Sam Harris and Roger Penrose discuss the mysteries of consciousness and selfhood.

Is the Self merely an illusion?

With a free trial, you can watch the full debate NOW at https://iai.tv/video/the-divided-self-sam-harris-roger-penro…escription.

Many have sought to divide the self into separate parts. From Aristotle’s distinction between the rational and irrational self to Freud’s separation of the conscious and unconscious mind, from Kahneman’s fast and slow self to McGilchrist’s selves of the left and right brain. But critics argue it makes no sense to see the self as divided. From Descartes to Sartre, many philosophers have concluded that to be conscious is to be conscious of something and there can be no further self hiding within consciousness. After all, if there are two aspects of the self does it not require a third to oversee or combine them? Meanwhile, neuroscience has been unable to identify a self at all let alone multiple selves.

Should we give up the idea of distinct selves as simply incoherent? Should we conclude that a single self is necessary to account for conscious experience and to enable responsibility for action? Or are multiple selves a better way to explain the wildly divergent thoughts and contradictory behaviours that we can sometimes exhibit?

#consciousness #samharris #rogerpenrose.

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It is commonly believed that there is a mind-body problem because we can give an explanation of matter but not of the mind. But according to John Collins, we don’t understand matter either. Materialism was refuted by Newton in the 17^th century, and the physicalism which has replaced it is not a substantive doctrine. There are gaps in our understanding of the mental – we still do not have a good theory of what the mind is – but after Newton, there is no ‘mind-body problem’

Minds are problematic. We don’t quite know what they are. If one has a mind, let us agree, then one is sentient and sapient, able to be self-aware and to think and reason about things. But both of these qualities are opaque, not least because they have no apparent analogy in the non-mental world. What, exactly, does one need to add to a body to get a mind? How is a thing that is merely subject to physical laws self-aware and able to think about dinosaurs and the afterlife? This conundrum is invariably depicted in terms of there being a mind-body problem. I’ll try in what follows to give you reasons to think that this label is at best misleading. There are lots of mind problems and lots of body problems, but no mind-body problem, because there is no realm of bodies in some general sense from which minds are excluded. Before you call for an intervention, let me explain.

A potted history.