[Don Salmon]

Hi Peter:

Since Freeman is also a physicalist, I don’t quite see how anything he says about the relationship of mind and brain could be substantially more worthwhile than Dennett’s. It still leaves untouched the mystery of how a world of appearances comes into being, how it is in any way orderly, how sentience, feeling,intelligence and awareness arise, why there should any kind of complexification of consciousness as even Stephen J Gould admits occurs in evolution.

It leaves untouched the biggest question of all, what I referred to earlier in my reference to Chalmer’s idea of “the hard problem of matter.”

Since at present, science has no explanation (in the philosophic sense) for anything, and has no evidence that some kind of purely physical stuff exists, and all the mysteries I referred to above, as well as the mystery as to why it is that mental health and treatments for mental health remain almost a complete mystery for the purely physicalist approach, why don’t we simply discard our ungrounded, irrational faith in the existence of some purely physical stuff?

What is the reason for our stubborn attachment to something that we could never even comprehend as existing, and which seems to make virtually everything impossible to understand?