Hello. I think that, for a start, we should get rid of the expression “hard problem of…". In philosophy, I do not see that there would be something as ‘soft' problems…

Second, to argue that consciousness is physical, I reckon, won't help to understand what consciousness is. Why? Because it has been quite a time since, for instance Darwin acknowledged that animals and humans were gifted with ‘mental powers'. Consciousness is a production center of mental powers. Now the question is: What is mentality? This is the main questions addressed to the very nature of consciousness .

Concerning time, if anything like 'personal time' exists, and I do assume that it does, how one will ever set some scientific protocols to measure the comprehension of personal time for each individual? Subjective time, as lived, is eminently personal. How do you erase those subjective differences? Added to this, it is quite likely that the very notion of Time is one of the most metaphysical question of all… 

In order to answer such questions raised by such notions as ‘consciousness‘ and 'time‘, I don't think that neuroscience nor physical explanation will help us. Sometimes, philosophy should rely on itself to offer her the proper power to think.

I think you are on the right track, Dimitrios. There is no great mystery to consciousness if we frame our descriptions right. 

People get worried about mental and physical, but nobody actually knows what they want to mean by these words. As Heraclitus, Leibniz, Russell and Worrall/Ladyman have in various ways pointed out all we can hope to describe about our world are tokens or types of process or change or dynamic relation - however one wants to call it. Let us say that all that 'is' are dynamic relations.

Our brains are designed to abstract from incoming signals evidence for 'physical objects' which are reasonably constant patterns of disposition to certain relations. So physics is about distal dynamic relations. But our brains are also equipped with an internal monitoring system that allows us to describe proximal dynamic relations in a quite different way - as experiences, or 'me being conscious of the world'. As long as we consider both descriptions in terms of dynamic relation there is no dualism required. 'Matter' need not come in to it.

But as you say, dynamic relations, or events, described as conscious experience are only ever 'the present' or 'now'. What I think is important is that they must also be 'here'. There is a common misconception that time is asymmetrical and space is not because you can 'go back to where you were'. But even in the sixteenth century Leibniz realised that there is no such thing as 'where you were'. You can never get back to 'here' any more than 'now' in a relativistic spacetime. It is the 'use' of spacetime by an event that is asymmetrical - it occurs as part of a sequence that cannot be reversed.

So experience, or consciousness, is a way of describing the dynamic relation that is totally proximal in both space and time. The dichotomy that people call mind/body is then really just proximal/distal. All physics relies on the fact that the nature of an experience is totally determined by the most proximal ascertainable event. (Experience is essential to observation and thus an essential component of physics.) The practical problem we have with pinning down consciousness is , as you imply, simply the problem of identifying not just the most proximal ascertainable event but the event that is genuinely totally proximal and 'here' and 'now'. And the key difficulty is that physics has not until recently had any need to decide what a 'single event' is.

That may not be such a problem, however, since quantum theory has shown that there is a clearly discernible grain of individual, in the sense of indivisible, dynamic events. We do not need to worry about wave function collapse and all that stuff, but it would make sense for the indivisible events of quantum field theory to be those individual events, one of which at any one time and place is 'here' and 'now'. To make biological sense in terms of the experiences we seem to have I think we need to make use of quite sophisticated applications of QFT to condensed matter like cell membranes but nothing spooky. It needs to be no more sophisticated than what we need to explain the electrical conductance of a wire or reflection off a mirror.

I have described the way I think one might develop this approach on my UCL website, linked to my RG page. You may find this interesting. But in summary I agree completely that consciousness is simply here and now. The uniqueness of here and now has always been manifest but seeing how it is a fundamental part of all physics is something that people have got confused about in the past.

I am also of the belief that our experience of time offers clues as to the neural correlate of consciousness. My own approach involved the analysis of temporal rate.

If my analysis is accurate, it demonstrates that no classical mechanism can be involved in determining the particular rate at which time is experienced. However, if the neural correlate of consciousness is a quantum coherent wave, then, using relatively simple quantum mechanical principles progress may be made!

