How do mind and body fit together? How do we account for conscious experience?
I believe the mind and body fit together as an individual allows them to but I don’t think that most individuals assign themselves the appropriate responsibilities within their environments. As a result it is normalized for individuals to allow themselves to be distracted (to varying degrees) but only as long as they can maintain an image that they believe others will perceive as impressive, ironically sometimes completely disregarding the opinions of others in spite of it.
Dr. Mark Solms would point out that modern evolutionary biology makes it pretty clear that fundamentally the best way to understand consciousness is as a reflection of our body communicating with itself as it is navigating life (interior & exterior).
Dr. Nick Lane points out that modern evolutionary biology is finding that:
“It might seem uncanny that whole metabolic pathways can spring into existence in this way, in the absence of genes and information, but this is what recent experiments are telling us.
There is something thermodynamically and kinetically favoured about the innermost chemistry of life.
I find this unsettling, but that’s how it is. …”
Just the other day I was made aware of John Searle though I haven’t been able to take the time to get to know him yet. But the description of a talk I’ve got lined up looks promising:
Jul 26, 2022 YouTube
A main intellectual scandal today is that we do not have, in philosophy or neurobiology, a generally accepted account of consciousness. In this lecture, John Searle offers the philosophical core of such an account, and explains the difficulties in getting a neurobiological account. Along the way, he exposes half a dozen really outrageous mistakes about consciousness.
Looks like he picks on everyone, bet it’ll be a fascinating listen.