Seeing red

[bennyboy]

So in other words, while accepting whatever science may learn about the content and processing that goes on in the brain (the physical in my case, the 'out there' in yours - physical/Matrix/BIJ etc), you choose to give up on the qualia question because there's no way of knowing whether it comes from a physical universe or the Matrix etc?

No matter what position you take, you have to take something as a brute fact. Rhythm takes as his brute fact the existence of a coherent physical reality, with mind as a byproduct of particular phenomena within it. I take as brute fact only the existence of my mind (I think therefore I am), and the content of my experience (things I can touch and see), but hold in high suspicion any interpretation that goes beyond experience. Rhythm will point to brains, and bullets to brains, to prove that mind is a byproduct of brain function. I'll point to the fact that 0% of what we know is known except as an experience, even watching someone get their head blown off halfway through singing Happy Birthday.

That's why in my PM I talk about ambiguism. People will argue until their blue in the face about yin or yang, but may never be comfortable enough with paradox or ambiguity to accept the mindfuck that would be yinyang. (I use these terms not representing any religious or spiritual idea, but just the idea that opposites are interconnected and possibly indistinguishable)

Admittedly I think I understand you better for this post, and see where that ambiguity lies... not in choosing to learn about the mind and consciousness - which you still do - but rather in the question of how the qualia is produced; I could take your stance and happily continue to study the brain and the mind, but just stop asking about how the qualia is produced? Is that what you mean?

It's important to differentiate between content and existence. In the context of human life, and with science and knowledge of brains, throwing all that out would be counterproductive. Obviously, drugs or brain damage will affect the way one experiences. In looking at why there IS a mind, whatever its form or content, rather than a lack of mind, then one must ask-- why would things, which are objects, develop a subjective perspective? What is it about the universe that allows this even to be possible?

My position is that mind is essential, rather than incidental, to the universe. And because of the "bridge" problem, dualism is out, and there are three possible positions only:
1) Physical monism
2) Idealistic monism
3) Something that is paradoxically neither but both of those things

If I have to choose a monism, I'd choose the 2nd, since Physical monism does such a piss-poor job of explaining the existence of mind, but Idealism has no problem accepting that some ideas are form, change over time, have properties, etc.

QM is interesting, because it hints (at least to me) that paradox itself may be part of the fabric of the universe: that things which cannot possibly be mind are mind and vice versa: a kind of universal mind-stuff. And why not? We've gotten over light being a wave, a particle, a thing, and an unresolved wave function; it is all of those, and somehow none of them, at the same time. We've accepted the idea that the solid-seeming desk in front of me is 99.9999999999% empty space, and that even the .0000000001% is made of "stuff" that cannot really be said to have a well-defined volume or shape, even hypothetically, but is really more of a mathematical function.