I very much identify with physicalism and eliminativism interests me immensely. I suspect I will greatly enjoy this coming week's reading on functionalism as well.
The blog question was, " If you agree with physicalism, how do you explain the fact that our mental life seems to be like nothing else in the physical world"
This seems like a very loaded and somewhat difficult question to answer in such a context. To compare the inner workings of a complex system such as our brain which we don't even fully understand yet since we don't have perfect visibility and reflection into our own brain inner workings with observed phenomena that we only understand at surface level just doesn't seem even plausible. If we had such knowledge, we would completely understand how we process not just physical stimuli but how our brain processes complex concepts such as acquisition of knowledge and formation of thoughts. For example, look at how we do brain scans. We essentially look at which areas light up in the brain. This tells us nothing about what the individual synapses are doing or even what the individual brain cells are doing. Our understanding and application of our limited understanding of our brains is downright primitive. Sure, we have come a long, long way in the past 50 years or so but we have quite a ways to go.
Here is a better example. Let's say I see an animal and it is something I have never seen before and it behaves in a way I have never seen before either. I can make the conclusion that nothing else is like this because in my limited knowledge I never observed such a thing/being. Maybe it is a cheetah running at 70 mph. However, there are many other things that run at various different speeds but are different because of their physical makeups, evolution, basic structure Conceptually, they are doing the same exact thing though. It's a question of degree. We realize our brains are complex and sophisticated but that doesn't make it 'magical'. How do we know our consciousness is in fact unique? We don't. We aren't even at the level of understanding required for our own species to make such a statement nevermind other animal species. This also discounts non-human life/consciousness. This limits the data set to things we have observed which can and will be incomplete. Not only is it limited in the size of the data set we currently have but our understanding is limited as well. This greatly discounts unobserved phenomena. What if there are millions of intelligent species out there that we don't yet know about?
The initial question is almost reminiscent of the 'black swan theory' . It goes: "One notices a white swan. From this one can conclude: At least one swan is white. From this, one may wish to conjecture: All swans are white. But it is impractical to observe all the swans in the world to verify that they are all white. Even so, the statement all swans are white is testable by being falsifiable. For, if in testing many swans, the researcher finds a single black swan, then the statement all swans are white would be falsified by the counterexample of the single black swan." (taken from the Wikipedia article on Falsifiability).
We can similarly assume that since our consciousness seems unique that it must therefore be unique but it is only unique because our scope of understanding is limited and our observations are limited as well. Because we think it is unique based on our limited understanding and observation does not make it ultimately unique. It's the fallacy of hasty generalization where a generalization is made based on insufficent evidence. How can we possibly even conclude that the concept of human consciousness as it is understood (which really isn't understood very well) is special and unique?
That said, I do think that over time as more strides are made in understanding the brain and phenomena that right now seems mystifying, the case for physicalism will be even stronger.
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This was a very interesting read. I suppose there are two ways of thinking of consciousness being unique. One is to say that it's the only thing of its kind and we are the only species to possess it. But surely one could also say it's unique in the sense that it seems to be unreducible (as far as we know) to anything that we can understand in scientific terms. That being said, there is also some merit to saying, as you say here, that perhaps this is only because science in this area is in its infancy
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