Sunday 4 November 2012

'I don't have a body, I am a body' Christopher Hitchens said during his final illness articulating simply a fundamental truth. Bodies exist in space and are subject to physical laws. Minds can not be said to be spacially anywhere. How can something of no physical properties control something existent in physical space? It can not. No more than a mind can move objects through the power of telekenesis. We now know that the brain has processed the decision to make a move before we decide to move. We act then explain it to ourselves, we 'decide' to move after our brains have decided to. It appears free will is an illusion. The self is an illusion. Mind body duality is an illusion. We are learning about consciousness now. During my life there have been huge leaps in our understanding. Even so, the hard problem remains; how can a mind, something that has no material and does not exist in space, control or move a body, something that exists in space. Centuries of thought have still not cracked this one.

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