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theories like this seem like grasping at straws to over explain a phenomenon we don't fully understand. it places consciousness on a pedestal. it's religious th

• lukifer 11d ago
  For good and ill, the phenomenology of human experience is that we are religious animals. Naturalism / Materialism has still left us with two unsolved (perhaps insoluble) questions: the hard problem of consciousness, and why there is something instead of nothing. I think it's a mistake to leap to socially-constructed, historically contingent solutions ("my magic book has the answers, as written by the Universe Architect, it says so in my magic book"). I also think it's a mistake to dismiss (seemingly) outlandish hypotheses. These theories do, explicitly, place consciousness on a pedestal, precisely because there's no reason to derive consciousness from evolutionary selection pressures: show me any biological or cognitive feedback loop, and I can describe a "p-zombie" version which is pure mechanism, without experience, a thermostat with extra steps. The notion that consciousness is an "epiphenomenon", a spandrel, a side effect, is entirely unsatisfying (and doesn't address the question, of where else that side effect might be taking place; the IIT-ers bite that bullet, that the thermostat experiences something). For an intellectually rigorous exploration of philosophical idealism, I'd recommend Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman. (I'm not claiming they're correct, just that they put forth the strongest version of the case.)