Since GR is essentially a description of the behaviour of spacetime, it isn’t GR’s job to explain why spacetime exists. More generally, it isn’t the job of any theory to explain why that theory is true; it is the job of the theory to be true. Nobody expects [theory X] to include a term that describes the probability of the truth of [theory X], so lacking this property does not deduct points.
There may be a deeper theory that will describe the conditions under which spacetime will or will not exist, and give recipes for cooking up spacetimes with various properties. But there isn’t necessarily a deeper layer to the onion. At some point, if you keep digging far enough, you’ll hit “The Truth Which Describes the Way The Universe Really Is”, although it may not be easy to confirm that you’ve really hit the deepest layer. The only evidence you’ll have is that theories that claim to go deeper cease to be falsifiable, and increase in complexity.
If you can find [Theory Y] which explains [Theory X] and generalizes to other results which you can use to confirm it, or which is strictly simpler, now that’s a different case. In that case you have the ammunition to say that [Theory X] really is lacking something.
But picking which laws of physics happen to be true is the universe’s job, and if the universe uses any logical system of selecting laws of physics, I doubt it will be easy to find out. The only fact we know about the meta-laws governing the laws of universes is that the laws of our universe fit the bill, and it’s likely that that is all the evidence we will ever be able to acquire.
Yes, I agree! Along the same lines, it is not the role of any theory of consciousness to explain why the subjective experience of consciousness exists at all.
Well, unlike a fundamental theory of physics, we don’t have strong reasons to expect that consciousness is indescribable in any more basic terms. I think there’s a confusion of levels here… GR is a description of how a 4-dimensional spacetime can function and precisely reproduces our observations of the universe. It doesn’t describe how that spacetime was born into existence because that’s an answer to a different question than the one Einstein was asking.
In the case of consciousness, there are many things we don’t know, such as:
1: Can we rigorously draw a boundary around this concept of “consciousness” in concept-space in a way that captures all the features we think it should have, and still makes logical sense as a compact description
2: Can we use a compact description like that to distinguish empirically between systems that are and are not “conscious”
3: Can we use a theory of consciousness to design a mechanism that will have a conscious subjective
experience
It’s quite possible that answering 1 will make 2 obvious, and if the answer to 2 is “yes”, then it’s likely that it will make 3 a matter of engineering. It seems likely that a theory of consciousness will be built on top of the more well-understood knowledge base of computer science, and so it should be describable in basic terms if it’s not a completely incoherent concept. And if it is a completely incoherent concept, then we should expect an answer instead from cognitive science to tell us why humans generally seem to feel strongly that consciousness is a coherent concept, even though it actually is not.
OTOH, if there isn’t some other theory that explain consciousness in terms of more fundamentall entities, properties, etc, then reductionism is out of the window...and what is left of physicalism without reductionism?
Since GR is essentially a description of the behaviour of spacetime, it isn’t GR’s job to explain why spacetime exists. More generally, it isn’t the job of any theory to explain why that theory is true; it is the job of the theory to be true. Nobody expects [theory X] to include a term that describes the probability of the truth of [theory X], so lacking this property does not deduct points.
There may be a deeper theory that will describe the conditions under which spacetime will or will not exist, and give recipes for cooking up spacetimes with various properties. But there isn’t necessarily a deeper layer to the onion. At some point, if you keep digging far enough, you’ll hit “The Truth Which Describes the Way The Universe Really Is”, although it may not be easy to confirm that you’ve really hit the deepest layer. The only evidence you’ll have is that theories that claim to go deeper cease to be falsifiable, and increase in complexity.
If you can find [Theory Y] which explains [Theory X] and generalizes to other results which you can use to confirm it, or which is strictly simpler, now that’s a different case. In that case you have the ammunition to say that [Theory X] really is lacking something.
But picking which laws of physics happen to be true is the universe’s job, and if the universe uses any logical system of selecting laws of physics, I doubt it will be easy to find out. The only fact we know about the meta-laws governing the laws of universes is that the laws of our universe fit the bill, and it’s likely that that is all the evidence we will ever be able to acquire.
Yes, I agree! Along the same lines, it is not the role of any theory of consciousness to explain why the subjective experience of consciousness exists at all.
Well, unlike a fundamental theory of physics, we don’t have strong reasons to expect that consciousness is indescribable in any more basic terms. I think there’s a confusion of levels here… GR is a description of how a 4-dimensional spacetime can function and precisely reproduces our observations of the universe. It doesn’t describe how that spacetime was born into existence because that’s an answer to a different question than the one Einstein was asking.
In the case of consciousness, there are many things we don’t know, such as:
1: Can we rigorously draw a boundary around this concept of “consciousness” in concept-space in a way that captures all the features we think it should have, and still makes logical sense as a compact description
2: Can we use a compact description like that to distinguish empirically between systems that are and are not “conscious”
3: Can we use a theory of consciousness to design a mechanism that will have a conscious subjective experience
It’s quite possible that answering 1 will make 2 obvious, and if the answer to 2 is “yes”, then it’s likely that it will make 3 a matter of engineering. It seems likely that a theory of consciousness will be built on top of the more well-understood knowledge base of computer science, and so it should be describable in basic terms if it’s not a completely incoherent concept. And if it is a completely incoherent concept, then we should expect an answer instead from cognitive science to tell us why humans generally seem to feel strongly that consciousness is a coherent concept, even though it actually is not.
OTOH, if there isn’t some other theory that explain consciousness in terms of more fundamentall entities, properties, etc, then reductionism is out of the window...and what is left of physicalism without reductionism?
Are you arguing against me? Because I think I agree with what you just said...
I’m confused about how you can be backing both IIT and something like panpsychism.
Why not? I’m just going based off the wikipedia article on IIT, but the two seem compatible.