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> You get a pattern of electrical impulses. Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in

> You get a pattern of electrical impulses. Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in a published paper describing this structure. Barring that, yes, experience really is just protein cascades and electrical impulses. A light bulb is orders of magnitude simpler — easily 10 or 12, maybe more; and, that's just spatial; the spatiotemporal complexity might be another 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination to believe qualia arise somewhere between "uniform black body emitter" and "human brain learning and experiencing over time".

DennisP 6y ago
That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness. People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. And it's not true that there are no options besides simple materialism and crazy woo. E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience; you can believe that without believing anything contrary to physics. There are all sorts of possibilities being explored by people who grapple with these questions, instead of just assuming an answer.
- mdifrgechd 6y ago
  > E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience I've tried to reason about this, and one hypothesis is that all matter has compulsions, like to get to lower gravitational potential energy, to react this way or that, etc. And that desire can be thought of as conciousness. So for more complex assemblies of matter, conciousness becomes the sum of those compulsions, but still reflects the sum of what the base components want to do - oxidize stuff, etc. But the point is, conciousness is the manifestation of the inherent desires we have, based on the rules of the universe. Just a hypothesis of course, not testable, but my demonstration is that if you pour water into a maze with an outlet, it will solve it, based on its desire to reach a lower potential energy, and to make hydrogen bonds.
- jeremyjh 6y ago
  > People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ? And if we did find a magic unicorn in the sky, we'd study it and probably eventually understand how it works, what forces are acting upon it or vice versa. And once we'd done all that, someone on a forum would say of course this can't explain qualia because its "just materialism".
  - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
    If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative. i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.
    - dr_dshiv 6y ago
      Right. See Bernard Kastrup's work. Or, Plato. Or Max Tegmark. In my experience, most people can't follow their arguments because their woo detector turns on and their rational faculty turns off.
  - namero999 6y ago
    It's not much different than the magic unicorn in the sky that makes fermions pop into existence out of thin air (our current understanding of fundamental physics postulates just that). Every ontology gets a free miracle, you can't reduce everything in terms of something else, either you'll never stop or you'll get into circular reasoning. You get to choose your ontological primitive. A "particle" or "consciousness" do not have different woo-factor. But by choosing consciousness as a primitive you can explain much more of what we observe in nature (and as a nice side effect, there might be positive existential implications with such a worldview).
treeman79 6y ago
I like that idea that at a deeper level quantum computing matters in the brain. Add a few digits to the layers of complexity. P I’m a Bnb

DennisP 6y ago

That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness. People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. And it's not true that there are no options besides simple materialism and crazy woo. E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience; you can believe that without believing anything contrary to physics. There are all sorts of possibilities being explored by people who grapple with these questions, instead of just assuming an answer.

mdifrgechd 6y ago
> E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience I've tried to reason about this, and one hypothesis is that all matter has compulsions, like to get to lower gravitational potential energy, to react this way or that, etc. And that desire can be thought of as conciousness. So for more complex assemblies of matter, conciousness becomes the sum of those compulsions, but still reflects the sum of what the base components want to do - oxidize stuff, etc. But the point is, conciousness is the manifestation of the inherent desires we have, based on the rules of the universe. Just a hypothesis of course, not testable, but my demonstration is that if you pour water into a maze with an outlet, it will solve it, based on its desire to reach a lower potential energy, and to make hydrogen bonds.
jeremyjh 6y ago
> People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ? And if we did find a magic unicorn in the sky, we'd study it and probably eventually understand how it works, what forces are acting upon it or vice versa. And once we'd done all that, someone on a forum would say of course this can't explain qualia because its "just materialism".
- MacsHeadroom 6y ago
  If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative. i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    Right. See Bernard Kastrup's work. Or, Plato. Or Max Tegmark. In my experience, most people can't follow their arguments because their woo detector turns on and their rational faculty turns off.
- namero999 6y ago
  It's not much different than the magic unicorn in the sky that makes fermions pop into existence out of thin air (our current understanding of fundamental physics postulates just that). Every ontology gets a free miracle, you can't reduce everything in terms of something else, either you'll never stop or you'll get into circular reasoning. You get to choose your ontological primitive. A "particle" or "consciousness" do not have different woo-factor. But by choosing consciousness as a primitive you can explain much more of what we observe in nature (and as a nice side effect, there might be positive existential implications with such a worldview).

treeman79 6y ago

I like that idea that at a deeper level quantum computing matters in the brain. Add a few digits to the layers of complexity. P I’m a Bnb