I think you ought to be more interested in what this shows about the severity of the problem of consciousness. See my remarks to William Sawin, about color and about many-to-one mappings, and how they lead to a choice between this peculiar quantum monism (which is indeed difficult to understand at first encounter), and property dualism. While I like my own ideas (about quantum monads and so forth), the difficulties associated with the usual approaches to consciousness matter in their own right.
(nods) I understand that you do; I have from the beginning of this exchange been trying to move forward from that bald assertion into a clarification of why I ought to be… that is, what benefits there are to be gained from channeling my interest as you recommend.
Put another way: let us suppose you’re right that there are aspects of consciousness (e.g., subjective experience/qualia) that cannot be adequately explained by mainstream ontology.
Suppose further that tomorrow we encounter an entity (an isolated group of geniuses working productively on the problem, or an alien civilization with a different ontological tradition, or spirit beings from another dimension, or Omega, or whatever) that has worked out an ontology that does adequately explain it, using quantum monads or something else, to roughly the same level of refinement and practical implementation that we have worked out our own.
What kinds of things would you expect that entity to be capable of that we are incapable of due to the (posited) inability of our ontology to adequately account for subjective experience?
Or, to ask the question a different way: suppose we encounter an entity that claims to have worked out such an ontology, but won’t show it to us. What properties ought we look for in that entity that provide evidence that their claim is legitimate?
The reason I ask is that you seem to concede that behavior can be entirely accounted for without reference to the missing ontological elements. (I may have misunderstood that, in which case I would appreciate clarification.) So I should not expect them to have a superior understanding of behavior that would manifest in various detectable ways. Nor should I expect them to have a superior understanding of physics.
I’m not really sure what I should expect them to have a superior understanding of, though, or what capabilities I should expect such an understanding to entail. Surely there ought to be something, if this branch of knowledge is, as you claim, worth pursuing.
Thus far, I’ve gotten that they ought to be able to make predictions about neurobiological structures that relate to certain kinds of quantum structures. I’m wondering what else.
Because if it’s just about being right about ontology for the sake of being right about ontology when it entails no consequences, then I simply disagree with you that I ought to be more interested.
What kinds of things would you expect that entity to be capable of that we are incapable of due to the (posited) inability of our ontology to adequately account for subjective experience?
I don’t consider this inability to merely be posited. It’s a matter of understanding what you can and can’t do with the ontological ingredients provided. You have particles, you have non-positional properties of individual particles, you have the motions of particles, you have changes in the non-positional properties. You have causal relations. You have sets of these entities; you have causal chains built from them; you have higher-order quantitative and logical facts deriving from the elementary facts about configuration and causal relationships. That’s basically all you have to work with. An ontology of fields, dynamical geometry, probabilities adds a few twists to this picture, but nothing that changes it fundamentally. So I’m saying there is nothing in this ontology, either fundamental or composite (in a broad sense of composite), which can be identified with—not just correlated with, but identified with—consciousness and its elements. And color offers the clearest and bluntest proof of this.
We can keep going over this fact from different angles, but eventually it comes down to seeing that one thing is indeed different from another. 1 is not 0; is not any specific thing that can be found in the ontology of particles. It reduces to pairwise comparative judgments in which ontologically dissimilar basic entities are perceived to indeed be ontologically dissimilar.
The reason I ask is that you seem to concede that behavior can be entirely accounted for without reference to the missing ontological elements.
What are we trying to explain, ultimately? What even gives us something to be explained? It’s conscious experience again; the appearance of a world. Our physical theories describe the behavior of a world which is structurally similar to the world of appearance, but which does not have all its properties. We are happy to say that the world of appearance is just causally connected, in a regularity-preserving way, to an external world, and that these problem properties only exist in the “world of appearance”. That might permit us to regard the “external world” as explained by our physics. But then we have this thing, “world of appearance”, where all the problems remain, and which we are nonetheless trying to assimilate to physics (via neuroscience). However, we know (if we care to think things through), that this assimilation is not possible with the current physical ontology.
So the claim that we can describe the behavior of things is not quite as powerful as it seems, because it turns out that the things we are describing can’t actually be the “things” of direct experience, the appearances themselves. We can get isomorphism here, but not identity. It’s an ontological problem: the things of physical theory need to be reconceived so that some of them can be identified with the things of consciousness, the appearances.
I understand that you aren’t “merely” positing the inability of a set of particles, positions and energy-states to be an experience.
I am.
