The Eastern Magician’s Apprentice in Philosophising about the Mind

Abstract

Physicalism, loosely defined, is the view that everything which exists is ‘physical’. According to physicalism, consciousness does not exist over and above the physical, and all mental activity reduces to scientific ‘physical’ concepts (Crane & Mellor 1990). To put it another way, a physicalist attitude rejects supernaturalism, religious/spiritual entities, ‘spooky’ ethereal concepts, and anything that seems too ‘Magical’ – in the Harry Potter sense. This concept of Magic, however, can have a dual meaning. There is Harry Potter Magic which Dennett (2003) has referred to as ‘Real Magic’; and there is the card trick kind of ‘Stage Magic’. Ironically, ‘Real Magic’ refers to a supernatural concept which is not actually real, whereas ‘Stage Magic’ is the kind of Magic that is real and uses methods accessible to Muggles (i.e., non-magical folk; Rowling 1997) like us. Philosophical Illusionism is a physicalist view which claims that consciousness is like Stage Magic. Consciousness is an illusion (Dennett 2016; Frankish 2016).

This thesis proposes an anti-physicalist version of a similar idea, which will be called ‘Magicalism’, the view that the fundamental essence of consciousness is Magic (but in the sense of a card trick, not the Harry Potter sense). This thesis defends a variation of Eastern spiritualism and rejects a physicalist ontology. In the same way that in a card trick, the cards themselves are real but what the magician does with them creates an illusion around it, this thesis will argue that consciousness itself is also real, but it is what philosophers do with the concept which can create a sense of illusion around it. Western academia itself can be like a magic show. In this decolonisation project, Stage Magic is used as a bridge between an Eastern and Western approach to philosophy of mind to try and take the best of both worlds.