Consciousness as a physical biochemical process explains the properties and limitations of consciousness. Strikingly rival theories lack a mechanism or, like receiver theory, have been unable to demonstrate that mechanism
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Replying to @metaauthor @chaosprime
I don't disagree with either of those threads, but they don't seem to touch on the point I'm making are qualia physical? intuitively it certainly doesn't seem so how can a nonphysical thing be explained purely in terms of the physical?
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Replying to @ded_ruckus @chaosprime
I agree it's a difficult thing to grasp, which is why so many cultures have developed the idea of a soul or a spirit world to explain why we appear to be 'in here'. I was grasping for an analogy to explain this and I came up with the following:
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A heads-up display is real, and physical, but it does not appear to be real and physical in the same way as the environment you are viewing through it. A process is generating it and relating it to its environment but that process may not be immediately comprehensible.
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Replying to @metaauthor @chaosprime
The question isn't why we have any particular given qualia; that's all easily answered physically. The question is why there's a "we" to have qualia in the first place.
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Who's looking at the HUD, and where did they come from?
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Replying to @ded_ruckus @chaosprime
The way I explain this (as per my threads) is that the 'we' is more fundamental than qualia. Only certain information is incident upon us; we can see only part of reality. That is our 'perspective', and it's a by-product of physics; not biology.
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Replying to @metaauthor @chaosprime
yes, but the question isn't "why do we see only what we see?", the question is "why do we see anything?" you still aren't answering: why is there an entity that can have experiences, whatever those experiences be?
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Replying to @ded_ruckus @chaosprime
I'm saying that the 'entity' predates any question of consciousness or qualia. A rock has a 'perspective' - it can physically only access some information. Add a brain to that rock and it can recognise that fact by processing information and writing to memory.
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Replying to @metaauthor @chaosprime
yes, but a rock (as far as we know) can't have experiences. where does the experience-having come from?
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it's worth considering that the rock is having experiences not very involved ones probably
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Replying to @chaosprime @ded_ruckus
Another way of thinking of it (for a given definition of 'experience') is that the rock is 'having experiences' but cannot 'experience having experiences'.
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