Still, isn’t “emerges” even there a shortcut for “then it somehow happens… but I don’t know how specifically”?
To rephrase what you wrote:
If information is processed by certain structures with many feedback loops (like brains) then… sometimes… I am not sure what specific conditions are necessary… consciousness happens.
Of course it feels much less convincing when written this way. As it should. Because it honestly admits that I actually don’t know the details, and maybe some critical part is still missing.
Concretely, this hypothesis tells us to look at physical structures and neuronal activity in the brain and compare them across individuals and species, and that this
The field of neuroscience seems to bear this out. Our perceptions and emotions are accounted for by brain activity. Seemingly deeper issues like memory formation and temporal perception, have been successfully localized and understood to a great degree.
In particular, even though we don’t understand there’s no obvious gaps. The phenomena we still don’t understand seem hard to understand because they are high-level or occur very diffusely, not because they aren’t generated by the activity of neurons in the brain (hypothetical contradictory evidence would be people reporting some type of highly distinctive experience [say out-of-body, or less mystically deja vu] while an MRI shows no deviation from normal resting activity).
By perceptions I mean our senses and by emotions I mean broad emotions like sadness, anger and excitement.
These sorts of lower-level experiences, which are also present in animals, are fully accounted for, correlated with AND explained by neural and chemical activity in the brain. By reading the electrical activity of your neurons, I could figure out what you were seeing. By electrically stimulating a certain part of the brain, I could make you feel angry or happy or sad.
This level of deep mechanistic understanding seems to be coming for other phenomena, but yes that is a prediction of the future so no I can’t prove it right this second.
Still, isn’t “emerges” even there a shortcut for “then it somehow happens… but I don’t know how specifically”?
To rephrase what you wrote:
Of course it feels much less convincing when written this way. As it should. Because it honestly admits that I actually don’t know the details, and maybe some critical part is still missing.
It’s incomplete, but that’s okay.
Concretely, this hypothesis tells us to look at physical structures and neuronal activity in the brain and compare them across individuals and species, and that this
The field of neuroscience seems to bear this out. Our perceptions and emotions are accounted for by brain activity. Seemingly deeper issues like memory formation and temporal perception, have been successfully localized and understood to a great degree.
In particular, even though we don’t understand there’s no obvious gaps. The phenomena we still don’t understand seem hard to understand because they are high-level or occur very diffusely, not because they aren’t generated by the activity of neurons in the brain (hypothetical contradictory evidence would be people reporting some type of highly distinctive experience [say out-of-body, or less mystically deja vu] while an MRI shows no deviation from normal resting activity).
“Accounted for” is ambiguous between “correlated with”, and “explained by”.
By perceptions I mean our senses and by emotions I mean broad emotions like sadness, anger and excitement.
These sorts of lower-level experiences, which are also present in animals, are fully accounted for, correlated with AND explained by neural and chemical activity in the brain. By reading the electrical activity of your neurons, I could figure out what you were seeing. By electrically stimulating a certain part of the brain, I could make you feel angry or happy or sad.
This level of deep mechanistic understanding seems to be coming for other phenomena, but yes that is a prediction of the future so no I can’t prove it right this second.
Train a blind from birth person in your technique.
Hand them a braille readout of the neural activity of someone looking at a tomato.
Would they now know how red the things look to a sighted person?
Yes, they could easily tell the distribution of color receptor activation.
Not what I asked.
Then what are you asking. Please, precisely define what it would mean to “know how red the things look”.
Look at a tomato.
That’s how a red thing looks.