At Mind Matters News: The final materialist quest: A war on the reality of the mind

Going to war with the very concept of the mind is an approach even George Orwell did not think up. Bound to happen though. Philosophy student Joe Gough explains:

The terms mind and mental are used in so many ways and have such a chequered history that they carry more baggage than meaning. Ideas of the mind and the mental are simultaneously ambiguous and misleading, especially in various important areas of science and medicine. When people talk of ‘the mind’ and ‘the mental’, the no-mind thesis doesn’t deny that they’re talking about something – on the contrary, they’re often talking about too many things at once. Sometimes, when speaking of ‘the mind’, people really mean agency; other times, cognition; still others, consciousness; some uses of ‘mental’ really mean psychiatric; others psychological; others still immaterial; and yet others, something else.

News, “The final materialist quest: A war on the reality of the mind” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: When George Orwell wrote 1984, he addressed destroying minds, not denying their possibility and changing the language associated with them.

But the new approach is probably more efficient, if workable.

You may also wish to read: How a materialist philosopher argued his way to panpsychism. Galen Strawson starts with the one fact of which we are most certain — our own consciousness. To Strawson, it makes more sense to say that consciousness is physical — and that electrons are conscious — than that consciousness is an illusion.

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