Ducks and dualism

My original post about zombies "Elan vital and consciousness" begged the question, Is consciousness something "extra"? I asked you to imagine a human who was indistinguishable from someone like you, but who had no inner life, that is, no consciousness: this is the philosopher's zombie. I then supposed that whatever extra it was that you (the real you) possesses, this quality of consciousness--this turns out, in the fullness of scientific investigation, to be inevitable given the structure of the human body and brain. Just as life is inevitable--there's no extra spark of life--there's no extra attribute of "consciousness."

Meaning that the philosopher's zombie is an impossibility. A human built like you or me is conscious, by definition. (If it walks and quacks like a duck…)

This is one "solution" (make it go away!) to what's been called the Hard Problem of Consciousness, which can be easily stated: How can physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience? Or how can brain-stuff be mind-stuff? You can add a verb in there--"…generate mind stuff" or "…be correlated with mind stuff" but then you start getting squirly, implying that brains and minds are two different things and consist of two different kinds of stuff--physical stuff and thinking (non-material) stuff. This is Descartes' "substance dualism."

I don't want to spend a lot of time defending this kind of dualism, what the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle scoffed at as "the ghost in the machine" idea. Just to say that seems to be the insurmountable problem of interaction--how something non-material (thoughts) can affect, or be affected by, something material (brain). "Thoughts affecting brains" implies either that either thoughts are some kind of matter or energy (in which case they're non-material) or else you have to fall back on the old stand-by: magic!

So for now I'll stick with the word "mind" being more like a verb, a metaphor for happenings in my brain. Marvin Minsky said it succinctly: "Minds are simply what brains do."