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Academian comments on Physicalism: consciousness as the last sense - Less Wrong
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Comments (14)
Thanks for posing the question so clearly; and roughly speaking, yes, I see no need to separate the notion of "subject" and the last phases of the sensation process in the brain. I am the phenomenon of my perceptions and behavior. What else would I call "me"?
That you ask your question with an analogy is no coincidence: what leads one to ask for a subject is precisely a misapplication of metaphor. You are mapping an event chain of length N into an event chain of length N+1, and demanding that the first chain is therefore missing something: An object is like an object, a sense is a like a transmission about it, so what's like the recipient of the transmission?
Well, no... at the end, at the visual cortex or wherever visual perception happens (as mind-state "playback" technology might help us verify), the perception is not a transmission... it's the recipient of it. And "you" are just a collage of such recipients (and subsequent phenomena if you identify with your thoughts and actions too).
I hope that this series will eventually progress to an explanation of what it means for a perception to be its own recipient or for a subject to be a collage of such perceptions. It sounds promising, and I have lowered my probability that you are secretly a p-zombie (see the paragraph here starting with "He kind of took this idea and ran with it"), but I definitely want to know more.
There's no causal loop... input is a previous brain-state, and output is a subsequent brain-state.