Only noticed your reply now. Can continue discussion via email if you're interested, but will quickly refer to what you've mentioned: I'm aware of Tegmark's vi

Only noticed your reply now. Can continue discussion via email if you're interested, but will quickly refer to what you've mentioned: I'm aware of Tegmark's view and was quite intrigued by it at the time, but I see it more as statement suggesting that mathematics can serve as the perfect map for physics to eventually uncover rather than that mathematics can be the territory itself (Max might disagree though). I don't think I can put it any better than the eloquent way Hawking stated it about what is it that breathes fire into the equations. Having a perfect description does not create a reality, and even if quantum mechanics, gravitation, dark matter, dark energy and whatever other mysteries that no doubt will surface in the future will be perfectly understood and unified under an elegant and perfect mathematical description, it still won't explain how existence exists (and I'm not referring to the big bang - I'm referring to the very current reality). Putting it simply, the "is-ness" of reality is not the same as the rules it adheres to, since rules don't create a reality. We attempt to understand reality by noticing consistencies in our interaction with it, and then somehow confuse these consistencies (which we label with certain concepts) with the reality that generates them - or worse yet, think that these consistencies that we notice create reality. Glad we are in sync regarding the soft problem. In order to be in sync regarding the hard problem, we should agree on what it is. Basically to agree on what the hard problem of consciousness is, we must agree that a subjective experience of being conscious is a very real thing, but at the same time there is nothing physical about the experience - measurable physical things can be correlated to the experience or even cause it, but there is nothing measurable about the very real subjective experience. That's the problem in a nutshell. By the way, if my explanation implied a belief in dualism then my explanation was obviously inadequate. However, my beef with dualism comes from a completely different angle than the scientific approach (or, more accurately, the approach of physicalism). The ironic thing is that physicalism, which is so opposed to dualism, is inherently dualistic by definition. Try and imagine what any physical object is other than being an interpretation of something from the point of view of a subject that experiences it. Science is so focused on the objects and the relations between them that it completely misses the fact that any conceptual explanation is only made possible by a very subjective explainer. Not sure I managed to get the point across. There's an article that I liked which ties some of these ideas together in a nice way - perhaps it will do the subject more justice: http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious