Why is it that science is OK for understanding physics and astronomy but not for understanding consciousness?
Science in some broad sense “is OK… for understanding consciousness”, but unless you’re a behaviorist, you need to be explaining (and first, you need to be describing) the subjective side of consciousness, not just the physiology of it. It’s the facts about subjectivity which make consciousness a different sort of topic from anything in the natural sciences.
Yes we will have to describe the subjective side of consciousness but the physiology has to come first. As an illustration: if you didn’t know the function of the heart or much about its physiology, it would be useless to try and understand it by how it felt. Hence we would have ideas like ‘loving with all my heart’, ‘my heart is not in it’ etc. which come from the pre-biology world. Once we know how and why the heart works the way it does, those feeling are seen differently.
I am certainly not a behaviorist and I do think that consciousness is an extremely important function of the brain/mind. We probably can’t understand how cognition works without understanding how consciousness works. I just do not think introspection gets us closer to understanding, nor do I think that introspection gives us any direct knowledge of our own minds - ‘direct’ being the important word.
Science in some broad sense “is OK… for understanding consciousness”, but unless you’re a behaviorist, you need to be explaining (and first, you need to be describing) the subjective side of consciousness, not just the physiology of it. It’s the facts about subjectivity which make consciousness a different sort of topic from anything in the natural sciences.
Yes we will have to describe the subjective side of consciousness but the physiology has to come first. As an illustration: if you didn’t know the function of the heart or much about its physiology, it would be useless to try and understand it by how it felt. Hence we would have ideas like ‘loving with all my heart’, ‘my heart is not in it’ etc. which come from the pre-biology world. Once we know how and why the heart works the way it does, those feeling are seen differently.
I am certainly not a behaviorist and I do think that consciousness is an extremely important function of the brain/mind. We probably can’t understand how cognition works without understanding how consciousness works. I just do not think introspection gets us closer to understanding, nor do I think that introspection gives us any direct knowledge of our own minds - ‘direct’ being the important word.