Knowledge of Matter and Mind

Knowledge of Matter and Mind

We don’t naturally know the nature of matter. We can’t know it just by looking. We had to figure it out over a long period of time. It wasn’t easy to discover the atomic theory. But the same is not true of the mind: here we do naturally know whereof we speak. We know what consciousness is; we don’t just point to it from afar. We may not know how it works, but we know what it is. We know what it is because it is as it appears: and we know how things appear to us. It seems to us that consciousness has objects (intentionality), and it does. By contrast, it seems to us as if matter is continuous, but it isn’t; we would never have thought that matter is mostly empty space punctuated by tiny particles. We know how things feel to us and that is what consciousness is. But matter is not the same as how it feels to us—we know that perfectly well. Matter is not consciousness of matter, but consciousness is consciousness of consciousness; there is no gap between consciousness and itself. We thus naturally know our own consciousness. This is a deep epistemic dualism. On the face of it, it implies an ontological dualism. We can therefore mount an “ignorance argument” against the identity theory: matter is something we are naturally ignorant of, whereas mind is something we naturally know; therefore, they cannot be identical.