The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential

[robvalue]

I'll throw my thoughts in here, and it's just my own brainstorming. It may be nonsense.

It seems to me that consciousness may be reminiscent of wave/particle duality. On the one hand, we have a physical brain behaving in a certain way, and the emergent patterns it produces are "consciousness" (objective view). On the other hand, we have an experience, which is also "consciousness" (subjective view).

So maybe it doesn't make sense to examine how useful the experience is, because it's asking an objective question about the subjective side. Finding the right question is one of the hardest parts when we're examining the very thing that traps us into subjectivity.

I'm working through some experimental thinking, and have been called insane by some people on TTA. I don't care if I'm wrong at the moment, because it's part of a process. I'm leaning towards the idea that the "experience" side of consciousness is just a very obvious manifestation of a more universal phenomenon; one which humans just so happen to be able to abstractly communicate to each other. I see everything as being very gradual, rather than there being hard lines where special qualities spring out of nowhere.

PS: could a brain work better a different way? I'm sure it could. Our brains are just a mish-mash of natural iterative processes. One could design something much better no doubt. Would it still be "conscious"? I couldn't possibly say. But I'm leaning towards the fact that it would be, or that in fact it's a redundant/malformed question. Better in what way though? Better at surviving? Computing? Passing on genes?