Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

214 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
we are aware of chairs and tables. It never occurs to Ryle that the fact of
awareness itself demands explanation. Or rather, it is “explained” as behavior.
Another, more interesting objection is that declaring the mind to be
illusory entails unavoidable circularity, since “illusion” is an inescapably
“mental” concept. There is no room in the world of matter for illusion;
things either are or they are not. The attempt to “reduce” mental concepts
to the physical devolves into explaining them away. The difficulty is that
genuine reduction implies deduction. That is, to say that we can reduce
phenomena A through W to concepts X, Y, and Z means that given X, Y,
and Z one could logically deduce all the rest. Modern science has actually
made it more difficult to envision explaining mental concepts in material
terms even while rendering the idea of matter as difficult and obscure as
mind is traditionally thought to be. The philosophical dilemma of materialist
science has actually deepened immensely since the time of Locke: as
scientists become ever more convinced that nothing but matter exists, science
has made it increasingly difficult to say just what matter is.
Materialism and Naive Realism
But the materialists, in their attempts to exclude everything from the universe
except matter in motion, find themselves returning to naive realism,
despite its having been discarded by so many philosophers as untenable.
Representative realism, merely by declaring that the mind does not directly
apprehend the physical world, must acknowledge that mind indeed
exists. Naive realism would appear to bypass the need for mind at all: it
puts the brain (a physical system) directly in contact with other physical
systems. But it then becomes necessary to ignore entirely the question of
how such a thing as awareness is possible at all. There is no reason to assume
that any physical system, considered strictly as such, should ever be
aware of anything. It just behaves. Just as Kuhn maintains, the materialists
do not really attempt to understand consciousness on its own terms; they
strive to bring it into the fold of their favorite paradigms. So the computer
scientists promote Functionalism, which declares that mind is nothing but
a computer algorithm, and the neurological scientists trumpet Identity
Theory, which insists that minds are nothing but the activity of neurons. If
considered honestly and logically, such theories reduce us all to unconscious
automata. In any case, naive realism is logically incompatible with
Functionalism and the Identity Theory, for if mind is “nothing but” an
algorithm for firing neurons, it is impossible to imagine how such a physi-