this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
22 points (100.0% liked)
Wikipedia
3885 readers
23 users here now
A place to share interesting articles from Wikipedia.
Rules:
- Only links to Wikipedia permitted
- Please stick to the format "Article Title (other descriptive text/editorialization)"
- Tick the NSFW box for submissions with inappropriate thumbnails
- On Casual Tuesdays, we allow submissions from wikis other than Wikipedia.
Recommended:
- If possible, when submitting please delete the "m." from "en.m.wikipedia.org". This will ensure people clicking from desktop will get the full Wikipedia website.
- Use the search box to see if someone has previously submitted an article. Some apps will also notify you if you are resubmitting an article previously shared on Lemmy.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Such bullshit.
" But consciousness is not like this. Knowing everything there is to know about the brain, or any physical system, is not to know everything there is to know about consciousness. Consciousness, then, must not be purely physical."
This was settled at least a century ago If not longer. If the mind was separate from the physical then lobotomies wouldn't do anything. Mind altering drugs wouldn't do anything. The physical state of the neurons including electrical potentials and chemical messengers are the components of thought.
There is no debate. Any philosophers arguing against the repeatedable experimental evidence that your mind is your brain and vice versa is bullshitting. It's not 300BC when it was debatable.
Recognizing that the physical can affect the mental, and vice versa, isn't really the end of the dualism argument. Dualists have incorporated that simple observation from the beginning.
From your quote, the key word is "purely." Is consciousness purely physical, or is some other substance involved, that's the question.
You can take either side of the argument, but physical-mental interactions only suggest that mental phenomena are not purely separate. It does not indicate that there are no non-physical elements of consciousness. In other words, that mental states are purely physical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism
If you want to read through some of the arguments for and against.
That there are arguments for dualism isn't the issue. There are arguments for a flat earth and many followers of that philosophy.
All arguments for dualism are equivalent to "God in the gaps". That is because perfect understanding hasn't been achieved, mysticism is possible.
The absurdity of the argument is that it can be applied to every mechanical observation. Take a simple lever. You push on one end and the other end moves. We can describe the forces mathematically. But when performing experiments, observations only approach the mathematics because of infinite external interferences to perfect measurement. This culminates in quantum uncertainty. The argument could be made that because we haven't measured every atom in every state that we don't actually understand the motion. The motion could be from some mystic source.
Can you step out of consciousness and prove there's a reality outside it? Or do you just keep pointing to an extracted brain existing inside consciousness and insist that it somehow proves that matter is prior?