The idea that consciousness emerges from matter is a product of consciousness itself
Is consciousness a product of the brain? The only certainty here is that anyone who thinks they can answer this question with certainty has to be wrong. We have only our conceptions of consciousness and of the brain to go on; and the one thing we do know for certain is that everything we know of the brain is a product of consciousness. That is, scientifically speaking, far more certain than that consciousness itself is a product of the brain.
It may be or it may not; but what is undeniable is the idea that there is a universe of things, in which there is one thing called the brain, and another thing called the mind, together with the scientific principles that would allow the one to emerge from the other – these are all ideas, products of consciousness, and therefore only as good as the particular models used by that consciousness to understand the world. We do not know if mind depends on matter, because everything we know about matter is itself a mental creation.
The mind body problem is a matter of howness rather than whatness. In that sense, Descartes was right: the one undeniable fact is our consciousness. He was wrong, however, most would now agree, to think of mind and body as two separate substances (two ‘whats’), a typical left hemisphere way of thinking, a concern with the ‘whatness’ of things. Where it was so obviously a matter of two ‘hownesses’ in the same thing, two different modes of being (as the right hemisphere would see it), he could formulate this only as two whatnesses, two different things.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 1 Asymmetry and the Brain (p. 46). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Philosophy / Neuroscience Status:☀️