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I've spent a lot of time thinking on the 'hard problem.' My current stance is that it works like this: Imagine you are a sphere. Got it? Wait—hold on now! You
by westoncb 10y ago
I've spent a lot of time thinking on the 'hard problem.' My current stance is that it works like this:
Imagine you are a sphere. Got it? Wait—hold on now! You didn't really imagine that you /are/ the sphere, you imagined you were a sort of disembodied human spirit residing within the sphere. Now, really imagine your total existence is /being/ the material constituting the sphere. Can you imagine that being the sphere in this way is very, very different than interacting with it externally as a human?
The hard problem is trying to explain how our total experience at any moment could be as it is, when we also know that it is in some sense created by the neurons in our brains. How can a clump of twisted neurons be the same thing as the feeling of warmth or the perception of the color blue?
My solution is that our experience (in the above sense) is how it is to actually /be/ a neuron aggregate.
Additionally, I think the problem is so hard because it doesn't involve a system that exists /within/ the material universe; instead it's an aspect of the whole thing itself. This is analogous to how we shouldn't expect the rules of Monopoly to be useful in describing the physical constituents of, e.g., paper Monopoly money. We shouldn't expect the notions of 'system,' 'consistency,' 'causality,' 'time,' etc. to apply to the nature of the universe itself just because they are good for describing things within it.
- sebastianconcpt 10y agoVery nice reasoning. It still doesn't explain how a paramesium, without neurons (so no neuron aggregate there), can experience (a sub-human) consciousness. Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU
- westoncb 10y agoSure it does: the sub-human conscious experience of a paramecium is what it's like to /be/ the part of the universe comprising the paramecium. Although that part of the universe is as much a paramecium as the part that's human is human, so I don't think what's going on there is 'sub' human. That said, there's less complexity there, so it seems like being that part of the universe would be less 'interesting'--but then again, that's just a human value judgement and probably similarly irrelevant to the universe and paramecia. Neurons aren't central to what I'm talking about; I'm just applying something like a variant of the panpsychic hypothesis to the human situation.
- visarga 10y agoDNA is a complex language, it's words are chemical signals and it exists in a soup formed of mineral and organic stuff. I think even a paramecium has quite a lot more complexity than we give it credit for. We also know that cells talk to each other by electrical and chemical signaling, so there is that external language besides the internal one.