No objective world?
2,918 views · Published 25 February 2008 · 7:27 · Indexed 23 October 2026
Channel: Footnotes2Plato · 2008 · Education
Response to Everett's questions and comments... Scientific materialism has approached the mind as if it were an object. I think this approach has from the very beginning turned consciousness into a bizarre paradox, into a problem which cannot be solved. To call it a trick that we just don't understand yet seems to dramatically understate the complexity of the problem as materialism has framed it. I think understanding the nature of this trick will require a complete shift in our metaphysical and epistemological understanding of reality, along the lines of the paradigm shift which occurred when Galileo and others overturned the geocentric model of the solar system (you may have seen SpiritualAtheist's video where he makes the same claim). Science is not immune to making philosophical assumptions, and I think the claim that consciousness can be reduced to a brain process is laden with them. What is it that allows us to know the objective processes of the brain? More brains? Isn't this an infinite regress? If science is going to posit knowledge of the objective state of affairs in the world itself, it's got to assume a knower or transcendental subject behind it all who can actually make that observation. This ability is more than a trick that needs further study, it is an insoluble paradox, at least in the terms set by materialism. The reason Buddhism is important for enactivism is that it is a highly developed tradition with a long history of investigation into the experiential side of consciousness (rather than the physiological or computational). This aspect of consciousness has been all but ignored by the materialist paradigm. So much so, that many materialists are willing to claim it does not exist at all. The point of applying Buddhism to cognitive science is to broaden our understanding of what it is like to be a mind, rather than merely what a mind is. In other words, Buddhism provides the 1st person angle while western science provides the 3rd person. We cannot hope to fully understand consciousness without approaching it form both ends at once. Am I saying that introspection will provide us with truths about the mind? No. I am saying that we need to be aware of our existential condition as biological creatures who are born and who die. We cannot understand the very essence of our own being by way of intellectual abstraction. Certainly, scientific investigation is of utmost importance, but not so we can replace our actual somatic experience of being alive with logical formulas and objective explanations. Consciousness has an internal component (experience) and an external component (dynamic interaction between brain, body, world, language, other people, etc). Neither one causes the other to occur; they are codetermining. So it is not that I as a subject determine what the world is, nor is it that the world itself determines what I am. Each arises together and in fact while we can distinguish between the two (subject and object), we can never separate the two.
