In the sense that I think you mean, yes, you are correct: there exists at least one phenomenon that science has not explained in terms of reducing it to more fundamental phenomena.
Now, Mitchell_Porter: do you want me to go over why that shortcoming is an insufficient reason to play “monad of the gaps”, or do you think you can connect the dots yourself?
In any case, I already showed you the research program that can attack this problem from a reductionist standpoint and what a solution would look like.
That research program reduces experience to computation. And in a brain that means atoms moving around. I have seen this position asserted in two forms. Color is atoms moving around in a certain way; or color is “how it feels” for atoms to move around in a certain way. The first is the sort of identity which I have been rejecting as outlandish—color is not motion, let alone collective motion.
The second possibly introduces a whole new sort of property to the physicalist vocabulary, “how X feels” where X is some physical event or condition. Where we go from here depends on how this property of feeling-like relates to the purely physical properties making up X. If “how X feels” is just another way of saying “X is the case”, then we are back to the first approach. If feeling-like is a new and different sort of property, then we have property dualism—unless feeling-like is itself physically reduced, e.g. to another order of computation, in which case we are back to the first approach after all.
There is a gap and I’m putting a monad in it, yes; the monad is the place where consciousness actually happens. But we shouldn’t overstate the difference between our views. In ordinary physical terms, this monad is supposed to be a big bunch of entangled biomolecules, nothing more; it’s only when we go beyond making predictions, to asking what physical things actually are, that I insist upon this inversion of the usual approach, whereby (in effect) the physical state of the monad is going to be explained as an abstracted description of its actual, conscious state, rather than the other way around.
When I say “physics contains no color” or “color can’t be reduced to physics”, I’m talking about the physical ontology you get if you take the physical formalism literally. That ontology contains no color. But I’m not saying that actual color exists in some extra realm outside of physics; the expectation is that it will be there in a slightly modified physics (a monadologized physics), when that physics is properly understood.
But if we skip these philosophical subtleties and just compare your view to mine at the ordinary level of discussion, according to which there is a physical brain and it contains somewhere a physical correlate of consciousness, what are the differences? I’m saying there’s a big quantum system somewhere and that is the correlate of consciousness; you’re saying there’s a distributed classical computation and that is the correlate of consciousness. That’s a difference but it’s not a radical difference. It’s only when we get into the details of how to make such an identification, between subjective and objective, that we get to the really heated differences in this discussion. Of course, it’s my views at that level which have motivated me to take the quantum path, so the two levels aren’t independent. But I wanted to step back for a moment and indicate how un-exotic a major portion of my hypothesis is.
In the sense that I think you mean, yes, you are correct: there exists at least one phenomenon that science has not explained in terms of reducing it to more fundamental phenomena.
Now, Mitchell_Porter: do you want me to go over why that shortcoming is an insufficient reason to play “monad of the gaps”, or do you think you can connect the dots yourself?
In any case, I already showed you the research program that can attack this problem from a reductionist standpoint and what a solution would look like.
That research program reduces experience to computation. And in a brain that means atoms moving around. I have seen this position asserted in two forms. Color is atoms moving around in a certain way; or color is “how it feels” for atoms to move around in a certain way. The first is the sort of identity which I have been rejecting as outlandish—color is not motion, let alone collective motion.
The second possibly introduces a whole new sort of property to the physicalist vocabulary, “how X feels” where X is some physical event or condition. Where we go from here depends on how this property of feeling-like relates to the purely physical properties making up X. If “how X feels” is just another way of saying “X is the case”, then we are back to the first approach. If feeling-like is a new and different sort of property, then we have property dualism—unless feeling-like is itself physically reduced, e.g. to another order of computation, in which case we are back to the first approach after all.
There is a gap and I’m putting a monad in it, yes; the monad is the place where consciousness actually happens. But we shouldn’t overstate the difference between our views. In ordinary physical terms, this monad is supposed to be a big bunch of entangled biomolecules, nothing more; it’s only when we go beyond making predictions, to asking what physical things actually are, that I insist upon this inversion of the usual approach, whereby (in effect) the physical state of the monad is going to be explained as an abstracted description of its actual, conscious state, rather than the other way around.
When I say “physics contains no color” or “color can’t be reduced to physics”, I’m talking about the physical ontology you get if you take the physical formalism literally. That ontology contains no color. But I’m not saying that actual color exists in some extra realm outside of physics; the expectation is that it will be there in a slightly modified physics (a monadologized physics), when that physics is properly understood.
But if we skip these philosophical subtleties and just compare your view to mine at the ordinary level of discussion, according to which there is a physical brain and it contains somewhere a physical correlate of consciousness, what are the differences? I’m saying there’s a big quantum system somewhere and that is the correlate of consciousness; you’re saying there’s a distributed classical computation and that is the correlate of consciousness. That’s a difference but it’s not a radical difference. It’s only when we get into the details of how to make such an identification, between subjective and objective, that we get to the really heated differences in this discussion. Of course, it’s my views at that level which have motivated me to take the quantum path, so the two levels aren’t independent. But I wanted to step back for a moment and indicate how un-exotic a major portion of my hypothesis is.