At about 20 minutes in, he says that as a cognitive scientist, the evidence that your mind and your consciousnessare completely dependent on and emergent from your brain is overwhelming. Now, I agree with this, and I can think of various examples that lead me to believe that that’s the occam’s razor position, but I’m curious if anybody can point me to any central source of resources for information to prove this. My basis for thinking this, as a layman, isn’t as rigorous or complete as I would like.
There are two main alternative hypotheses you might want to contrast that with: dualism and “body-mind”.
For dualism, the theory is that the mind is happening somewhere else (a mental plane) and “pushing into” the body. Think, like, a video game being played by a person; the character isn’t doing the generating of the mind or consciousness, that’s all happening on the other side of the screen. IMO the most compelling external evidence against this comes from brain damage cases, of which the most famous and one of the earliest was Phineas Gage, and the most compelling internal evidence comes from brain-affecting chemicals. (You still need some external evidence to show that the chemicals are affecting the brain / nervous system specifically.) If the brain were just an antenna receiving input from the mental realm, instead of the place where the action is happening, it would be weird to have functional errors connected so tightly to physical errors. (I think there are maybe people who still hold this position? Or believe in dualism for weirder reasons.)
For “body-mind”, the theory is that the mind isn’t just happening inside the skull; it’s happening throughout the whole body, or in connection with other parts of the environment, and so on. I think in response people mostly go “ok by ‘brain’ I meant ‘nervous system’, which is mostly your brain”, but again we look at the cases where people have lost parts of their body that aren’t their brain and see how much effect that has on consciousness, and the result is mostly quite small. (Looking at amputees, one gets the sense that not much of the mind is happening in arms and legs, whereas looking at patients who have lost bits of their brain, one gets the sense that lots of the mind is happening there.) People whose habits and cognition have become dependent on some external features—like looking things up in their phone, or conferring with colleagues, or so on—do often have their behavior and performance interrupted by losing those things, but it seems harder to argue their consciousness is affected.
At about 20 minutes in, he says that as a cognitive scientist, the evidence that your mind and your consciousnessare completely dependent on and emergent from your brain is overwhelming. Now, I agree with this, and I can think of various examples that lead me to believe that that’s the occam’s razor position, but I’m curious if anybody can point me to any central source of resources for information to prove this. My basis for thinking this, as a layman, isn’t as rigorous or complete as I would like.
There are two main alternative hypotheses you might want to contrast that with: dualism and “body-mind”.
For dualism, the theory is that the mind is happening somewhere else (a mental plane) and “pushing into” the body. Think, like, a video game being played by a person; the character isn’t doing the generating of the mind or consciousness, that’s all happening on the other side of the screen. IMO the most compelling external evidence against this comes from brain damage cases, of which the most famous and one of the earliest was Phineas Gage, and the most compelling internal evidence comes from brain-affecting chemicals. (You still need some external evidence to show that the chemicals are affecting the brain / nervous system specifically.) If the brain were just an antenna receiving input from the mental realm, instead of the place where the action is happening, it would be weird to have functional errors connected so tightly to physical errors. (I think there are maybe people who still hold this position? Or believe in dualism for weirder reasons.)
For “body-mind”, the theory is that the mind isn’t just happening inside the skull; it’s happening throughout the whole body, or in connection with other parts of the environment, and so on. I think in response people mostly go “ok by ‘brain’ I meant ‘nervous system’, which is mostly your brain”, but again we look at the cases where people have lost parts of their body that aren’t their brain and see how much effect that has on consciousness, and the result is mostly quite small. (Looking at amputees, one gets the sense that not much of the mind is happening in arms and legs, whereas looking at patients who have lost bits of their brain, one gets the sense that lots of the mind is happening there.) People whose habits and cognition have become dependent on some external features—like looking things up in their phone, or conferring with colleagues, or so on—do often have their behavior and performance interrupted by losing those things, but it seems harder to argue their consciousness is affected.
These sorts of things are definitely along the lines of the examples I had in mind as well. Thanks for the reply.