Article How Long is a Piece of Time? Phenomenal Time and Quantum Coh...

Article Time, Mind and Quantum Coherence: Physics, Psychophysics and...

I think this article by Raymond Tallis might help you think about how to approach the issue of time and consciousness – through the crucial notion of intentionality: "Without intentionality, there is no point of arrival of perceptions, no point of departure for actions, no input and output, no person located in a world. It is intentionality that opens up the present to the absent, the actual to the possible, and the now to the past and the future, so that we are able to live in a world that is an infinitely elaborated space of possibilities, rather than being simply “wired in” to what is."

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-neuroscience-cannot-tell-us-about-ourselves

But what IS the crucial notion of intentionality, Line? My experience of philosophy is that people use the word precisely because it has no agreed meaning and they can mean whatever they like by it and often two different things in the same sentence. I agree with Tallis that a lot of neuroscience is blinkered but my impression is that his solution to this is to hide behind empty touchy-feely verbiage, and, unlike Dimitrios, evade rigorous metaphysics. Intentionality in the strict philosophical sense of 'aboutness' is readily accommodated within the causal dynamics of neuroscience, although very considerable complexity is required. Intentionality in the lay sense of 'having intentions' seems to have pretty little to do with consciousness.

What I take from Tallis' discussion on the hard problem of consciousness is that intentionality in the strict philosophical sense is in fact not readily accomodated within the causal dynamics of neuroscience – "because intentionality points in the direction opposite to that of causality". He meticulously goes through arguments for and against a materialist account, identifying the problem with a physicalist causal understanding of perception and "the elimination of appearance" – pointing out "the difficulty of fitting consciousness into the natural world as understood through strictly materialist science".

Have a look at the arguments and see what you think.

By the way – Dimitrios – perhaps you have thought of this already, but I think you will the find the neuropsychological research of (Dr. Phil. et Med.) Ernst Pöppel on consciousness and the phenomenology of time (his 'hierarchical model of temporal perception') highly relevant to your inquiry.

In case you are not already familiar, I have attached some references here for your convenience.

Hello. I think that, for a start, we should get rid of the expression “hard problem of…". In philosophy, I do not see that there would be something as ‘soft' problems…

Second, to argue that consciousness is physical, I reckon, won't help to understand what consciousness is. Why? Because it has been quite a time since, for instance Darwin acknowledged that animals and humans were gifted with ‘mental powers'. Consciousness is a production center of mental powers. Now the question is: What is mentality? This is the main questions addressed to the very nature of consciousness .

Concerning time, if anything like 'personal time' exists, and I do assume that it does, how one will ever set some scientific protocols to measure the comprehension of personal time for each individual? Subjective time, as lived, is eminently personal. How do you erase those subjective differences? Added to this, it is quite likely that the very notion of Time is one of the most metaphysical question of all… 

In order to answer such questions raised by such notions as ‘consciousness‘ and 'time‘, I don't think that neuroscience nor physical explanation will help us. Sometimes, philosophy should rely on itself to offer her the proper power to think.

Dear Line,

I had a look at the Tallis article and I fear it is full of the touchy-feeliness I expected. He wants to show that ‘we are [NOT] merely beasts like any other, equally beholden as apes and centipedes to biological drives.’ He wants a magic voodoo ingredient. I am afraid I am unimpressed. I am wondering when the Ouija board is coming out.

Tallis takes Brentano’s arrow as his starting point but appears to reify it from a mere metaphor into some strange reality in a space of concepts outside space and time. And yet he gives as an example ‘looking out’, which presumably IS in space, if it is more than just a metaphor. The whole thing seems to me childlike in its muddled naivety.

