My thoughts on the Hard problem of consciousness

[emjay]

@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.

Tell me about it especially in the case of the clockwork universe vs subjective 'choice' in the moment and the subjective paradoxes it seems to create. I read about one person's solution... I believe her name is Susan Blackmore, author of a book called 'Conversations on Consciousness'; she takes the extreme step of referring to herself all the time in the third person ie 'she did this, she did that' rather than 'I did this, I did that'. I think that's taking it a bit far... we are what we are, and what we are includes a first person perspective. As to the idealist position, I'll have to take that on faith for now, cos it's not at all clear to me what exactly an idealist thinks, even with this post of yours. But getting there

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."

I'm sorry to say, you're losing me with all this   So your view is a kind of materialistic/idealistic hybrid? Okay, 'immaterial formative principles'... 'physical rules' etc... those are 'ideas' to an idealist? How is that different from a materialist accepting physical laws of the universe, like gravity etc? I thought idealism simply referred to the qualia... the opposite of realism. I'm really sorry but it's just not making the slightest bit of sense to me, not even enough to know what sort of questions to ask to clarify it What would a neuron be? an idea? an immaterial formative principle (in the sense that it is the ultimate functional building block of the brain, just as a gate is in an electronic circuit)?

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.

Well, I hope to understand it better at some point, but you had me at 'layered' From that perspective, there is an appeal because that's what evolution is really... layers and layers of slow but sure development. Is there any particular idealist that inspires you or is this all you?  

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)

No worries It answers some of my questions   But asks a lot more