Ghostly Consciousness and Natural Selection

While consciousness is not what this blog is intended to be about I am starting here for two very simple reasons. Firstly, because one of the cornerstones of the reductionist mindset is that consciousness will be explained as simply "atoms doing their thing" and secondly because I think I have a logical question that undermines the basic premise of this idea.

The position that consciousness will be explained by a reductionist description of the atoms in the brain is based upon a logical conceit; that consciousness is an 'illusion' and has no effect upon the physical world. In other words, that the experiential nature of our existence is simply a by-product of unconscious activity and that any conscious decision that we seem to make is actually a trick our brains play on us so that we believe that we are acting consciously.

Now, here's my challenge to this. Presumably this notion of the brain 'fooling' this ghostly 'I' must be predicated upon physical actions. In other words there must be a physical cost involved in the brain processing information in order to fool the 'I' into considering itself a real entity. Now, if a creature could as easily perform all of its tasks without the need for this superfluous, non-interactive self then it would gain an advantage in terms of energy costs compared to the creature busy expending energy 'fooling' this useless 'I'.

While it is perfectly feasible to argue that conditions could have been such that environmental pressures might not have been strong enough to wipe out the conscious 'version' of that creature, there would certainly be nothing that ought to have wiped out the unconscious version - except, perhaps for a huge stroke of bad luck. So, we ought to have examples of non-conscious humans; humans who can't even understand what this experiential nature of existence might be. To my knowledge no such humans have been discovered.

Now, one could argue that they might have learnt to 'feign' experiential knowledge in order to fit in with their conscious neighbours - but this is, of course, utterly illogical. If the conscious neighbours are discussing their experiential existence then their experiential existence is affecting their physical actions, which undermines the basic premise that the conscious self is non-interactive.

What's this about

As someone with a very deep interest in science, especially Physics, and as someone who would count themself as an atheist, I have become frustrated at how both science and atheism have been hijacked by a sort of quasi-philosophical position that might be termed 'hard-materialist' or 'atheist-materialist'. I say quasi-philosophical because there is a seemingly shared philosophical position but it lacks any kind of logical formalism. This position is based, quite simply, upon the notion of reductionism. What I'm aiming for with this blog is to highlight the many logical contradictions within that position.

I have tried to address these issues on science and atheist forums but this idea of 'hard-materialism' as equivalent to science and atheism is very entrenched. At the mere mention of any other position one is immediately confronted with accusations of trying to push some religious agenda, or of dealing in 'woo' (and interestingly the concept 'woo' and QM are almost synoymous within this thinking). The tactics of such communities is to deride the position as in some way religious and then to simply circularise any argument to little more than semantic gamesmanship.

Well, I am an atheist, and I believe that reductionist science is running itself down a blind alley searching for the modern equivalents of the planet Vulcan and the aether. What is lacking is any coherent ontology. There is an ontology, but it is an ad-hoc ontology, and is wracked with contradiction - which is what I hope to highlight here.

Thanks for reading.