The neurological account explains aboutness perfectly well. Aboutness is a form of dynamic correlation in the context of the rules of operation of a brain. My idea of a rose is said to be ‘about’ a rose outside because the two are correlated according to some rather complicated rules of causation. The rules are complicated because there are actually two correlations involved. One involves the way the rose might cause the idea and the other involves the way the idea may cause rose-related behaviour, like going out and picking it to put in a vase. The whole point of our ideas is to have this dual correlation. In a sense that is the basis of Millikan’s teleosemantics. The problem is that it was never going to be that evolution would make the two correlations perfectly and uniquely matched. So aboutness suffers from all sorts of difficulties in definition like the de re/de dicto dichotomy and people find it slippery. But that simply indicates that it is an intuitive ‘family resemblance’ concept that needs to be unpicked in serious dynamic analysis.

Tallis also makes the mistake of thinking that neuroscience, as a branch of physical science deals with ‘matter’, as a sort of stuff. Like all physical science, neuroscience only deals with dynamic relations, saying nothing else about the nature of stuff. Nothing need be ‘physical’ or ‘mental’, just dynamic. Tallis quotes Dennett but Dennett, like other ‘Brights’ tends to be completely out of touch with what science is actually about.

Tallis is right to deny that perception ‘just is neural activity’ and that some neuroscientists do seem to hold that view. But most neuropsychologists at least are a bit more sophisticated than that. (I agree with Tallis that the Churchlands have lost the plot, but then they are philosophers.) It is also true that many neuroscientists call themselves ‘materialists’, an example I know well being Colin Blakemore. However, they do not deny appearance. What I think Blakemore would mean by materialism is that whatever causal processes are involved in mind, they are covered by biophysics. This has nothing to do with how many sorts of ‘stuff’ we have, or denial of experience. It is just a denial of any magic 'ingredient that can have efficacy yet not be a biophysical cause – a sort of cause that is not a cause – in other words a phoney idea, in Tallis’s case probably the phoney idea of free will.

Tallis does not seem to appreciate that if his extra aspects of explanation are not causal they have no explanatory power because they cannot provide any predicted effects. If they are causal then he needs to show that they are outside the causal laws of biophysics and he makes no case for that. The whole project collapses like a house of cards because he confuses metaphor with reality.

Dear Fabrice,

Why should 'mental' not be 'physical'? To be honest I am not clear what either of those words means. If all we can know about is dynamic relations, or what might cause what, which seems pretty certain, I see no need to have two mutually exclusive categories. What seems to define the mental is that it is always here and now. If mental is just the physical that is here and now, is that a problem? I am not aware that any scientist like Darwin has suggested that we need mental causal relations over and above the ones given by physics.

Jonathan: I think you are a fine Spinozan metaphysicist ("Nothing need be ‘physical’ or ‘mental’, just dynamic.") The good old rationalist debate is still thriving, as this thread shows, but the metaphysical denial of metaphysics is still – as in the Vienna school – on your table.

Thank you or the comment Per. But you have out-finessed me with your last sentence. Am I to sharpen my rapier to reply or just fill our glasses for another ouzo in the warm evening air? Can you clarify a teeny bit? Maybe I should just say Ockham vivit?

J.: Sorry, Ockham shortened my sentences. Spinoza's monism –> Bertrand Russell's monism etc. Mind is an 'attribute' to things, he says, and extended substance is another 'attribute'. Just to avoid Descartes' phenomenology –> Husserl's (cf. his Cartesian Meditations), and Merleau-Ponty's, later. To give you some more clues, I think dualism may be a fine path to follow in thinking. Descartes thought that mathematics is about things without extension, whereas stones, for example, are things with extension. So Spinoza had to declare that stones can think – which changes the premisses for discussing thinking - and consciousness (Leibniz had to add that stones - aggregations of monads - can indeed think, without consciousness). Check them out, the old guys. –

Yes, I am familiar with these guys, Per. I am just back from giving a lecture on Leibniz in fact. But what is your view here? Mine is that Leibniz more or less sorted everything and nobody much has done better since, although Whitehead added some useful suggestions. Descartes's dualism is mostly completely misunderstood and undervalued. I do not have much time for Husserl or M-P. Dynamism is the basis of science so I think we should stick to it. In fact Leibniz did not attribute any perception to stones (or at least marble tiles) as he saw them as mere aggregates with no dominant monad, but he did wonder if he was right there. 

