Yerda
Veteran Member
The problem of how a subjective world of experience is able to emerge from gooey material in our bodies is still a total mystery. As in, there isn't even one decent guess as to how subjective experience can come from matter as far as I can see.
If you think about all the biological processes that occur within us they seem to be reducible or explanable in terms of physiological concepts. For example, the nephron is the unit of kidney i.e. one nephron = one bit of kidney (roughly speaking). The nephron does what it does because of its shape, its composition and the surrouding fluid concentrations. You can model and explain how the nephron is able to filter out waste materials using these ideas from physiology. Digestion, muscle contraction, respiration, etc all seem to be explainable in much the same way; we look at the relevant structures and suggest models of action from the physiological concepts.
So taking our cue from other biological processes and assuming that consciousness is one of those maybe the magic comes from the particular way our brains are arranged in space. But this seems to get us nowhere. Neurons are a very peculiar shape and the agglomeration of neurons in the brain and rest of the nervous system is highly ordered (as in any unordering apparently leads to no consciousness or death). Impulses are carried around quickly by the particular method of cell-to-cell communication. A stimulus from my finger hitting these keys is carried to my brain and from there it whizzes about and fizzes and pops and whatnot and then I feel the keys. Where in that process is the feels?
There's a whole cascade of action/reaction going on when I see this screen. But none of it seems to imply blueness. There is always a gap.
Most days I'm confident (almost sure) that at some point, with enough work, we'll make the empirical and conceptual breakthroughs which will get us over the hump towards a science of consciousness.
Am I excercising faith in science?
Sorry if this post itself isn't highly ordered, this stuff confuses me no end.
If you think about all the biological processes that occur within us they seem to be reducible or explanable in terms of physiological concepts. For example, the nephron is the unit of kidney i.e. one nephron = one bit of kidney (roughly speaking). The nephron does what it does because of its shape, its composition and the surrouding fluid concentrations. You can model and explain how the nephron is able to filter out waste materials using these ideas from physiology. Digestion, muscle contraction, respiration, etc all seem to be explainable in much the same way; we look at the relevant structures and suggest models of action from the physiological concepts.
So taking our cue from other biological processes and assuming that consciousness is one of those maybe the magic comes from the particular way our brains are arranged in space. But this seems to get us nowhere. Neurons are a very peculiar shape and the agglomeration of neurons in the brain and rest of the nervous system is highly ordered (as in any unordering apparently leads to no consciousness or death). Impulses are carried around quickly by the particular method of cell-to-cell communication. A stimulus from my finger hitting these keys is carried to my brain and from there it whizzes about and fizzes and pops and whatnot and then I feel the keys. Where in that process is the feels?
There's a whole cascade of action/reaction going on when I see this screen. But none of it seems to imply blueness. There is always a gap.
Most days I'm confident (almost sure) that at some point, with enough work, we'll make the empirical and conceptual breakthroughs which will get us over the hump towards a science of consciousness.
Am I excercising faith in science?
Sorry if this post itself isn't highly ordered, this stuff confuses me no end.