It has a name: dualism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%2...

Why are you implying that it's stupid?

EDIT:

Also note, you don't have to be a dualist to think that consciousness is not a property of a brain model. You could be a materialist and think that consciousness can be given to a machine, but still think it's separate from the turing-machine model of computation. That is, hold the view that consciousness is not a property that can emerge from a computation process; but rather some other different kind of process that's not yet known.

Is there any good arguments in favor of materialism? It's always struck me as a completely ridiculous position.

First of all, almost by definition, we can't really look at anything that's not materialistic; it's just a limitation.

For instance, there's no way to prove or disprove the existence of awareness in something or someone. If a robot walks like humans, looks like humans, is it a human? Does it experience anything? Do insects have consciousness? Do animals have it? Does anyone besides me have it? Who says even I have it? How can we test for it? Can we even define it? Who says that my computer mouse doesn't have it?

Second, I believe that we only know a tiny fraction of what's out there, or of what's there to know, so it's hard to say that there's nothing beyond matter. And who even says that everything we looked at is materialistic? Is time materialistic? Can it be made from something else?

Third, there's nothing materialistic about awareness. It's not as though we can say "it's like a computer program, just more complicated". We can't say that emotions are like variables that control the behavior of a program.

Do you know any reason why awareness might be materialistic?

So far, we've found exactly zero processes which we can observe (i.e., which affect the physical world) that can't be explained by physics.

Yes, there are some processes which we can observe which we can't YET explain very well. But when I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not about the phenomenon.

It seems likely that consciousness / awareness is just another physical phenomenon that we haven't explained yet. Here are some other examples of "mysterious phenomena" which it took a while to explain: fire, why the sun rises and sets, the discrepancy of Mercury's orbit (explained by relativity), discrete energy levels (explained by quantum physics).

Now, what makes you think physics will never explain consciousness?

I think I answered your first and third. To answer your second question, both the theory of relativity and quantum physics dissolve time (it's just a variable), as I understand them.

Decision-making can be completely robotic. Will, or Free Will, and whether or not it's compatible with materialism, is another controversial problem. Awareness, is what you feel subjectively. I can build a robot that senses colors, and when it sees the color red, it screams "OMG! RED!!!". This robot however has no awareness what so ever. What you described is exactly the kind of thing that might happen with robots, but it has no relationship to the awareness/consciousness aspect of the problem.

> Here are some other examples of "mysterious phenomena" which it took a while to explain (...)

This is a weak argument, and really it's irrelevant to the mind-body problem. All things you described are physical states to begin with.

A more approximation of the mind-body problem might be some one saying something like this: fire is not the same sort of thing that water is. I can hold water in my hand, but can I hold fire in my hand? I can store water for later use; can I store fire for later use? Now this sort of argument could be right or wrong, but it seems like a plausible thing to say. It's not saying fire is some kind of a super-natural miracle.

I think we both agree that we don't know what awareness is; the difference is I'm saying I know what it's not: and I know it will not arise from a computer simulating a brain.

Overall I think consciousness is an interesting topic that's worth reading about. I don't mind someone being a materialist, but it doesn't seem like you appreciate the difficulty of the problem.

It's theoretically possible that one day we'll know more about awareness, and I don't know what that knowledge would be like, but I'm pretty sure it's not something that arises from running some sort of a computer program. And I can also say with about 85% certainty that it's not reducible to any of the physics we know about today.

It's also theoretically possible that we'll never know what awareness is. It might seem outrageous and somewhat a "forbidden" idea to speak, but it's a possibility. Either due to time restraints (the universe dying before we get there) or conceptual restraints (as in, maybe our minds are just not smart enough to figure it out). Unlike most other things in nature, I don't know of anyone who even came up with a hypothesis of what awareness might be. For instance, atoms where theoretically discussed long before science proved they existed, and many different models were advanced to explain and account for planetary motions (many of them were wrong, but you get the idea). But awareness, doesn't even have any model that might account for it; not even a wrong one. That's a strong indication that it might be something outside our comprehension; not much unlike the nature of space and time.

See David Chalmers, among others.

EDIT: Really? Downvotes?

Science can't prove that there aren't any supernatural requirements for a sentient mind.

However, Science has proven that most of our intuitions about our own cognition are wrong.

Since intuition is the only evidence we have that subjectivity and qualia can arise from mysterious nonphysical processes but not computational, physical processes, Occam's Razor demands that we accept the explanation which accords with proven laws of physics.

http://www.diss.sense.uni-konstanz.de/virtualitaet/delanda.h...