Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

acknowledge ‘brute facts’ — things that seem to make sense and seem to make our theories about the world coherent.

For physics there are only ‘how’ questions. I’m not so sure however about biology. To suggest that life just spontaneously arises out of inert matter and that consciousness is just an epi-phenomenon of life seems dubious at best. Books on biology often begin by strictly insisting that evolution is a blind process driven only by chance, but sooner or later they fall into suggesting nature has a will and a purpose in bringing about changes to species and so on. It is almost an inevitable error and also a very telling one. There is a whole universe of experience, intentions and values that are as meaningful, if not more meaningful, to people in living our lives. Humans are conscious, soulful creatures in our personal lives and that, to me, is the reality of being human. For the world of values, ‘why’ questions are paramount — the ‘how’ questions of science are just background.

One question of science is whether consciousness is ‘substrate-neutral’ — in other words, not dependent on a particular underlying ‘substrate’ for it’s functioning. A great philosophical question! But you see where that is heading. Could consciousness be uploaded to a computer (and thus another — and this time non-physical — substrate)? Perhaps the problem is clear — the underlying assumption about consciousness is that it can be broken down into bits and re-built, rather than it being an emergent quality of life plus life’s environments — far less something sacred.

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