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I'll go ahead and guess: it will look explicitly and seriously religious.
To me the social history of the last few decades, and indeed the last few centuries, is that of a hollowing out and lack of seriousness in religious practices and traditions. While there have been revivals here and there, the overall trend has been to become more and more secular as modern 'philosophy' and science becomes more powerful. When Descartes completely threw out Aristotelean formal causes, and claimed the Mind was totally separate from the body and physical reality, he unwittingly destroyed the way humans made sense of the world and each other from time immemorial.
At this point I'm convinced that modern philosophy, specifically post-Cartesian philosophy that sees materialism as the ultimate truth and the universe as nothing more than meaningless particles bouncing into each other, cannot coexist with human society. Either we will destroy our societies through increasing social fragmentation, or the transhumanists will get their wish and change the fundamental way human beings interact with each other to paper over the problems of a materialist philosophy. Perhaps both will happen.
Either way, Social Justice has become such a force because it attempts to fill the gap left by the absence of sincere religions, and just like previous 'isms' and secular ideologies, it is doomed to fail because these sorts of religious systems just can't work in a materialist universe. For better or worse, humans need to believe in purpose and meaning beyond dead matter in order to cohere together in large social groups. If we can't have that, well, we will burn it all down.
Personally I think Christianity will rise again to rule the day, at least on a religious level. It has died many times before and come back from the grave - that motif being the mythological bedrock upon which the entire enterprise is founded is no coincidence. The primary, hidden strength of Christ's gospel is the fact that it gives hope in the darkest of times, and promises a renewal and escape from death.
There is a major paradox in this philosophy, as it often takes a maximalist tabula rasa view. The world is supposed to be nothing more than mechanistic particles, yet the human psyche is untouched by it. Biological essentialist is used as a slur in the social sciences. Subjects such as human biodiversity, heritability of criminal behaviour or Iq or differences in evolutionary strategy between males and females are the ultimate taboo. A person can be born in the wrong body which means that the person isn't their body.
The view is that we are some free floating spirit that happened to be attached to a body. The phrase my friend who happens to be black is a perfect example of this reasoning. He was created black, he can't be anything else than black. There is no he without his black body. Yet we talk about it as if there is a he independent of his body that got inserted into the black body at birth.
Descartes philosophy is deeply flawed in that he both believed in mind body dualism and a mechanistic world. Either we are meat bots, aka mind = body or the world isn't mechanistic. Mind body dualism doesn't work in a mechanistic world. If there is no ghost or spirit there is no dualism.
How this giant contradiction in the middle of the modern world view doesn't explode goes beyond me.
There are millions of people who don't think human cognition is somehow beyond the realm of materialism or at least cause and effect.
And yet none of them can give a material explanation of it, which is, well, the whole problem.
You can't just look at drugs having an effect on experience and handwave away that the whole thing can be explained in material terms without actually providing a material explanation. And any explanation you need to provide has to answer a whole lot of thorny questions about what is conscious, how it becomes so, how it stops becoming so in a way that is tantamount to solving the largest part of metaphysics.
As far as I know the only coherent materialist answer is the one given by modernist totalitarianism, which is to say that individual consciousness is a delusion only experienced by the mentally ill. And that one is falsified not just by ones own experience of oneself but also by practice.
Fascinating. I would make the opposite inference. If the mind was separate from the body, like if we were little ghosts remote controlling the body, I would expect drugs and brain damage to have a much smaller effect or no effect at all. You can get some effect in the brain-as-antenna model, but stuff like prefrontal cortex lesions causing personality changes and primary visual cortex lesions causing loss of color vision in memories is hard to swallow.
None of this is conclusive but it makes me lean more towards materialism.
The antenna model is indeed a good way to approach the problem with the materialist understanding.
Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?
At RF frequency voltages and currents are not well behaved and will do weird things that break Kirchhoff's laws. Power devices operating at those frequencies are often fragile and without the load of the antenna there's a risk that the output device creates much higher voltage magnification than the setup is rated for...and there goes your amp.
Now walking away from the metaphor, it is very much possible that even in a dualist understanding mind and matter are entangled enough that messing with their link creates big and specific problems. After all the radio transmitter and the antenna are properly different objects despite sharing this kind of link.
But my intuitions (in the total lack of evidence we are in of course) point towards a monist understanding as well. Just not a materialist one, but a realist one, as in an Aristotelician one. I think we probably are some combination of body and mind, but I have no reason to believe that this whole combination resides solely in materially observable reality given the fact that consciousness has never directly been observed or can be completely explained by materialism.
I trust we will get more answers (and more questions) once our understanding of neurology improves.
But in this case the brain would be the receiver antenna. I mean, this is all an hypothetical so you can always make up an excuse how a damage on one end (physical) would propagate to the other end (ghost world?), none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind.
Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.
We really have no fucking idea how any of this shit works. We're barely further than antic medicine on this particular issue and it's almost purely down to the invention of MRI. Given most of the stuff people care about in this debate probably happens in the deeper regions of the brain we're even unlikely to get anywhere close to asking the right questions when Neuralink is tested on many humans.
But we are making some progress, so maybe someday we'll be able to have a meaningful debate about what consciousness is instead of hypothesizing about Motoko Kusanagi.
I think this is where we disagree. I would say that everything that we have discovered so far does reinforce the idea that mind is just an emergent property of the brain: the effects of brain injuries on the mind, the effect of psychotropics, of anesthesia, the physiological roots of various memory related syndromes (korsakov, etc). The things we have failed to discover also point to no mind-separate-from-matter: parapsychology, out of body experiences, remote viewing, auras, so-called near death experiences.
The existence and spread of the mind-as-matter theory is a testament to this since it is so counterintuitive. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only real strike against it is that it is so counterintuitive because of the (presumed) universal subjective experience of consciousness.
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