“The Impenetrable Mystery of Being You”

“The Impenetrable Mystery of Being You”

 

An adult male human brain
Is this you?
Are you essentially a neurochemical secretion?
(Wikimedia Commons)

 

The latest installment of my weekly Deseret News column is up:

 

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865649146/The-impenetrable-mystery-of-being-you.html

 

Already, one of the usual atheistic commentators there has accused me of religiously-motivated obscurantism because I describe consciousness and subjectivity as a “mystery” and as perhaps even an “irreducible” one.

 

But I’m scarcely alone in this view.  In fact, in writing those words, I was drawing on the work of the philosopher Colin McGinn, who is not (to my knowledge) a religious believer of any kind, and on the school, in the philosophy of mind, that’s sometimes called the “new mysterianism.”

 

 


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