Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Views composes a post in which he offers up a nice summary of various materialist views of the mind. He closes with this:
The mind is a catastrophe for materialism. Materialism doesn't explain the mind, and it probably can't explain the mind. Materialism flounders on the hard problem of consciousness - the problem of understanding how it is that we are subjects and not just objects. Now a number of scientists and other academics are challenging this repellent materialist nonsense. There's no scientific or even logical justification for the inference that the mind is merely the brain, without remainder, and the philosophical and sociological implications of the materialist view of the mind are abhorrent. Now there's a reality-based push-back to materialist superstition, and the materialists have an insurrection on their hands.
The question of whether we have a mind that is a qualitatively different "substance" than matter has, like almost all philosophical problems, enormous implications. If material stuff is all that makes up the world, our bodies, and our brains then it becomes much more difficult to hold onto a number of beliefs that many people hold dear.
If, for example, materialism is true it's harder to believe that there is a God, a life after death, human dignity, free will, and moral responsibility, just to mention a few. Indeed, most materialists don't believe in any of these things. Fortunately, it's very unlikely that materialism is true. Egnor's summary does a nice job in a relatively few paragraphs of showing us why.
RLC
