Regaining consciousness

Abstract

This paper draws on the central ideas of John Dewey’s ‘pragmatic technology’ – as explored by Larry Hickman in his book of that name published in 1992, and, secondly, on the understanding that reality can be understood to be ‘natural but not naturalizable’ (Margolis, 2002). It thus takes issue with the ‘naturalizing’ assumptions (specifically the ‘causal closure of physics’) which deny any initiating role for the mind, currently prevalent within biologist understandings of cognitive science, Rortyan neo-pragmatism, and interpretations of the future role of Artificial Intelligence. I argue both that any attempt to resolve the ‘mind-body problem’ in naturalizing terms is logically untenable in terms of Dewey’s pragmatic ‘tools of enquiry’, and further that the ongoing attempts to resolve/ discuss the problem while ignoring this impasse, have resulted in some significant negative consequences within the real world. The paper acknowledges more recent work on consciousness within the pragmatist tradition, but argues that this is either compatible with Dewey’s understanding of body-mind, and thus widens the argument without changing it, or else it differs in ways which may be incompatible with the arguments of the paper, which seek to engage with dominant thought systems outside of pragmatism. I argue that a relativist stance will disallow this wider engagement. The paper concludes with a discussion of current arguments concerning alternative ‘natural’, immaterial (and thus not physical) approaches to understanding consciousness.