My thoughts on the Hard problem of consciousness

[bennyboy]

@Benny, as the closest thing to an idealist around these parts what's your view on the correlation between neuroscience and your own subjective experience? How does something you presumably still consider external, come to affect how you actually experience? Ie how does a 'stable' idea 'out there' come to affect how you actually experience ideas of 'out there' and 'in here' from the subjective perspective?

In whatever world view you choose, unless you take the external world as a complete illusion, you will have to reconcile the subjective and objective into a single framework, which is no easy task.  I'm not an idealist, but I don't think any idealist is arguing that brains don't exist, or that they don't matter to our experiences.

I'd actually like to start with a material world-view and work from there.  In this view, all our experiences are symbolized before we experience them, and are encoded in brain function.  So one view is that the brain is an active agent, which kind of absorbs information, processes it, and subjectively experiences part of that process.

However, we can flip-flop between objects and their properties as brute fact (materialism) and objects as the expression of immaterial formative principles (idealism) in tracing the history that led to our qualia.  For example, the brain, a thing, is the expression of an idea-- "brain" as encoded in DNA.  The DNA is a merging of formative principles which themselves are a record of the genetic history of two individuals.  Ultimately, these go back (we believe) to a primordial soup: a multitude of organic molecules interacting in liquid water with energy provided from the sun and/or geothermal venting.

How do those molecules have the capacity to interact?  Are they objects with properties that allow them to interact, or are they better seen as the expression of formative principles-- physical rules and so on, which are not themselves "stuff"?  We can only observe objects and their properties scientifically, since science is intrinsically objective.  However, it seems that for any object, no matter how refined, there must be some formative principles which provide the framework in which it may be said to exist-- and those are called "ideas."

That's the idealistic view-- not that there are no brains, but that everything is rooted in formative principles which are themselves neither materials nor properties of materials-- and these principles underly time, space, and everything in them.  Brains are the expression of a tremendous chain of layered ideas interacting with each other over billions of years.  Brain function, then, is ideas interacting with other ideas.

I know all this doesn't answer your question: I show how you can reconcile brain function and qualia in an idealistic world view, but not HOW the brain allows for qualia. That's because qualia is a big freaking mystery no matter what world view you try to examine it in.


(sorry if too long I tried to be as concise as possible)