(January 21, 2019 at 11:07 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: It helps more than it may seem at first glance. This is due to our being able to observe both that and how other physical systems present and handle abstractions. Systems that we have the convenience of being able to take apart piece by piece and study at a level of intensity unavailable to us with regards to the brain for practical and ethical reasons, lol. Our cameras, for example, create bitmaps. This is how they wield abstraction to record their field of view. This record is translatable, and conferrable..to us, even. We can see what the camera saw..even if we can't see what the camera could on our own. So, we look for something like a bitmap analog - and finding that would help us to understand the experience of seeing the world. Why and how it presents itself to us in the manner that it does (there's no gaurantee that understanding this will answer any question -you- may have, ofc).
The "jump" from electrochemical events to felt experience is not completely unexplained. This is pointless sensationalism (and dated as all hell, on top of that). Above, I was discussing visual field processing, which isn't a black box. There are multiple explanations, each of which can be shown to be workable in principle and theory, and the trick now is to establish which (if any) apply to human visual field processing..or are more accurate themselves or in conjunction with others or portions of others.
Digital cameras don't have selves, and don't experience qualia. So the analogy isn't helpful here.
It's possible that the comparison to computer bit mapping will help to clarify something. We should remember, though, that in the history of science brains and bodies have always been explained analogously according to whatever technology is new and cool at the time. Yet these comparisons are very limited and sometimes misleading. Brains don't work the way our computers do, for example.
