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Tallis in Wonderland

The Illusion of Illusionism

Raymond Tallis sees through a physicalist confusion.

Consciousness has always been a serious embarrassment for those who believe that everything is physical and that physics is the most authoritative account of the material world. There is, it seems, nothing in matter or energy as seen through the eyes of physics that explains how a part of the material world might become aware of itself and the world surrounding it, as is the case with conscious subjects, such as readers of Philosophy Now. Physicalism cannot account for the emergence of minds from a purely physical reality.

Physicalist philosophers often try to tame the conscious mind by reducing it to the locus of functional connections between incoming sensory stimuli and outgoing bodily behaviour. Consciousness then becomes a tapestry of causal pathways passing through the nervous system of the organism.

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