What I understand by Dimitrios's statement that he sees consciousness as physical is that when considered distally its dynamics will be adequately covered by those of physics and I agree. The proposal is, I think, that 'experience' is tied to the point of view, which is the now and the here, which is perhaps almost tautological but maybe this is all we need in the way of dichotomising - proximal/distal. That would of course fit with Leibniz's conception that the universe consists entirely of relations of points of view (monads) to the whole. I have got so used to it myself that I find it quite hard to remember what the hard problem was, but I realise that others may still struggle with it!

J.: As you know, all monads have perception and appetition. Therefore, all monadic aggregations have it. To me this is of course fascinating and arbitrary nonsense. (As a semiotician, I have to be fascinated by nonsense). God coordinates all minimal units, monads, of the universe. Yeah man. Hard problem solved. Just a matter of 'complexity', the moderns will say. Chalmers is heading toward Spinoza now. – Leibniz was a fervent religious believer and wanted to build an ecumenism on monadology. Which the Catholic Bossuet rejected, violently, to stop the project. Since we are supposed to discuss time here, what about Heidegger's Being and Time? Another piece of fascinating nonsense. By contrast, Tallis knows about Husserlian phenomenology, which may be why you can't follow. Take your: time –

Dear Per,

If we are to have a useful discussion I think it worth not just reading but taking note of the content of what is read. You clearly have no conception of what Leibniz was saying. Try paragraph 79 of the Monadology in which he makes it clear that the dynamics of Monads (perception, following the laws of final cause) and the dynamics of aggregates (not perception and following the laws of efficient cause) are totally distinct yet always progressing in harmony. As a large number of modern physicists have commented, this turns out to be exactly what we find - the difference between quantum and classical dynamics bridged by the correspondence principle (always matching). There is nothing 'touchy-feely' about Leibniz's metaphysics. It is a laying out of the logical imperatives that must underly real dynamics. He has proved to be remarkably prescient.

It is true that Leibniz wanted to accommodate all his philosophy within an ecumenical faith but Leibniz's God is as austere as the Higgs particle itself. For Leibniz the idea that God and physics were two different issues was absurd. You dismiss him as nonsense but it seems fairly clear that you have not discovered what he said! It certainly has nothing to do with woolly modern ideas of emergence from complexity or systems theory. Leibniz pointed out that there are no real systems with parts. Leibniz is of direct relevance to testable science. Husserl is not because he makes no new testable predictions.

Again, I am familiar with Husserl. He seems naïve too. I can imagine him, together with Kant, as boys at the back of Leibniz's class to which Leibniz would turn at the end of term and say 'you two don't quite get Natural Philosophy do you? why not go and play football in the summer term instead '. And I have yet to discover what point you are wanting to make about Husserl or Tallis. Perhaps you prefer not to make a point because these people's ideas are so easily demolished. Perhaps there is something interesting to say, but I have not found it in twelve years of enquiry into the matter.

What did you read and understand that I did not, Per? The gauntlet is now at your feet.

Dmitrios, I think there is a problem with your idea that we can narrow our investigation of consciousness to "determining where and when a sensory or internal perception turns present in the brain". The problem is that memories, when we are remembering them, are experiences in the present (but of the past), and likewise imagining, extrapolating, and planning for the future are something we do in the present (but about the future). Arguably, there are no sensory or internal perceptions in the brain except those we have presently. Memories we are not remembering simply are not 'sensory' or 'internal perceptions' unless you want to add a category of 'subconscious perceptions'.

Rognvaldur, we do not recall all our memories at the same time. Only the ones we do, are they pushed up into our personal Now and they remain there for as long as we recall them. Otherwise, they sink back to being mnemonic engrams, physically existing yet not present for us.

