Re:Language is not essential for the cognitive processes tha...
by lanstin on Sunday October 20, 2024 @04:31PM
(#41898241)
Like what is magic - it turns out to be the ability to go from interior thoughts to stuff happening in the shared world - physics is just the mechanism of the particular magical system we have.
To deal with the awkwardly apparent fact that consciousness certainly seems to have physical effects, zombiephiles challenge the notion that physics is causally closed, so that it is conceivable that something non-physical can cause physical effects. Their approach is to say that the causal closure of physics is not provable, but at this point, the argument has become a lexicographical one, about the definition of the words 'physics' and 'physical' (if one insists that 'physical' does not refer to a causally-closed concept, then we still need a word for the causal closure within which the physical is embedded - but that's just what a lot of people take 'physical' to mean in the first place.) None of the anti-physicalists have been able, so far, to shed any light on how the mind is causally effective in the physical world.
You might be interested in the late Daniel Dennett's "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies": https://dl.tufts.edu/concern/pdfs/6m312182x