I also understand that you consider this a foolish insistence on my part on rejecting the obvious facts of experience. As I’ve said several times now, repeatedly belaboring that point isn’t going to progress this discussion further.
I think you ought to be more interested in what this shows about the severity of the problem of consciousness. See my remarks to William Sawin, about color and about many-to-one mappings, and how they lead to a choice between this peculiar quantum monism (which is indeed difficult to understand at first encounter), and property dualism. While I like my own ideas (about quantum monads and so forth), the difficulties associated with the usual approaches to consciousness matter in their own right.
(nods) I understand that you do; I have from the beginning of this exchange been trying to move forward from that bald assertion into a clarification of why I ought to be… that is, what benefits there are to be gained from channeling my interest as you recommend.
Put another way: let us suppose you’re right that there are aspects of consciousness (e.g., subjective experience/qualia) that cannot be adequately explained by mainstream ontology.
Suppose further that tomorrow we encounter an entity (an isolated group of geniuses working productively on the problem, or an alien civilization with a different ontological tradition, or spirit beings from another dimension, or Omega, or whatever) that has worked out an ontology that does adequately explain it, using quantum monads or something else, to roughly the same level of refinement and practical implementation that we have worked out our own.
What kinds of things would you expect that entity to be capable of that we are incapable of due to the (posited) inability of our ontology to adequately account for subjective experience?
Or, to ask the question a different way: suppose we encounter an entity that claims to have worked out such an ontology, but won’t show it to us. What properties ought we look for in that entity that provide evidence that their claim is legitimate?
The reason I ask is that you seem to concede that behavior can be entirely accounted for without reference to the missing ontological elements. (I may have misunderstood that, in which case I would appreciate clarification.) So I should not expect them to have a superior understanding of behavior that would manifest in various detectable ways. Nor should I expect them to have a superior understanding of physics.
I’m not really sure what I should expect them to have a superior understanding of, though, or what capabilities I should expect such an understanding to entail. Surely there ought to be something, if this branch of knowledge is, as you claim, worth pursuing.
Thus far, I’ve gotten that they ought to be able to make predictions about neurobiological structures that relate to certain kinds of quantum structures. I’m wondering what else.
Because if it’s just about being right about ontology for the sake of being right about ontology when it entails no consequences, then I simply disagree with you that I ought to be more interested.
I don’t consider this inability to merely be posited. It’s a matter of understanding what you can and can’t do with the ontological ingredients provided. You have particles, you have non-positional properties of individual particles, you have the motions of particles, you have changes in the non-positional properties. You have causal relations. You have sets of these entities; you have causal chains built from them; you have higher-order quantitative and logical facts deriving from the elementary facts about configuration and causal relationships. That’s basically all you have to work with. An ontology of fields, dynamical geometry, probabilities adds a few twists to this picture, but nothing that changes it fundamentally. So I’m saying there is nothing in this ontology, either fundamental or composite (in a broad sense of composite), which can be identified with—not just correlated with, but identified with—consciousness and its elements. And color offers the clearest and bluntest proof of this.
We can keep going over this fact from different angles, but eventually it comes down to seeing that one thing is indeed different from another. 1 is not 0; is not any specific thing that can be found in the ontology of particles. It reduces to pairwise comparative judgments in which ontologically dissimilar basic entities are perceived to indeed be ontologically dissimilar.
What are we trying to explain, ultimately? What even gives us something to be explained? It’s conscious experience again; the appearance of a world. Our physical theories describe the behavior of a world which is structurally similar to the world of appearance, but which does not have all its properties. We are happy to say that the world of appearance is just causally connected, in a regularity-preserving way, to an external world, and that these problem properties only exist in the “world of appearance”. That might permit us to regard the “external world” as explained by our physics. But then we have this thing, “world of appearance”, where all the problems remain, and which we are nonetheless trying to assimilate to physics (via neuroscience). However, we know (if we care to think things through), that this assimilation is not possible with the current physical ontology.
So the claim that we can describe the behavior of things is not quite as powerful as it seems, because it turns out that the things we are describing can’t actually be the “things” of direct experience, the appearances themselves. We can get isomorphism here, but not identity. It’s an ontological problem: the things of physical theory need to be reconceived so that some of them can be identified with the things of consciousness, the appearances.
I understand that you aren’t “merely” positing the inability of a set of particles, positions and energy-states to be an experience.
I am.
I also understand that you consider this a foolish insistence on my part on rejecting the obvious facts of experience. As I’ve said several times now, repeatedly belaboring that point isn’t going to progress this discussion further.