Comment on Consciousness

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:48:46 GMT

I agree with your interpretation of our current physical and experiential evidence. I believe the perceived dualistic problem arises from imperfections in our current modeling of brain states and control of our own. We cannot easily simulate experiential brain states, reconfigure our own brains to match, and try them out ourselves. We cannot make adjustments of these states on a continuum that would allow us to say physical state A corresponds exactly to experience B and here's the math. We cannot create experience on a machine and have it tell us that it is experiencing. Without internal access to our source-code, our experiences come into our consciousness fully formed and appear magical.

That being said, the blunt tools we do have--descriptions of other's experiences, drugs, brain stimulation, fMRI, and psychophysics--do seem to indicate that experience follows directly from physical states of the brain without the need for a dualist explanation. Perhaps the problem will dissolve itself once uploading is possible and individual experiences are more tradeable and malleable.

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