Galileo Debunked: A Neutral Foundation for Nature

To a great extent, the traditional picture of nature is derived from Galileo’s insight about the separation between quantitative objective prop- erties of matter and qualitative subjective properties of the mind. As a result, the ensuing dualism entrenched the gap between nature and mind. Eventually, the mind became an apparently intractable problem both for physics and neuroscience (which is rooted on physics). Yet, the conscious mind seems to have a set of properties that are not shared by any known physical phenomenon – i.e. quality, intentionality, unity, semantics, first- person perspective, duration, and so forth (Chalmers 1996; McGinn 1999; Miller 2005). Given the recurrent difficulties in tackling with the mind (Chalmers 1996; Manzotti and Moderato 2010; Noë and Thompson 2004; Searle 1992; Tononi and Koch 2008; Uttal 2001), it is worth considering whether the real problem may consist in the received Galilean ontology. Maybe nature is different from what we surmise it to be, thus rethinking nature may lead to a simpler solution. Maybe our difficulties as to the mind-body problem stem from some misguiding assumptions about the “nature of nature”.