Thoughts on the mind-body problem?

[tardis]

For a long time my views were closest to John Searle's, but recently I have become more sympathetic to some kind of idealism.

This isn't entirely offtopic since idealism is more compatible with things like souls and afterlives than materialism, but I'm just curious in your philosophy of mind views if you have any.

 

[hʚll]

bump.
i'm too weak to write coherent things. but curious what others think as well

 

[StringPuppet]

I'm honestly not even sure what my views are anymore. I've seen convincing (or at least graspable) arguments for both idealism and materialism. One materialist response to the mind-body problem I've seen is denying that it's a problem at all. The distinction of "mind" as something separate from "body" is only an illusion.

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? | Oliver Burkeman

The long read: Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more than complex robots

www.theguardian.com

"Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with – making the whole debate kickstarted by Chalmers an exercise in pointlessness. Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn't anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesn't actually give rise to something called consciousness. Common sense may tell us there's a subjective world of inner experience – but then common sense told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat. Consciousness, according to Dennett's theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named "fictoplasm"; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying."