Soul Dust or a Matter of Mind: The Mindless Ideas of Nicholas Humphrey

Abstract

The ideas presented by Nicholas Humphrey in his book Soul Dust and elsewhere are an excellent example of the kind of ridiculous and logically incoherent accounts of the mindless evolution of matter into ‘illusory’ mind which are penned by materialist advocates of primordial mindlessness.  Humphrey’s approach relies on often clearly incoherent, and sometimes almost childish, speculations, with little attention to evidence and scant regard for logical rigor. According to Humphrey consciousness is just so remarkable that an unwary brain might be tempted to think consciousness is really real. According to Humphrey, however, consciousness is an illusion generated by matter mattering to itself, and is ultimately ontologically non-existent. Both direct phenomenological investigation and modern science show that, contrary to Humphrey’s materialist desires, consciousness “has its own intrinsic degrees of freedom” and is a fundamental dimension of reality. Ultimately we are not the result of the evolution of an “original dollop of physical matter”.