Critique of the mind/body problem
I&#x27;m a materialist, and believe consciousness is an emergent property. The essay writer was pretty rudely dismissive of the idea, mocking it as if people who hold that stance think the words &quot;emergent property&quot; is all that needs to be said. It is &quot;just a magic word to cover over something no one understands.&quot; That completely ignores that there are thousands of researchers of various stripes who are are digging into the specifics and aren&#x27;t simply saying, &quot;Aha, it is emergent and our work is done here.&quot;<p>Another problem with the essay is that the term &quot;consciousness&quot; needs to be defined before discussing it, as different people take that word to mean different things.<p>Finally, I think it is important to appreciate just what a facade our consciousness is. It is a veneer that works well most of the time, but if it is probed too deeply one discovers what a hodge-podge it really is. Optical illusions are one window into seeing that our perceptions are often pretty shallow.<p>Reading Oliver Sacks&#x27; book, &quot;The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat&quot; 30 years ago was an eye-opener for me. It is filled with case studies of people who have suffered some localized failure of their brain, typically due to a stroke or physical trauma, but were otherwise normal. The deficits were stunning and revealing.<p>To give one example, there was the case of someone with Capgras Syndrome, a situation where their emotional response to the subject&#x27;s parents had gone silent. In every other way the subject was normal and of typical intelligence. Although they could say logically it makes no sense, their explanation for the loss of emotional affect seeing his parents was that they had been replaced by visually perfect doppelgangers. Having a ridiculous explanation for their emotional response apparently was more &quot;energy minimizing&quot; in their worldview than accepting the clinical explanation. Sometimes Capgras Syndrom turns inward and is called Cotard&#x27;s syndrome, where the subject believes they are dead despite all evidence to the contrary.<p>The point is, our consciousness is a jumble of heuristics we use to navigate the world. It doesn&#x27;t take some mystical detached consciousness that somehow violates the laws of physics to steer or corporeal bodies to carry out the will of the consciousness.