Specter of Reason

Deepak Chopra, a well-known spiritualist, does not like physicalism. Physicalism says that everything is physical and can be entirely explained in non-mental terms.  So, according to physicalism, consciousness can ultimately be explained in physical, non-mental terms.  Chopra says this view is an unreasonable dogma, and that it makes much more sense to believe that thoughts are non-physical.  When we think, he says, non-physical phenomena affect the workings of the brain.  To add muscle to his position, he has issued a challenge:  According to the New Statesman , he will award  a prize of $1 million  to anyone who can demonstrate, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, that human consciousness is created by the brain.   This is not a challenge to demonstrate that Chopra has misunderstood physics, nor is it an invitation to critique his own arguments about consciousness.  The challenge is to scientifically demonstrate that brains create consc...

That's the title of a recent paper I just read by Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa (Journal of Consciousness Studies  19, pp. 67-95; H/T ex-apologist ).  It's an interesting and mostly very clear paper, at least for me, who has not read most of the source material they are discussing.  (They're primarily drawing on Chalmers, Stoljar and Pereboom.) I was most surprised (and pleased) to see that Chalmers has made a significant qualification about the implications of the Knowledge and Conceivability Arguments.  I used to think he believed those arguments entailed the falsity of physicalism.  However, Chalmers now claims that they only entail the following disjunction:  Either physicalism is false or Russellian Monism is true.  Since there can be varieties of physicalism which are compatible with Russellian Monism, then Chalmers must be open to the possibility of physicalism. Chalmers apparently accepts (or perhaps only strongly leans towards) a variety...