Expecting physics to explain consciousness is like expecting lambda calculus to explain Microsoft Word. On one level, it does (you are a pattern in a simple lawful process that we call 'reality' or 'physics'), on the other, it's not supposed to. Jumping from apparent confusion to postulating new substances is a basic error.
I'd like to offer what I think might be objections to this post. When I imagine myself as a non-reductionist and non-materialist reading this post (I am, in fact, neither of these things), I believe I find myself unconvinced by this thought experiment. I suppose I'm not sure convincing this hypothetical me is the goal... nonetheless here are my hypothetical objections:
When I introspect on my thought processes, I am using my mind. I might imagine that I can isolate a "specks of consciousness" just as you ask me to do, but this is a fact about
The decomposability or granularity of experience may be illusory. (This is the first point in taiyo's comment.) But even if one can sensibly pick out a tiny piece of one's experience, I don't expect it to be an electron.
Analogously, the tiny piece of my computer's function that makes the cursor blink at a steady rate is definitely a physical process, but it's not an electron.
I want to try to get away from the idea of jumping from mind to physics. The middle ground is more firm. The brain is a biological organ with a function. The stomach is a similar organ with a digestive function. The heart is a similar organ with a circulation function. The function (or one of them) of the brain is mind. Mind is not a thing, it is a biological function. If I extract an electron from my heart, I do not have a bit of circulation. There is no magic here. Take the physics and move to chemistry, take them and move to biochemistry and biophysics,...
If a "materialist" believes that the problem of consciousness can be solved by current physics plus vague "complexity" (rather than new physics), then I don't know if I'm a "materialist" or not, and this post doesn't convince me one way or the other. Am I alone in thinking this is all just hand-waving?
What would we call this tiny, almost infinitesimal speck of your mind?
I say we call it "electron"…
I would like to clarify what you mean here. I think you're saying that any given mind-state is ultimately the result of 10^n particle movements, so that some "fraction" of that mind-state is in principle traceable to only one particle - say, an electron - moving. Is that right?
Brilliantly done! :)
Yes, I think the major hurdle is that people expect an account of mind as arising from matter to somehow feel intuitive, or to be easily picturable.
Which is as unreasonable as, say, expecting a psych profile of a murderer to be so good that it makes you murder somebody.
Please, start with a tl;dr summary before writing such huge blocks of text. There's a reason every research paper starts with an abstract.
Does neurology presently explain cognitive biases, or allow for memory restoration? I'd like to see some examples of such cool stuff.
I don't relate to your inspirational material, but I liked the analysis.
...I'm doing my best here to approach what "a tiny piece of your soul" might mean. But no matter; perhaps you have a better idea of what that is. In any case, suppose you somehow isolated this tiny fraction of mind or spirit, and took it out of the context of all the countless other details we didn't look at. Now it's disconnected from all that other stuff: vision, balance, nachos, nuances of empathy…Given modern science, there is something more you can say about a particle besides the geometry and equations that describe it, something which con
When we talk about the states of a microprocessor, what we care about are the contents of the registers, the cache, and the instructions in the pipeline. I'm not certain about the gigahertz level processors of today, but for the processors of 20 years ago, these states are completely stable in terms of changing the placement of one electron with non-relativistic energy levels.
Those processors operated at tens of megahertz. Are 100 Hz neurons so much more sensitive that the placement of a single electron has any effect on the mind states we care about?
Interesting. Mind if I bounce this off some of my Internet peeps? I'm curious as to how people outside this rather eccentric community would react.
(Granted, "my Internet peeps" is a rather eccentric community of its own - just separate from this one.)
There doesn't have to be anything more. (I certainly don't require "more" for my existence to be justified.)
Also, I know.
The two halves of this post, as originally written, were indended for different (but overlapping) audiences.
This was not wise. I'm splitting it now, and the second half should be more interesting after some revision.
Thanks to everyone for very helpful comments!
Do electric and magnetic fields actually exist, or are they simply a mathematical description of how charged particles move in the presence of other charged particles?
(As it turns out, the fact that Maxwell's equations describe light entirely in terms of said fields provide a good reason to believe the former over the latter.)
As a conviction, physics need not claim that "dots and waves are all there is", but rather, that all there is can be described on analogy with dots and waves.
I found this a very useful statement.
