Over at the New Atlantis Raymond Tallis reviews David Chalmer’s new book The Character of Consciousness. Here is an interesting passage on all of those MRI experiments purporting to capture consciousness in mere brain activity:
But none of these characteristics seems likely to deliver the difference between neural activity that is and is not associated with consciousness, not the least because they all aim to narrow down a phenomenon that is inherently multifaceted. And the approach faces other inherent limitations. For a start, as Chalmers points out, correlation is not causation: even if one identifies some neural feature correlated with consciousness (say, by stimulating a part of the brain and having the subject report being aware of some mental state), it does not follow that this neural feature is solely or mainly dedicated to consciousness. More to the point, even if some of these phenomena do turn out to be truly and uniquely causative of consciousness, none of them would enable us to get a handle on the “hard” questions. As Chalmers candidly points out, “why should [some particular neural feature] give rise to conscious experience? As always, this bridging question is unanswered.”
And then there is this gem:
Indeed, how do any concepts arise out of the inert matter-energy interchanges of physics? Until we are presented with a plausible account of how the concept of “matter” arose out of matter itself, we should be prepared to argue that there is nothing in matter as described by physics that would suggest it could rise above itself, and enclose that which it has risen above in quotation marks. (It is this simple insight — and not anything about how confusing, difficult, or incomplete is quantum physics — that is one of the great challenges to materialism.)