Comment by keefle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keefle | Hacker News Reader

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I wholeheartedly agree. For those interested check out the hard problem of consciousness

And I have a thought I would like to share here, an attempt at arguing for why it might be impossible for a physical pure materialistic model of the world to explain consciousness

In a pure physical materialistic world, we can represent everything as laws, interactions between materials, guided by a set of rules. That's it.

If we had a absolute knowledge, we can represent those rules, all of them, as a set of mathematical and logical equations.

I reduce the material world to a mathematical world of rules and laws, an abstract world.

Saying consciousness could arrise from a pure material world, is akin to saying the mathematical equations and laws, combined, can be conscious. As in, there is a system of rules that if tuned in a certain way can think. Since rules are abstract, and by definition rules don't think. No combination of them no matter how complicated can think

The initial rebuttle I have in my mind is that "well you are conflicting the system with the objects governed by it", I feel there is a better way to phrase the initial proposal to address this issue, but I just wanted to throw this idea out there

I think you're on the right track here. I usually try to reason down a similar line. I wouldn't say that the claim is that the equations and laws combined can be conscious. Instead, I would say that none of the equations or laws that we come up with involve mental attributes (such as consciousness or qualia) as either inputs or outputs.

You look at all the proposed laws of the universe, and they involve things like energy, mass, time, position, work, etc, as inputs or outputs. No equations have inputs of these sorts of natural quantities and outputs that entail consciousness or that first-person experience.

We can see from these equations how things like tree leaves blowing in the wind, or mountains, might arise. These things involve motions and mass and things interacting with each other. While we might not be able to paint the full picture, we can see that the inputs and outputs of those equations are the right kinds of things that might plausibly lead to mountains and leaves blowing in the wind, at the right scale.

We can't see from these equations anything that might plausibly lead to the first-person experience, the what-it's-like to be something.

Note that the naturalist cannot then just inject these mental/consciousness related parameters into their equations. That would amount to a form of dualism, and destroy their project. What I think the naturalist needs to do is somehow explain away consciousness, because I don't see any path they could take to explain it in purely natural terms. They need to deny that there's anything here that needs explaining at all.

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