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From a purely physical perspective, there shouldn't be such a thing as subjective experience. Why? But for various reasons, philosophers and scientists find t

• danShumway 8y ago
  Because we don't see any reason for it, and we don't have any precedent for something similar happening in other situations. We also observe that many properties of subjective experience are counterintuitive and seem to contradict what we would expect from an emergent system. This makes us curious and we want to learn more about it. Feynman's response in the video you link is not that it's unreasonable to ask about the mechanics of a thing. Quite the opposite - it's that simple questions are often very deep and very complicated and can't be described in a quick one or two sentences. What he's not saying is: "Why is the sky blue? Well, why shouldn't it be?"
  • narag 8y ago
    Because we don't see any reason for it... That's appeal to ignorance. and we don't have any precedent for something similar happening in other situations Precedent? Come on, that's like saying atoms shouldn't exist because there is no precedent for them. We also observe that many properties of subjective experience are counterintuitive That's vague and terribly subjective. Who decides what is intuitive and what's not in this context? and seem to contradict what we would expect from an emergent system Who would expect what? Again you are simply saying that you don't understand it so it must not be possible. I linked Feynman response just to make you undestand that what you are saying lacks any reference frame. You are using your own intuitions to declare impossible a thing that, to begin with already exists :) and moreover it's exactly what generates you intuitions, so you are falling in a circular reasoning. Oh and Feynman doesn't say that magnetism can't be explained or that it shouldn't exist, just that it can't be explained in terms of other phenomena, exactly the same as consciousness. Edit: HN won't allow me to reply to your last comment, so I will put it below, though I won't comment further anyway. It's not that I'm not interested in how consciousness emerges. What I object to is the characterization of the basis of consciousness as a hard problem. It's just an area of knowledge that we haven't enough information to talk about. Saying it's a problem, even a hard one, it's jumping to conclusions very prematurely.
    • danShumway 8y ago
      > Again you are simply saying that you don't understand it so it must not be possible. I... don't think subjective experience is impossible. I think that our current knowledge about how it works is very limited, there's a lot for us to learn, and I'm encouraged when philosophers and scientists research it more. I'm discouraged when people say "it exists, what else do we need to know?" Are we saying the same thing in different ways? When I say "jump", I don't mean that there is no explanation for subjective experience. I mean that we do not currently know what that explanation is. It's a jump because it is currently a gap in our knowledge about a phenomenon that exhibits interesting properties and that we don't know how to reliably measure or reproduce. When we talk about things like consciousness we have to "jump" over that gap. It would be nice to fill in the gap a little. Is it possible you thought that I meant something else? For a lot of people, basic questions like "what are atoms," or "why is there matter", or "how does a physical process create a subjective experience" are really interesting. And to a certain extent, why should atoms exist? It's not a bad question - we can start talking about electrons, and then we can start talking about forces, and then at a certain point we'll have to say, "well, we don't know about this thing yet. Ask again in a decade and maybe we'll have some theories to propose." There are large branches of science devoted to these types of questions, and pursuing them has lead to useful theories and practical applications in the past.