(January 26, 2023 at 9:03 am)emjay Wrote:(January 26, 2023 at 8:13 am)GrandizerII Wrote: If by full, you mean including how you can get from neural activities to [what appears to be] phenomenal experiences, I must admit I can't see how that would be possible. We'll have to wait and see, I suppose, when it comes time for such a full explanation to come into fruition (hopefully before I die).
That 'full'; no I don't think we can ever answer that.... that part I just have to take as is. But full in the sense of a full explanation of the processes and content of consciousness, full enough to be fully predictive, would be the fullest explanation we (or at least I) could ever dream to have of consciousness, and perfectly satisfactory, to me.
I will say though that occasionally within certain theories, and I'm guessing ast will be one of them, I get some ineffable feeling about the inevitability of qualia if not the mechanism of it... so that's when I vacillate between the aforementioned 'tantamount' and 'actual'. I know such an ineffable feeling would, could, or should not convince anyone else, such as yourself, philosophically but it's good enough for me.
Quote:Yes, there's pros and cons to each view. Every view of [the emergence of] consciousness (or what appears to be consciousness) is going to be radical in some way, whichever one ends up being true.
True, they will all be radical in some sense... but basically the more grounding they have in observable reality, the more appealing they are to me. For instance given two theories about consciousness, one purely speculative, and one that looks at the actual structures of the brain etc, the latter will always be more compelling to me.
Speaking of Mind Chat, since we were talking about pzs earlier in this thread, once you get the chance to watch some episodes, I would suggest as your first episode the one where they interview Sean Carroll. They spend quite some time getting into some of the implications of the pz thought experiment, if you wish to explore these aspects further. Although that's not one of my favourite episodes because the panpsychist dude gets wrecked really badly by Sean Carroll ... so you might like it even more because of that.
