Word: grasp
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McGinn and Chalmers are among the philosophers who have been called the New Mysterians because they think consciousness is, well, mysterious. McGinn goes so far as to say it will always remain so. For human beings to try to grasp how subjective experience arises from matter, he says, "is like slugs trying to do Freudian psychoanalysis. They just don't have the conceptual equipment...
...doesn't mean--you know--God. He's speaking as a philosopher, using the term as a proxy for whoever, whatever (if anyone, anything) is responsible for the nature of the universe. Still, though he isn't personally inclined to religious speculation, he can see how people who grasp the extraness of consciousness might carry it in that direction...
McGinn doesn't mean that subjective experience is literally a miracle. He considers himself a materialist, if in a "thin" sense. He presumes there is some physical explanation for subjective experience, even though he doubts that the human brain--or mind, or whatever--can ever grasp it. Nevertheless, McGinn doesn't laugh at people who take the water-into-wine metaphor more literally. "I think in a way it's legitimate to take the mystery of consciousness and convert it into a theological system. I don't do that myself, but I think in a sense it's more rational...
Mike recalls the painful way he was given the news. "They had a pretty crude way of telling me. They said, 'They've got one body and two heads.'" Patty, still under sedation, heard the word Siamese and couldn't quite grasp it. "I had cats?" she asked...
...modern career in late November 1963, just after the assassination of John Kennedy. We were all Lee Harvey Oswald, some editorial writers wanted to believe. Of course, anyone who does not know the difference between a person who kills and one who does not kill has failed to grasp the first of civilization's house rules. That everyone is capable of murder, at least theoretically, but that most refrain from committing it is the start of social order...