Materialism & Consciousness Part 2

d0rkyd00d · September 20, 2007, 6:47pm

After reading through the other materialism thread, I happened to be reading through The End of Faith by Sam Harris (pg 208 - 214), and I think he has some excellent viewpoints on the matter that I’d like to share.

I love reading his works simply because of his extensive background in both philosophy and neuroscience… Enjoy, and discuss!

“…The place of consciousness in the natural world is very much an open question. The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it…”

“…The problem…is that nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, declares it to be a bearer of that peculiar, interior dimension that each of us experiences as consciousness in his own case. Every paradigm that attempts to shed light upon the frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness, searching for the physical difference that makes the phenomenal one, relies upon subjective reports to signal that an experimental stimulus has been observed. The operational definition of consciousness, therefore, is reportability. But consciousness and reportability are not the same.”

“The sense of self seems to be the product of the brain’s representing its own acts of representation; its seeing of the world begets an image of a one who sees. It is important to realize that this feeling- the sense that each of us has of appropriating, rather than merely being, a sphere of experience-is not a necessary feature of consciousness. It is, after all, conceivable that a creature could form a representation of the world without forming a representation of itself in the world. And, indeed, many spiritual practitioners claim to experience the world in just this way, perfectly shorn of self.”

I will also be starting another thread with some interesting quotes that deal more specifically with consciousness and duality, with some excellent quotes from what I think is the most interesting chapter in the book!