Since our judgments about the universe come from subjective experience. The mystery we should be considering is not how consciousness arises from an arrangement of atoms and weather or not it effects those atoms, but rather why our experiences are consistent.
We may conclude from the consistency of our experiences that there is some sort of substance which is maintaining that consistency, and that this substance some how operates independently of our experiences, and that what specific experiences we have depends on this substance.
This sounds like epiphenomenalism, which for reasons Eliezer has described seems absurd, but I could still consider a conceivable possibility. As far as it is possible that there is no inherent correlation between the color of black body radiation and temperature, and our observations thus far have just been coincidental.
Having rejected this notion, and still observing that conservation of matter-energy seems to hold even when no one is looking. We seem to be forced to accept that there is some substance to the Universe, and that our experiences are actually part of this substance.
I wouldn’t say that we are seeing the territory exactly, but I would say that seeing is part of the territory.
This seems to present another paradox in that our experiences are so consistent that we seem to be able to predict them with mathematical models, which to do not contain any term for experiences.
… Unless we accept that the brain is a quantum computer, and the collapse of its wave functions are being manipulated by another kind of substance, but this seems doubtful.
I think the place then to look is in computations that have no explicit form. That is some sort of iterated recursive function where you can’t compute the state at step n from the state at step 1 with out computing all the intermediate values.
This would translate to something like, if you know the physical state of my body and my environment now, you can not predict what i will be doing three days later with out calculating what i would do for the entire three days. This would seem to suggest that i actually have to experience what happens during those three days to determine what i will do, and your only option is to have a copy of me go through those same experiences.
This becomes more difficult if we further accept that time is continuum. In this case the universe has to preform uncountably many computational steps in a manner that is not well ordered with out skipping any. A great feat indeed, but this is the Universe.
Since our judgments about the universe come from subjective experience. The mystery we should be considering is not how consciousness arises from an arrangement of atoms and weather or not it effects those atoms, but rather why our experiences are consistent.
We may conclude from the consistency of our experiences that there is some sort of substance which is maintaining that consistency, and that this substance some how operates independently of our experiences, and that what specific experiences we have depends on this substance.
This sounds like epiphenomenalism, which for reasons Eliezer has described seems absurd, but I could still consider a conceivable possibility. As far as it is possible that there is no inherent correlation between the color of black body radiation and temperature, and our observations thus far have just been coincidental.
Having rejected this notion, and still observing that conservation of matter-energy seems to hold even when no one is looking. We seem to be forced to accept that there is some substance to the Universe, and that our experiences are actually part of this substance.
I wouldn’t say that we are seeing the territory exactly, but I would say that seeing is part of the territory.
This seems to present another paradox in that our experiences are so consistent that we seem to be able to predict them with mathematical models, which to do not contain any term for experiences.
… Unless we accept that the brain is a quantum computer, and the collapse of its wave functions are being manipulated by another kind of substance, but this seems doubtful.
I think the place then to look is in computations that have no explicit form. That is some sort of iterated recursive function where you can’t compute the state at step n from the state at step 1 with out computing all the intermediate values.
This would translate to something like, if you know the physical state of my body and my environment now, you can not predict what i will be doing three days later with out calculating what i would do for the entire three days. This would seem to suggest that i actually have to experience what happens during those three days to determine what i will do, and your only option is to have a copy of me go through those same experiences.
This becomes more difficult if we further accept that time is continuum. In this case the universe has to preform uncountably many computational steps in a manner that is not well ordered with out skipping any. A great feat indeed, but this is the Universe.