A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

I'm sorry, brother, that's a little too dl;dr for me. Forgive me if I cherry pick a couple points.

2) My computer did not arrive at a subjective state, by any sensible definition of the word-- that is a semantic abuse that goes too far for the word "subjective" to have any meaning any more-- something which suits your purposes just fine, hmmmm?

With reference to other computers, unconnected and unassisted, it did.

I won't work under a definition of "subjective" which means "localized" and nothing more. That's defining out an important part of the intent of the word's meaning as used by most people.

Nevertheless I only meant to express that the subjectivity of your experience is to be expected, given the limitations of your central nervous system. What else would your experience be...what else could it be?

Experience couldn't be other than it is. I'm asking you by what mechanism the brain unifies sight, sound and other senses into single experiences, and I don't think I have an answer yet.

Personally, I don;t think that this is semantics at all, I think that it's unsatisfying to you because of some additional stuff you are implying or assuming when you use the term subjective experience.

That's not how I see it. I already know about experience. You have a theory, which you state as fact, that consciousness is exclusively mechanistic. I want you to explain how that mechanism works. My position is that since I interface with reality only through ideas, that it is assertions beyond idealism which must hold the BOP.

The computer also grants unity, in the bitmap Benny. Processing balloons out and then shrinks in at many steps along the way. The screen doesn't see all the pixels that we do, it sees only the bitmap

Again, I think you are borrowing qualia words in explaining physical processes. The monitor doesn't see anything. We arrange for pixels to have electricity fed to them. I think you are implicitly begging the question in your vocabulary choice: you frequently use words designed to talk about our conscious experience, in reference to things we do not normally think of as conscious. The implication, I think, is an inversion: that since any mechanical thing can "see," the human experience of sight is best thought of as purely mechanical. It may be so, but that doesn't mean that defining it so provides useful answers about the mechanism of human consciousness.