If you can notice when you’re confused, how do you notice when you’re ignorant?
Have you noticed when YOU are confused?
1) The universe is a unified, consistent whole. Good!
“Good”? What does the statement even mean? What would be an alternative? non-unified whole? unified parts? non-unified bits and pieces? How would you tell?
2) The universe contains the experience/existence of consciousness. Easily observable.
Depends on your definition of consciousness. Is it one of the qualia? An outcome on the mirror test? Something else? If it’s a quale, do qualia exist in the same way physical things do? The statement above is meaningless without specifying the details.
3) If consciousness exists, something in the universe must cause or give rise to consciousness. Good reasoning!
Eh, bad reasoning. Depends on the definition of “cause”, which is more logic than physics. Causality in physics is merely a property of a certain set of the equations of motion, which is probably not what is meant in the above quote.
4) “Emergence” is a non-explanation, so that can’t be it. Good!
Bad. Emergence “as a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties” does not necessarily imply irreducibility, so even if we can reduce humans to quarks, humans can have properties which quarks don’t. Anyway, I grant this one if it means “everything is reducible” and nothing more. Of course, the reduced constituents are not required to have all the properties of the whole.
5) Therefore, whatever stuff the unified universe is made of must be giving rise to consciousness in a nonemergent way.
Presumably this means “in a non-dualist way”, i.e. a complex enough optimizer is not granted consciousness by some irreducible entity.
6) Therefore, the stuff must be innately “mindy”.
To argue against it, you don’t need “the computational theory of mind and consciousness”, just note that, say, atoms are not innately solid or liquid, so some properties of complex systems are meaningless when applied to its constituents.
Of course, maybe I am the one who is confused and not noticing it...
That seems to be within the domain of neuroscience (for what physiologically is going on in “itchy” and how “itchy” sensations are distinguished in the nervous system from “painful” or “red” ones) and possibly neurolinguistics (for how we acquire the category “itchy” and learn to refer to it when we describe our sensations to ourselves or others).
There might be a sideline of some other branch of psychology for why people get so damn defensive about the idea that their ego is a Real Thing that Really Has Real Experiences as opposed to a cogno-intellectual process running on a symbiotic ape brain.
Neuroscience can match off known neural activity to known sensations on aposteriori evidence, but it cannot provide a principled and predictive explanation of why a particular neural event should feel a particular way.
How we verbally categorise phenomenal feels is also not the hard problem.
The ego is also not the hard problem. You might want to say that egos don’t exist, but it seems to us thatvwe have them, or we feel we have them. That is a dissolution of the ego, not of qualia.
Have you noticed when YOU are confused?
“Good”? What does the statement even mean? What would be an alternative? non-unified whole? unified parts? non-unified bits and pieces? How would you tell?
Depends on your definition of consciousness. Is it one of the qualia? An outcome on the mirror test? Something else? If it’s a quale, do qualia exist in the same way physical things do? The statement above is meaningless without specifying the details.
Eh, bad reasoning. Depends on the definition of “cause”, which is more logic than physics. Causality in physics is merely a property of a certain set of the equations of motion, which is probably not what is meant in the above quote.
Bad. Emergence “as a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties” does not necessarily imply irreducibility, so even if we can reduce humans to quarks, humans can have properties which quarks don’t. Anyway, I grant this one if it means “everything is reducible” and nothing more. Of course, the reduced constituents are not required to have all the properties of the whole.
Presumably this means “in a non-dualist way”, i.e. a complex enough optimizer is not granted consciousness by some irreducible entity.
To argue against it, you don’t need “the computational theory of mind and consciousness”, just note that, say, atoms are not innately solid or liquid, so some properties of complex systems are meaningless when applied to its constituents.
Of course, maybe I am the one who is confused and not noticing it...
“Emergence” means different things to different people. Yep, this is an argument about definitions...
We can explain how to build solidity and liquidity out of atoms.
If you want to argue for CTM, it would help explain how Red and Painful and Itchy are built out of bits and bytes.
That seems to be within the domain of neuroscience (for what physiologically is going on in “itchy” and how “itchy” sensations are distinguished in the nervous system from “painful” or “red” ones) and possibly neurolinguistics (for how we acquire the category “itchy” and learn to refer to it when we describe our sensations to ourselves or others).
There might be a sideline of some other branch of psychology for why people get so damn defensive about the idea that their ego is a Real Thing that Really Has Real Experiences as opposed to a cogno-intellectual process running on a symbiotic ape brain.
Neuroscience can match off known neural activity to known sensations on aposteriori evidence, but it cannot provide a principled and predictive explanation of why a particular neural event should feel a particular way.
How we verbally categorise phenomenal feels is also not the hard problem.
The ego is also not the hard problem. You might want to say that egos don’t exist, but it seems to us thatvwe have them, or we feel we have them. That is a dissolution of the ego, not of qualia.