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< Modernism, Post-modernism, and Neo-modernism.
Hmm, I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the suggestion that there's more to thought and meaning than (our present) physical science. I can only advocate in brief for a philosophical complication to the extent that I understand it, but which I nevertheless feel is worth taking into account. You're quite right, after all, that science is dependent on philosophy.
Now, to say that there could be more to thought and meaning than physics would not be to suggest that thought and meaning aren't dependent on the physical world—they certainly seem to be, by all accounts—but that the problem just isn't as simple as the reductionist materialist account makes it out to be. (I say reductionist not in a pejorative sense, but in the sense that the theory 'reduces' the mental to the material, i.e. the physical.) No matter how close we seem to come to solving the easier problems of consciousness, there is as yet no satisfactory explanation for how non-sentient matter can produce consciousness. It's important to stress that the issue is not perception; human beings and cameras alike perceive, after all, but we only attribute consciousness to one of these two things. Philosophy does not sit easily with contemporary science here because it would seem to enable important predictions as to the course our physical sciences will take. Not only is it hard to imagine the physical sciences explaining consciousness in the short-term, it remains to be seen how they can ever do so in the long-term.
The most obvious issue is, naturally, the conflict of the objective with the subjective. Consciousness represents the essence of the subjective: privileged access to the experience of what it is like to be something. Whatever may contribute to this experience, such as our faculties of perception, our nervous system, and so forth, the appearance of subjective, first-person experience is a challenge of another order and should be taken seriously as such. We can't, I would think, presume to understand something fully if we can never expose it to rigorous examination to generate reproducible findings, and it might well be that subjectivity will forever prevent us from doing so. We could come damn close, of course, but some barriers might nevertheless resist our solutions. Consider the mechanic in William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' of the "simstim", a technology which allows you to assume the perspective of another person and perceive everything they do, feel everything their body feels...with the exception of their mind. This is a wonderful representation of the problems scientists face. All such observation can achieve is the production of new, subjective experiences in the minds of others, but access to any mind other mind than our own would remain elusive. We would have to somehow let other people into our "I", our fundamental being, and vice versa.
Consider a mental image, for example. Suppose I have you imagine a ramshackle wooden home on a prairie. You perceive this in your mind, according to the description provided. How can we reduce this to the physical? In fact, such things are often argued to be "physically irreducible", but what does this mean? Well, one way to imagine the problem is to try and scale the mental image down until you meet the hardware, so to speak, until you're back in the physical realm. But when can you possibly do this? You might make the image increasingly simple, so that instead of a whole prairie scene you instead imagine a single color, a rusty brown hue. But the complexity of the image wasn't the issue; it was that it was perceived subjectively in the first place. Or work the other way up, beginning from the physical. When does the image appear? Can we imagine it slowly coming into being? But the original issue remains in all cases: why does the image come into being at all, and how? At what point is there subjectivity—where does objectivity end? What makes the difference between purely objective, observable, physical processes and this abstract, mental content?
In any case, perhaps the progression of the easier problems of consciousness will, someday, crack the issue of the hard problem. I'm by no means opposed to it. Perhaps consciousness really is situated in the electromagnetic field, and our experiences of will are that of the EM field influencing the neurons of our brains, or something along those lines. Or maybe there'll be something objectivity has to pass over in silence.
This is to say nothing of the further issues posed by the existence of reason and value.
I offer all this only because it might be of interest to you and some others here. I can't claim to really understand it, only that I have a little familiarity with writing on the subject. If you'd like to follow up on it, Thomas Nagel's work is very clearly written and rigorously argued on this subject.
To speak to your larger point, I'm in perfect agreement that you and I inhabit precisely the same world, and that the difficulties we tackle are those of limitations in our personal worlds of perception and understanding, not a true difference of worlds as such. But I agree with pink2ds that the brass tacks are by no means simply taken care of, and that our practical approach to the world must necessarily consist of a (sometimes self-contradictory) patchwork of perspectives.
I never suggested that we currently understand all of these processes. I do not think we currently understand everything (otherwise we would have been able to simplify all of physics into one equation, which we have not yet done.)
To respond to the body of your comment, consciousness emerges just from a certain level of computational complexity. A camera is analogous to an eye, not to a conscious mind. Likewise, computers and AIs are capable of "imagining" (rendering, in various forms) images like the one you described. The comparative simplicity of computers dictates parameters be exceedingly specific, whereas our consciousnesses are capable of much better input parsing - however, on the other side of this, vague parameters mean you and I will not produce an identical image.
And again, if something has no measurable effect on the physical world, it is irrelevant. If it can't be measured in any way, it has no effect on the physical world. For all intents and purposes it does not exist.
And you're correct that practical approaches to the world must consist of a patchwork of perspectives, as you so eloquently put it. This is simply due to a lack of understanding on our part. To analogize again, this is similar to the apparent irreconcilability of quantum physics and general relativity (the main obstacle to that aforementioned equation of everything).