Dmitrios, yes, but then it turns out that your "investigation of determining where and when a sensory or internal perception turns present in the brain" really becomes an investigation of determining how a mnemonic engram becomes conscious. That is something that does not perhaps particularly relate to the trichotomy between future, present, and past, because every mnemonic engram we have is always present even when they are not present to us. One difficulty with this, I suspect, is that the concept of a mnemonic engram is a theoretic entity. Do we know what such things are in empirical terms? 

Yes. A mnemonic engram is a series of synapses whose efficiency has been modified and their activation coordinated - and this does not have be locally limited in only one brain region.

In this model, conscious experience resembles a spotlight. Sensory information may be stored and myriads of memories may exist yet we may or may not be conscious of them unless they are brought into our personal Present.

Now, obviously this is a work in progress and this process is far from identified. Yet, I strongly suspect it to be the result of a pattern activation of temporally sensitive areas such as the striatum and the hippocampus (http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/34/13888.short)

I am a little puzzled by the discussion, Dimitrios and Rognvaldur. My understanding is that a memory, in the sense of an engram present long term (my grandmother's face) consists of a structural pattern in connectivity that facilitates certain patterns of input to whatever neurons receive sensory or image patterns when triggered by a word or place or scent maybe. An instance of remembering is something totally different, being an instance of that input that the engram facilitates. The difference is a bit like the difference between the layout of a toy train set with lines and points and a particular journey of a toy train down one particular line arriving at a particular station.

So I am not sure what it could mean for something to 'turn present'. What is called 'now' is surely whatever is arriving at those places that experience sensations or memories at the time that we are considering as now. We can be pretty sure that these are rather special places in the brain that must be in a connection path involved in very short term memory and able to pass 'content' to speech reports. The real problem is in pinning down exactly where these receiving places are, how many of them there are and in what form the input pattern encodes the content it is about. This is partly a problem because a lot of neuroscientists deny that such places can actually be defined, and that an experience of 'now' is distributed across networks. In my view that is incompatible with physics, but that does not seem to bother a lot of people working on consciousness.

To clarify (or confuse even further), my point is that I just can't see a temporal aspect to the issue at all. Whatever the mnemonic engram is, it is something we have from the moment it is created, and whatever is involved in its being presented to our consciousness will not involve the mnemonic engram being passed into the present from the future or past, but perhaps will involve an electrochemical triggering of the coordinated neurons.

On a related note, what it involves for an area in the brain to be temporally sensitive, as opposed to just sensitive to stimuli or able to produce an experience, seems unclear to me. 

I agree that the use of words is confusing here, and I am not quite clear how Dimitrios is intending them to be interpreted. However, we are dealing with an aspect of time which physicists, including Einstein, generally agree is not handled well by physics - the existence of NOW, discussed at length by McTaggart but known to be a problem long before (and probably not much illuminated by McT).

I quite agree that the wiring that forms an engram is not passed to the present. But something needs to be passed to the present for it to be NOW for something. Electrochemical triggering of neurons is a description in biophysics that we can consider as being at any time. Moreover, it seems that at a given point in time electrochemical triggerings are going on in all sorts of parts of the brain, not to mention other brains and yet NOW will only include the content of our engram (grandmother's face from fifty years ago). There must be some place and time for which this content is input and thus the content of its now.

The view i personally favour is that now is then purely differentiated on the basis that for any instance of experience it has the content of the most proximal dynamic relation. 'Mental' events may be not quite so proximal in the sense that they may just be events in a brain a few steps before that of NOW, but when mental is used in the sense of experiential I think it must refer to the absolutely proximal event. The question is where exactly is this and what is its domain?

You may query why we have to make the electrochemical events an INPUT, rather than just be events. But all physics has to deal with causal relation so we have to consider these events in terms of their causal impact on something else. Otherwise they are mere abstractions. To be considered signals we have to consider what they are signalling to. Unless we stipulate what these events have a causal impact on there is no way of defining the domain of interest that could be a NOW. I realise that very few people are aware of this problem but it needs addressing. 

