This coming week the University of Cambridge will host a conference on Non-physicalist Views of Consciousness, supported by the New Directions in the Study of the Mind project:
Consciousness has been one of the stumbling blocks for physicalist theories of the mind. Much effort has been dedicated to finding the physical basis of consciousness. But how does our knowledge of the mind connect with our knowledge of the brain? Physicalist theories have struggled to give satisfactory answers to this question. In this conference we will take a different turn, by investigating non-physicalist approaches to the mind. We will address questions such as: What ontological categories do conscious phenomena belong to? Does the consciousness of sensory experience differ from that involved in thought? How is it possible to investigate consciousness without assuming physicalism? We aim to open up the discussion by exploring alternatives to physicalism in the philosophical and scientific study of consciousness.
For those who are interested in these topics but can’t be there in person, the New Directions YouTube channel will livestream all the talks (and, I assume, host video of them afterward). For a full schedule, visit the conference website.
Our mind is in our brain and has a physical base. I don’t struggle to understand it and physicalists are clear nowadays.
The ones that struggle and make no progress are those that try to find non-physicalist approach. They just guess things.
The only sucessful approach is a naturalistic one and anyone not adhering to this is losing the train of the great contemporary progress done by science and philosophy in the study of what we really are vs what many thought we were. People that want to understand what we know about consciousness, about ourselves, need to read Quine, Wittgenstein and reach the contemporaries Damasio, Dennett, Andler and Dehaene.
Yes, those outgroupers sure are bad at being the ingroup.
Luckily contempt is part of any good scientific inquiry.