And then the more I thought about it, I lost why it was special. I'm not sure why that happened, or what it means. Perhaps a reversion to my dark side. If so, that was faster than I would have thought.
I think a good term for what I believe in might be 'abstractionism'; essentially, I believe in all possible things, and all entities existing in all possible contexts.
From this perspective, matter, mind and mathematics are all the same kind of stuff: patterns. The mind is a pattern than can be abstracted from processes functioning to solve problems which, at a high level, implement our thoughts. Those processes can be performed by brains running in the kinds of universe we are familiar with, which run on ontological frameworks consistent, at least for ob...
A non-materialist thought experiment.
Okay, so you don't exactly believe in the God of the Abrahamic scriptures verbatim who punishes and sets things on fire and lives in the sky. But still, there just has to be something more than just matter and energy, doesn't there? You just feel it. If you don't, try to remember when you did, or at least empathize with someone you know who does. After all, you have a mind, you think, you feel — you feel for crying out loud — and you must realize that can't be made entirely of things like carbon and hydrogen atoms, which are basically just dots with other dots swirling around them. Okay, maybe they're waves, but at least sometimes they act like dots. Start with a few swirling dots… now add more… keep going, until it equals love. It just doesn't seem to capture it.
In fact, now that you think about it, you know your mind exists. It's right there: it's you. Your "experiencing self". Maybe you call it a spirit or soul; I don't want to fix too rigid a description in case it wouldn't quite match your own. But cogito-ergo-sum, it's definitely there! By contrast, this particle business is just a mathematical concept — a very smart one, of course — thought of by scientists to explain and predict a bunch of carefully designed and important measurements. Yes, it does that extremely well, and you're not downplaying that. But that doesn't explain how you see blue, or taste strawberry — something you have direct access to. Particles might not even exist, if that means anything to say. It might just be that observation itself follows a mathematical pattern that we can understand better by visualizing dots and waves. They might not be real.
So actually, your mind or spirit — that thing you feel, that you — is much more certain an extant than scientific "matter". That must be something very important to understand! Certainly you can tell your mind has different parts to it: hearing, seeing, reasoning, moving, remembering, empathizing, picturing, yearning… When you think of all the things you can remember alone — or could remember — the complexity of all that data is mindbogglingly vast. Imagine the task of actually having to take it all apart and describe it completely… it could take aeons…
Imagine then, for a moment, that you could isolate just one part: some relatively insignificant portion of your vast mind or spirit. Let's say a single, second-long experience of walking with a friend; certainly minute compared to the entirety of your life. But still, an extremely complex object. Think about all you are perceiving in that second... your mind is incredible! No, I'm not talking about your brain, I'm talking about your experiencing self, your mind, your essence, however you might think about that experiencing entity. Now imagine isolating some small aspect of that memory with your friend, discarding the massively detailed experiences that are your vision, your sense of balance, how hungry you are for nachos… Say, a concerned awareness of your friend's emotional state at that instant. This too is a highly complex object, so it too has parts, which I may not be able to describe in finer granularity, but they're there. Now let's say you're some kind of super-introspective savant, who can sense the conceptual fragments of still finer, sharper aspects of this…
I'm doing my best here to approach what "a tiny piece of your soul" might mean. But no matter; perhaps you have a better idea of what that is. In any case, suppose you somehow isolated this tiny fraction of a mind or spirit, and took it out of the context of all the countless other details we didn't look at. Now it's disconnected from all that other stuff: vision, balance, nachos, nuances of empathy…
Suppose you managed to somehow look at this object, by which I mean observe it in some way — It is part of your mind, after all — and consider a possible outcome. So that we're picturing roughly the same thing, imagine that as you observed it, this piece of your soul is not writhing and thrashing about spasmodically, but appears in fact calm, and focused on its task. Suppose it moved regularly, like maybe in a circle, for example. How curious it could turn out to be! What would we call this tiny, almost infinitesimal speck of your mind?
I say we call it "electron".
Like many readers of this blog, I am a materialist. Like many still, I was not always. Long ago, the now-rhetorical ponderings in the preceding post in fact delivered the fatal blow to my nagging suspicion that, somehow, materialism just isn't enough…
Finish reading in: The two insights of materialism
(these were originally a single post, so some comments below refer to the sequel.)