Tim Crane on Philosophy Bites
Pertinent to the last post is this interview on Philosophy Bites with Tim Crane.
On brain scans: For anyone who knows anything about the brain and psychology at all, it’s not surprising that there is a bit of your brain that lights up when you walk or talk…some neuroscientists have said that we can identify conscious experience or correlate conscious experience with some particular kind of brain activity. now that presupposes, it seems to me, that there is some “thing” that is being correlated…and that presupposes that consciousness is one phenomenon. And I’m not sure that we know that consciousness is one phenomenon…we ought to be able to study the appearances and study the structure of consciousness.
On the role of the philosopher: You don’t solve the problem of consciousness by looking into the brain. If I’m right that the questions we’re asking about consciousness are the result of confusion rather than ignorance, then the philosopher has to unpick those questions and unravel them.
Relevant, too, is the fact that Crane is not a Cartesian dualist or arguing for any kind of immaterial reality (he explicitly denies those options in this interview and elsewhere in his work).
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