternal aspects of one self-same reality, much as concave and convex are aspects of one curve."

You see what these guys are saying?

If you're a scientific materialist and you hear James explain that consciousness as an entity, as a Cartesian self, does not exists, you're likely to take James as being somewhere in the brain-mind identity camp. You'd think there is no such thing as consciousness per se because the mind is just what the brain does, more or less. Most people in this camp will back off just a bit and make some qualification, but that's the basic idea. But when you read this Fechner-inspired stuff you realize that James had a whole different deal in mind. Instead of thinking that the mental is a product of the physiological, which is a product of the physical, you see that it's more like the physical and the mental have grown up and evolved together as two aspects of the One. In fact, James's biographer, Robert Richardson, says the quote above is the best statement about the many and the One that James ever produced (page 447). 

Now think about that pithy little radically empirical slogan. Experience and reality amount to the same thing. 

Hmmmm. Consciousness. Maybe I'll give it some thought.

What was the question? Can you state it very specifically?