Seeing red

[emjay]

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.

As it stands then, I take the same thing as brute fact as Rhythm, but I understand your point here as well, that the only way we know anything is through experience. But to be honest I can't understand how you can 'subsume' materialism either, given that where theories of psychology and neuroscience are concerned, they directly affect the content and nature of your experience - you can rely on them to make predictions about your experience, but they rely on materialistic assumptions. I know you say later that they don't have anything to say about the actual existence of subjective experience - why or how it exists - but nonetheless they still do have a lot to say about what you experience given that you can experience. It seems to me that if you accept the findings of materialistic theories of psychology and neuroscience - to whatever extent you do - then you have to be relying on materialism to some extent, and therefore to deny materialism seems like circular logic. Unless you're saying that everything that materialism sees as a thing is in fact an idea? But if that is the case, why would those ideas exhibit exactly the same relationships and coherency as the materialistic universe? Why would they be as if it was a materialistic universe? eg that certain ideas are only found in certain places in 'idea space'... like you'd have to look in a brain idea before you could see a neuron idea etc?

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)

As I said, I'm not ready for that mindfuck yet

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?

I don't know. Whichever way you look there's what you refer to as the 'bridge problem' - or at least from a materialistic viewpoint there is, which I think is your point. But speaking from my materialistic viewpoint, limited as I know it is, in the past I've wondered if consciousness could provide something that neurons couldn't do and in that sense was tapped into by the brain... a new form of processing that couldn't be accomplished with neural networks and which was therefore like a black box but that suffers from the bridge problem big time so I had to discard the notion that consciousness could be anything more than a mirror or a story that we can do nothing but watch unfold, even though it feels like we're making choices etc - part of the illusion. In other words it couldn't feed back or influence the underlying system. My current position still suffers from the bridge problem but it feels less of a problem because there is somehow a kind of intervening layer in ironically something a lot like 'idea space' Well information space or abstraction space... unless they are not intervening layers but actual perception. The point is the neural network or system produces abstractions or information that make sense at the functional and structural level, and to me at least, fit in with what is experienced in consciousness. For instance, as I've said before, there are line detector neurons for instance, and there is hierarchical abstraction going on in the visual cortex to build complex representations out of simpler representations. And then you see the fruits of all of that in consciousness. The bridge problem is still there but that very strong correlation between abstractions understood at a functional/structural level and actual experience is something I can't ignore.

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.

Yes, QM is the second mindfuck The one I remember most is the black box with a mirror inside and with slits for entry and exit of a photon... fire it in, it reflects off the mirror and comes out the other slit. But then take away the mirror and do the same thing and sometimes it still comes out, with at least the book I was reading suggesting that it takes any path, even if it was like spaghetti junction. So what with photons that can take any path through space, and particles popping up and disappearing all over the place etc it is very interesting and very paradoxical. I do find what you're saying here compelling, and this, more than any other argument, makes me wonder about idealism.