There are in fact many illusions in life that will remain so until an appropriate perspective is identified that brings it into focus. Your question would be asked amiss if you did not include all layers of the consciousness and purpose even for what you refer to as the "now." A bad example would be to try and understand the wheel of an automobile without knowing the purpose for the design.

Your question about  the perception of the "now" would be lost without understanding the possibilities of why our brain converts this to an understanding of the "present." One possible direction I could perhaps steer you would be to look at the boundaries of the conscious and also the boundaries of the "collective unconscious."

Without doubt, a meaningful construct of the conscious is to provide meaning or purpose as we interpret the world around us. Your statement that " our consciousness is not a uniquely a human trait" is quite possibly true, but in turn that would beg the question then of why some life forms exist to understand the world around them, while others purpose and function are limited to a universal collective unconscious?

Once found, you will discover that the concept of time is unique to those with a consciousness and not universal. You will not escape the metaphysical element which you seek to avoid. Scientific method must begin to reach beyond the limitations of "observable" and "measureable" if it is going to be part of the next great phase of scientific discovery.

Discussing the hard problem of consciousness and not wanting to do any form of metaphysics is contradictory. The hard problem is a pure metaphysical problem: what is RES COGITANS? Descartes' metaphysical meditations asked it, Spinoza reasked it, adding an answer (mind is in matter), Leibniz reasked it, again with an answer (mind is grounded in the monads). Human consciousness differs from other animal consciousness in many ways: human temporal cognition can hold cognitive schemas for various forms of time: 1) deictic time (now, then, soon), 2) aspectual time (beginning, ongoing, ending, iterating, durative), 3) sequential time (before, after), and 4) epistemic time (often, seldom, rarely, always, never, sometimes). Combinations of these schemas create rather complicated temporal notions, supporting human thinking.

Dear Jonathan, I only come to see your answer now. First, why anything should be physical ? Physicians admit that they do know only 4% of what is called ‘matter' in the Universe. What about the 96% remnant? It is quite a time, by the way, that physicists have told us that the very notion of 'matter', of what is 'physical' is problematic. They learned  us this as soon as the end of the 19th century, didn't they? On the other hand, philosophers, with a great unity, posit that all there is to find is physical. I think this is wrong. The question is not to propose an opposition between what is physical and what is mental, but to pause one moment and to ask what are the differences? You can show me a finger, but you cannot show me the concept of 'yellow'; you will be able to only show instantiations of the concept 'yellow', right?

The mental is not always here and now... Aristotle did write that the intellect needed to be 'actual' in order to work. How many mental items are not actualized right now in your mind? A lot, I assume.

I mentioned Darwin because, as I see it, if he speaks of 'mental powers', it's because he is aware that, at some certain level of nature, there is more than just the organic; there is some mentality at work. I mentioned Darwin because, as Aristotle earlier, he did envision that the mental did add something that the 'physical' could not.

Dear Fabrice,

I am not quite sure what point you are wanting to make. Your first two paragraphs are pretty much what I normally say. 'Physical' as used by contemporary philosophers is an empty concept. Physicists have been telling us this for four hundred years. But 'physical' in the sense of all causal relations being in line with the laws of physics, which is I think what Dimitrios had in mind, is fine - it merely indicates no 'magic ingredient'.

The mental in the broad sense of brain activity is not always here and now, as I indicated, but there is a narrow sense of 'mental' or 'phenomenal' which is here and now by definition.

But your third paragraph sounds to me like magic ingredient stuff. You seem to think that 'mental' can be a causal 'more than'. I was not aware that Darwin thought that but I do not worry too much about Darwin because his thinking was very muddled. The Origin of Species is about the most muddled book I have read in science. It was Wallace who provided the empirical evidence that made the world take natural selection seriously and he should get the credit for it. Darwin just happened to be the grandson of one of Britain's richest entrepreneurs.

