“The brain is just meat and electricity. How does that
account for consciousness?”
So says Gloria Verrano, the Medical Examiner on Haven, over-playing her hand and using a
common argument for property dualism as a basis for substance dualism and “universalist”
– as opposed to Haven-specific – notions of life after death.
One argument intended to take us past emergence and property
dualism is that neither “meat and electricity” nor any material basis can
explain the unity of apperception.
For that, only the radical unity of the res cogitans could suffice.
But supposing meat and electricity in fact account for my
representations being all mine and none
of them yours, perhaps some failure
in the meat – or the electricity – accounts for multiple personalities.
That kind of multiplicity seems a lot more plausible in that case.
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