Is Consciousness Natural?
And why you should care about the answer
In his recent article Consciousness: natural or supernatural, Colin Mathers responds to my article Why Consciousness is Such a Big Deal. Colin is surprised that I would argue consciousness is fatal to the philosophy of naturalism and therefore it must be supernatural.
The first thing to note is, I didn’t use the word supernatural anywhere in my article. Supernatural is a word I try to avoid. It obscures the issues because it hides all the naturalist assumptions people are making and reinforces an unhelpful way of thinking about the topic.
Splitting the world into two categories
The modern way of thinking splits the world into the categories of natural and supernatural. Natural refers to the things studied by science, supernatural is whatever’s left over.
With this way of thinking, the supernatural isn’t a category in its own right with particular qualities that define it. It’s understood in the negative as not-natural. Supernatural becomes anything that science is yet to explain.
This is why theism and non-materialist worldviews are constantly accused of making god of the gaps arguments. Because the naturalist presumption is already there, unspoken and unjustified.
