RE: Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis
February 16, 2017 at 9:05 pm
(This post was last modified: February 16, 2017 at 9:12 pm by bennyboy.)
(February 16, 2017 at 6:23 pm)emjay Wrote:(February 16, 2017 at 5:05 pm)bennyboy Wrote: eh? Who's doing the inferring?
I was just expressing my own confusions; if you want to believe in a homunculous, knock yourself out, but for me it's not a given... all that's given is there's an apparent homunculous. That apparent homunculous is the subject of experience, ie if there is experience there is something to experience it... apparently... but that focal point, of which our senses revolve around, could, in my view, be just another implicit representation in the network, not above and beyond, as a homunculous would be, but the natural inference the network would make when it finds all sensory information, pointing as it were to the same thing.
So you're saying the self is. . . an idea?
Do you anticipate a tough sell here?
(February 16, 2017 at 6:36 pm)Khemikal Wrote:(February 16, 2017 at 6:21 pm)bennyboy Wrote: What you are asking me to do is difficult, since one of my reasons for not being a materialist is the hard problem of consciousness.It shouldn't be difficult, I'm not asking you to agree that anything -is- a distal cause of qualia, only asking you to identify candidates -as- a distal cause in a material monist framework. Your view is irrelevant to the question you asked me to answer.
What's the distal cause of the existence of matter? The Big Bang? Whatever quantity/principle/process allowed for it?
Whatever that is, then that is my view of the distal cause of the capacity for material systems to experience: it has been intrinsic to the fabric of the Universe from the very start.
(February 16, 2017 at 6:36 pm)Khemikal Wrote: Laying aside brain itself as a proximal cause, as you asked me to do, does the process which led to that brain qualify as distal, how about the chemistry that supports that process, how about the physics beneath that? In the vast amount of explanatory space between the brain and quantum mechanics...all of it a material monist explanation..is there -anything- that strikes you as a candidate to be a distal cause?
The process you describe led to the capacity for a particular organism to experience things in a particular way. As I said, we don't "get" what it's like to do echolocation because we're not built like that. But we get what it's like to be able to know what something is like, and so do bats, worms (I think), and I suspect there's no magical critical mass at all-- that it runs right down the scale spectrum to QM.
