A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

I'm going to produce about a half-dozen examples showing that the mechanism of a phenomenon and the phenomenon are not identical.

Produce a single one.

I can produce an unlimited number of examples. I'll say that "redness" is an experience, and you'll say I'm experiencing brain chemistry. I'll say that no, in fact, I'm experiencing redness-- that the experience of brain chemistry would involve an fMRI or something. Then we'll rinse and repeat for 20 pages. But let's not do that. There are other ideas in this thread that are worth discussing.

I've mentioned this before, but I think that one small misstep (as with mario) is the source of the entirety of our difference. You think that the information or the experience - divorced for the sake of argument from the mechanism is "the thing"" (not in the material sense, in the sense of being the object) - whereas I see the experience or the information as a description of "the thing".

Fair enough. And in my view of idealism, the two views are a chicken-and-egg issue: for the most part irrelevant. It is because of QM, in which I don't see ideas to represent what can usefully be called "a thing," and because of qualia, which I also don't think can be resolved unambiguously in geometric space, that I break from that mundane view.

(I am, btw, getting frustrated with the one-sidedness of your expectations in our conversations....you expect quite a bit of explanation from me...you offer none in return - I'd love to see some functional description from you, as to how this qualia business might be accomplished..after all this time explaining how it could be accomplished by material objects - with the constant allowance that this may not be how we do it, simply that it could be done..at some point...I would have expected you to return the courtesy)

I don't pretend to know the mechanism of qualia. You, however, gave an explicit physical description of what qualia are, and how they are brought into existence, and I wanted you to support those assertions.