Consciousness and Intelligent Design
October 30, 2008 by Chris Hallquist |
You need to read this post by David Chalmers on attempts by the IDiots to appropriate the issue of consciousness.
Here’s the skinny: Scientific and philosophical interest in consciousness has been going strong for a decade or two. Lots of interesting stuff there. A limited form of dualism is taken seriously, if not widely embraced, among philosophers. But the work the ID associated people are doing is the least-interesting and least-competent stuff I’ve seen. I own the O’Leary/Beauregard book, and I agree entirely with PZ that it’s crap. Beauregard’s big scientific article is poorly reasoned in the extreme.
It’s unfortunate that Chalmers declined to be quoted for the article, because he’s dead-on here and would have provided an authoritative voice from serious dualism. I’ll just end with this quote from him:
The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism. In fact, I think it’s a fatal problem for materialism, as I’ve argued at length here and there. But it simply isn’t a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.The simplest way to see this is to note that the “hard problem” does nothing to suggest that consciousness doesn’t lawfully depend on physical processes, at least in the sense that certain physical states are reliably associated with certain states of consciousness in our world. Even if materialism is rejected, there is still good reason to believe that there is such a dependence, via laws of nature that connect physical processes and consciousness. But if so, there is no problem at all with the idea that evolution can select certain physical states, which yield certain states of consciousness. If interactionist dualism (on which consciousness has a causal role) is true, evolution might even select for certain states of consciousness because of their beneficial effects. And if epiphenomenalism (on which consciousness has no causal role) is true, consciousness can still arise by evolution as a byproduct. Perhaps the thought that consciousness is a byproduct is unattractive, but if so the problem lies with epiphenomenalism, not with evolution.