Dear Jonathan,

the concept of 'causal relation' is very complicated, and it doesn't help to say that there are 'physical' causes or relations. 

The Greeks discovered the 'mind', and we did not much go further than Aristotle on this point. There is nothing magic in saying that mentality exists, and that it consists in more than physical relations or causes. To deny this is simply missing something, I guess.

The activity of the brain as brain much be distinguished from what is mental, it does not concern the same categories.

What you're saying about Darwin is quite amazing. It seems to many scholars that Darwin helped us to think quite a few new things, and his work did contribute to change some paradigms.

I like Fabrice's observation that to say consciousness is physical doesn't necessarily solve anything. And I am glad we got back to Spinoza so quickly. Are we neo-German Idealists? Will Meister Eckhart save us? Is this the emergence of "re-emergentism?" 

I know: let's try "physical" and "mental" as master signifiers. Each can validate a separate Berkelyian world (all imaginary) or a separate Humian world (all empircal). Together they simply describe the Cartesian duality, which gives rise to the need for a scientific metaphysics, which has driven us to Freud, which means crazy. Each of these notions also suggests an ultimately causal determinist experience or admits of free will to some extent. (By the way, society made me write this. It isn't my fault.) 

So how could Spinoza have been conscious of what he was reasoning such that he wrote what he intended if what he reasoned was correct? He could have been completely unconscious and the Ethics were completely unintentional on his part, all ready written such that he simply translated them into his language. But that means he wasn't really reasoning at all, just behaving. The telos of his work must then be in that sense irrational. The irrational part, the part we cannot vouch for is the metaphysical implication. The metaphysical implication is that there is a god (in a panentheistic sense). Without this, there is no reason for his behavior so his behavior was irrational. And we can perform the same exercise on Descartes.

[God as master signifier: we must ask god for forgiveness; god is love; love means never having to say you're sorry.]

Currently, I would claim that "god" and "big-bang universe" are roughly synonymous master signifiers in terms of the way they function as a world view. In the same way, physicalism argues for a unitary being in which there is no duality of mind and body. If one is "mentally ill" then there is a trace of the problem in the physical brain. In accordance with a Spinozan god-is-in-everything universe, we can dispense with duality and intentionality (free will) and simply accept that our actions are caused, that existence is a domino of events.

But then weirdly, we have a choice? We can choose to believe that the body can do one thing while the mind does something else. (Anybody else here ever been married? There is some empirical evidence of this duality after a few years.) However, the duality poses the "ghost in the machine," the emergent quality that is not merely the sum of its parts, and the possibility of a metaphysical dimension, in other words, an emergent consciousness. 

Or could this choice be part of a binary causal chain? How high tech does that sound? One group is caused to perceive determinism and the other caused to perceive free will... from the same evidence. But that means that we may not completely understand causality, how it can result in two contradictory results. Or we are dealing with master signifiers whose irrationality we cannot see past for purely ideological reasons. We may not be dealing with reality at all, but some distorted image through the lens of our physics and metaphysics. Kant limited reason to make free will possible. What made him do that? Desire?

My view on Darwin is far from unique, Fabrice. You are probably not aware how nepotistic twentieth century British science was. Darwin had political clout (money). He spawned a clan of academics, possibly because his children married bright partners. The Huxley family were actually the bright ones - culminating in Andrew. I wonder if you have read Origins. It really is a terrible muddle and he gets almost everything wrong. He does better in later books - maybe with some help from Thomas Huxley. 

For me the mental, experiential, is entailed within the concept of a physical dynamics. You can call that just real dynamics, I agree, but I use the term physical to indicate that the dynamics are being considered as operations of laws of physics (not to be confused with the intuitive 'stuff' sense of physical) - and that entails the mental aspect of experience as the 'read-out'. I am not sure what other mental there is to add but I would certainly deny any evidence of causation that doe snot follow the laws of physics.