'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell 
I'm puzzled by his assertion (paraphrased) that "conscious experience is an entirely different thing to neural activity, but I'm not a dualist".
How does the first half of that assertion not describe dualism? The only possible way I can see is in the case in which it goes beyond just the two ontological substances of mind (represented by conscious experience) and matter (represented by neural activity), into a pluralism like the "trialism" discussed in Sci's Justin Riddle on Quantum Biology + Consciousness thread. In any case, I did some googling to try to discover his objection(s) to dualism, and to panpsychism and cosmopsychism/idealism for good measure given that he describes himself as an ontological agnostic, and thus must have objections to those too. The best result that I found for dualism was in his 2016 Philosophy Now article “What A Possessive!”: On Being Embodied, in which he refers to: Raymond Tallis Wrote:Descartes’ discredited idea that we are the result of a seemingly contingent union of a ghostly mind and a machine-like body. Philosophy Now readers probably do not require an extended tutorial on the problems associated with this dualism. It is enough to note the apparent impossibility of seeing how an immaterial mind, that, according to Descartes, is not extended in space, could be connected with a body that is so extended; even less working out how the former could influence or direct the latter by means of its thoughts, intentions and other supposedly non-material events. Cartesian dualism would seem to make us impotent ghosts in self-propelling machines. They're pretty standard and also weak or at least non-fatal objections. The best result that I found for his objections to panpsychism and cosmopsychism/idealism were also in an article that he wrote for Philosophy Now, 2017's Against Panpsychism. Basically, he rejects panpsychism due to "the so-called combination problem", and cosmopsychism due to "the ‘disaggregation problem’, of how universal consciousness becomes individual conscious minds". In these cases, I think his objections succeed. A minor note: while I agree that neural activity and conscious experience are not dual aspects of the same thing, I don't think that his rebuttal - which he gives between 2:53 and 3:44 - to the water-H20 analogy for this dual-aspect theory succeeds. I could try to articulate why I say that if asked. Finally, my googling turned up an interesting article What Consciousness Is Not that he wrote for The New Atlantis in 2011, reviewing David Chalmers's 2010 book The Character of Consciousness, a book that I haven't read. Others might enjoy his review. It seems notable in particular because it reiterates and reaffirms the point made by EJ Lowe - that David Chalmers concedes to much to materialism with his hard-easy problem distinction - in his paper There are No Easy Problems of Consciousness, as shared by Sci in this post in his thread The A Priori Case for the Paranormal? [Resources].
P.S. My googling also turned up an interesting quote in the 2008 Guardian article Ray Tallis: 'At 15 I was a biochemical materialist':
Quote:"The brain is a necessary condition for consciousness," he argues, "but it is not a sufficient one. [...]" I guess he's not convinced by the evidence from NDEs and CORTs, etc, to whatever extent he's even aware of them.
(2024-09-23, 06:45 PM)Laird Wrote: P.S. My googling also turned up an interesting quote in the 2008 Guardian article Ray Tallis: 'At 15 I was a biochemical materialist': IIRC he did sign some petition that was put out about bias in science and how parapsychology was a respectable field of inquiry. Whether he believes these inquiries have borne fruit is another question. I feel like Penrose is the same way, open minded but for whatever reason (bias?) unconvinced.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell 
(2024-09-23, 06:45 PM)Laird Wrote: P.S. My googling also turned up an interesting quote in the 2008 Guardian article Ray Tallis: 'At 15 I was a biochemical materialist': I don’t think it’s lack of awareness that makes people unconvinced of these things.
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