The puzzle of the physical
I mentioned a little while ago that sometimes, in philosophy, it is important to examine the shared presuppositions of the parties to a debate, and I discussed a number of assumptions (some common to the functionalist and the phenomenologist, and one to Dennett and Stich) that might be questioned.
I want to end this chapter by inviting you to think about another shared assumption: namely, that the puzzles about the relations between mind and body stem from the special character of the mind. After all, the idea that there is something special about the mind to be explained at all seems to presuppose that there is nothing much to be explained about the nonmental, the physical world. On the best current theories of nature, at one time the universe contained no minds, and they then evolved. One way of understanding how phenomenologists think about the mindbody problem is to think of them as asking: “How could my mind— which I know from direct experience—be made out of matter, which seems so different from it?”But why is it puzzling that minds are made out of matter? Stars, magnets, bacteria, and elephants are made out of matter, and each of these would have been hard to anticipate from the character of the universe before they emerged. We have learned about the properties of matter by seeing what can be made of it: we know that it is the kind of thing that magnets can be made out of, because we have found magnetic substances; we know that it is the kind of thing bacteria can be made out of, because we have found bacteria. Why is it especially hard to accept that it is the kind of thing minds can be made out of? Indeed, since the one thing of which each of us surely has the most extensive direct experience is our own mind, shouldn't we be puzzled, if we are puzzled by anything, by the nature of matter? How can it be, one might want to ask, that a world made of the sorts of things and governed by the sorts of laws that physicists now believe in should give rise to the astonishing range of experiences that each of us has every day?
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