InternetArticle 1998: "Mindless Materialists"

My prior articles on this and related topics

Over the years I published a few articles relating to physics and cosmology - professionaly on inflationary cosmology, and quite separately, in other journals, on the subjects of awareness, free will, and the potential significance of the existence of free will to cosmology .

In 1987 I wrote an article about awareness and free will accompanied by questions - a survey - and sent these to various physicists (snail mail, some years before email). Responses were received from eg from Paul Davies and David Finkelstein, and I had conversations with various physicists and philosophers about the issue including Roger Penrose, Wheeler, Hawking, David Bohm, Art Komar, Ed Witten and others.

Later I wrote internet-posts, and articles on my website, relating my speculation regarding "mindless materialists", ie that they are quite correct, but only about themselves: see directly below. However, these posts were inevitably eventually deleted for one reason or another.

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My ideas as mentioned in Wikipedia and Webster's online dictionary: see bold below (later removed from both entires by moderators).

From Wikipedia (2008?) : ''Access consciousness'' (A-consciousness) is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perception|perceive, information about what we perceive is often access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past (e.g., something that we learned) is often access conscious; and so on.

Chalmers thinks that access consciousness is less mysterious than phenomenal consciousness, so that it is held to pose one of the ''easy problems'' of consciousness. Dennett denies that there is a "hard problem", asserting that the totality of consciousness can be understood in terms of impact on behavior, as studied through heterophenomenology. There have been numerous approaches to the processes that act on conscious experience from instant to instant. Philosophers who have explored this problem include Gerald Edelman, Edmund Husser and Daniel Dennett.

Daniel Dennett (1988) suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgements and consequent behaviour. He extends this analysis (Dennett, 1996) by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem."

Eccles and others have pointed out the difficulty of explaining the evolution of qualia, or of 'minds' which experience them, given that all the processes governing evolution are physical and so have no direct access to them.

There is no guarantee that all people have minds, nor any way to verify whether one does or does not posses one. The possiblitly has indeed been proposed that those denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem, do so since they do not posses this faculty.

<ref>Avi Rabinowitz [WAS: http://www.pages.nyu.edu/~air1/scirelig.htm NEW: https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/home/mindless-materialists : "Mindless Materialists: A Controversial Proposition"]

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http://www.websters-online-dictionary.com/definition/consciousness

Daniel Dennett (1988) suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgments and consequent behaviour. He extends this analysis (Dennett, 1996) by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem." Chalmers, on the other hand, makes a strong case for the hard problem, and shows that all of Dennett's supposed explanatory processes merely address aspects of the easy problem, albeit disguised in obfuscating verbiage.

Eccles and others have pointed out the difficulty of explaining the evolution of qualia, or of 'minds' which experience them, given that all the processes governing evolution are physical and so have no direct access to them. There is no guarantee that all people have minds, nor any way to verify whether one does or does not possess one. The possibility has indeed been proposed that those denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem," do so since they do not possess this faculty^[13]. 13 Avi Rabinowitz [WAS: http://www.pages.nyu.edu/~air1/scirelig.htm NEW: https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/home/mindless-materialists Mindless Materialists: A Controversial Proposition]

(the existence of a universe which is not eternal itself implies acausality, which is also at the root of what incompatibilists mean by free will; and the deep intelligence behind sophisticated laws on nature as we know them also correlates to the type of intelligence required for free willed choices which can bear moral responsibility).