The Hive Mind

Charlie Brooker has one of his excellent columns in today’s Guardian, this time ruminating on the phenomenon of who’s really in charge of his mind. While it’s funny, like all the best humour there’s an underlying seriousness, and that is: how does consciousness and personality come about anyway? It’s a topic that, as I mentioned before, I find fascinating.

 

One set of theories that I personally don’t accept about the mind and consciousness is that it has anything to do with dualism, certainly not Descartes’ substance dualism. Property dualism also seems to me to be introducing an unnecessary level of indirection into what seems to me to simply be emergent phenomena arising out of physical causes. And I’m still trying to get my head around what predicate dualism actually is. I’m a simple soul at heart, and that’s probably why, armed with Occam’s razor, I find any theory of dualism of the mind rather unsatisfactory. 

 

There’s a good chapter in Stephen Law’s The Philosophy Gym titled, appropriately enough, The Consciousness Conundrum dealing with the subject. He deals with both substance and property dualism, but not predicate dualism (perhaps this is a recent development?). For further reading, Law recommends (amongst others) the "now quite old but nevertheless still excellent" The Mind’s I. I can concur – this book is very good indeed and well worth reading on the topic of what is the Mind?