I Am Not A Meat Robot!

While a human is alive his mind and his brain are connected. No one doubts that. Just as assuredly, no one doubts that their own immaterial mind exists. And when I say no one doubts that, I include people like Sam Harris who say they do. Harris does not really doubt that his own mind exists. How do I know? Well, I am fairly sure Harris is not insane, and only an insane person asserts as false that which he must know to be true. It is an odd thing though. If Harris were to say “I’m a poached egg” they would put him in a padded room. But if he says the ontologically equivalent “I’m a meat robot,” they give him a book contract.

Denying that one’s own immaterial mind exists is nuts on the order of “I deny that the pronoun ‘I’ in this sentence has any antecedent.” And Sam Harris, like everyone else, knows for a certain fact that there is indeed an antecedent to that pronoun. Because the existence of one’s immaterial mind is self-evident, its existence can be denied only on pain of descending into patent absurdity.-On Invoking Non-Physical Mental States to “Solve the Problem” of Consciousness

Update: forgot to h/t - sorry, Ilion