Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[polymath257]

And there's this unexplained capacity to vividly experience things. Try to imagine how you can get to that from neural activity. There's clearly a gap there that is being left unexplained.

Let's look at this because it seems to be the crux of the matter.

What does it mean to 'vividly experience things'? 

Is there a difference with 'dimly experiencing things'? What does the word 'vividly' actually modify?

Let's take two examples of information that the brain processes. One is the color red when we are looking at it in good light. The other is carbon dioxide level in your blood.

Both of these are processed by the brain, but only one of them is 'conscious': the perception of the color red. The perception of the carbon dioxide levels happens, but is not conscious. The brain reacts to both. For example, it will trigger deeper breathing in response to high CO2 levels.

The question is why? What is the difference in how the brain processes those two pieces of information?

This is a 'soft' problem, but it seems to me to be the key to the question of consciousness. Knowing the differences between how those two pieces of information are processed would point to what, precisely, is happening in 'conscious perception'.

I guess the first question is : do you agree with this assessment? Does it seem to you to be a key question? If not, why not?

So, now, what actually *are* the differences? One big one is that the autonomic nervous system only links to fairly low levels of the brain stem and NOT to the higher regions in the brain (limbic system, cortex).

This suggests to me that the limbic system (which deals with emotions) is the key to what we usually call 'consciousness'. And, in fact, the role of anesthesia is to suppress parts of the activity just above the brain stem to achieve *unconsciousness*.

So why is it 'vivid'? Because the limbic system is strongly connected to the other areas of the brain, making the results of its processing *important* for the processing of other areas.

Now, admittedly there are a LOT of details, but does not this seem like a plausible route towards explaining consciousness? Why we 'feel' strongly: the connections are *important* across the brain. That *is* vividness, only from a different perspective.

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There is no 'switch to the first person'. The first person perspective is the one to whom it happens. So, if a creature with a brain detects the color red, that is what it *means* for that creature to 'see red' and that is the first person perspective for that creature.

There is no switch from your perspective, correct. We each observe everything in first-person perspective. But, if you were to imagine you could go beyond your first-person perspective, to get from third-person neurons firing to first-person perspectives requires a switch of some sort.

Ok, maybe that word "switch" is just causing confusion. But then I don't know what else to say. Can you at least see why Chalmers and co. see a hard problem, even though you don't agree there is one?

No, I actually don't see the difficulty. if a rock was processing information at a certain complexity, then it would have a first person perspective. I really don't see what the problem is supposed to be.

I don't see what needs to be explained: I have a first person experience because it is my rain that processes the information. it seems trivial to me.

In your view, first-person perspective is fundamental then?

I'm not sure what that means in context. It seems to me to be simply the concept of identity. So, when a comet hit Jupiter, it did not hit the Earth. From the perspective of the Earth it was third person, from that of Jupiter, it was first person. Now, Jupiter doesn't have a complex enough processing of information for it to be 'conscious', but the comet strike hit there and not here.

So, I see first person vs third person to simply be a description of where something happens. Consciousness, on the other hand, seems to be related to complexity of processing of information, probably in real time. The two seem to be very different questions.