Atla wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 1:01 am
Electromagnetic fields are physical and analyzable.
Analyzable, yes. Physical? Sort of. "Fields" (gravitational, magnetic, electrical) are all
theoretical constructs invented to explain various types of action-at-a-distance (e.g., the ability of a magnet to move a body some distance away from it). We can't see, touch, or measure any of those fields directly; we can only observe and measure the effects they are invoked to explain. They are pretty ephemeral.
So that would mean that the model is in fact physically identical to a part of the brain.
Well, you can call an effect of a process a part of the processing mechanism if you wish, but that would be somewhat unconventional. I don't think the Earth's magnetic or gravitational fields are treated as part of the planet in most geology texts. Those would be covered in astronomy or physics texts.
If you want to start working on the Hard problem, you first have to discard ideas that probably don't work. Strong emergence is a good example of it, here we pretend that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, in short it's a scientifically accepted version of magic. We are still at square one, trying to bridge the explanatory gap, and we are still fully involved in dualism, we simply convince ourselves that we aren't.
I share your sentiments there, and your skepticism of "emergence." It sounds very much like a "just so" story, and like magic.
But we need to grasp what makes the Hard Problem hard.
It is hard because the phenomena we are trying to explain is intrinsically subjective and private. That means that scientific method, as usually understood, is inapplicable to it and impotent to solve it. Scientific method presupposes, and depends upon, publicly observable phenomena, things we can describe in publicly verifiable ways using terms with agreed upon meanings, things within our common experience which we can weigh, measure, manipulate, analyze, compare with other things, things for which we can obtain repeatable, consistent answers to the questions we pose about them. In short, science is a
public methodology for investigating
public phenomena.
So the problem is more severe than mere irreducibility; it defies the fundamental assumptions and prerequisites of science itself. How can we explain a phenomenon we cannot observe or describe objectively, cannot measure or analyze, from known scientific facts or principles, or derive it from them?
Yet "mental" phenomena --- thoughts, impressions, feelings, qualia, ideas, knowledge, etc., etc. --- are undeniable; we all experience them (strictly speaking, we only experience our own mental phenomena, but we assume that other creatures do as well), and we talk about those phenomena, meaningfully, all the time. And being inquisitive creatures we're driven to try to explain them.
So what to do?
The best we can do, I think, is a functional explanation. We can investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness to appear --- we can handle that scientifically; we know quite a bit about that. But just how and why those conditions produce that effect will forever remain an unanswerable question. We can, somewhat wistfully or metaphorically, describe it as a field effect, an emergent effect, or just magic. But we'll have to accept it as "brute fact."
It will not be the only "brute fact" we're forced to accept without explanation. We can't explain why a particular radium atom fissions at a certain time; we can't explain why the speed of light is
C; we can't explain why the Big Bang happened (if it did).
There is another interesting reason for supposing that consciousness will never be fully explicable scientifically. Our scientific understanding of ourselves and the universe is a conceptual model we have created. But no system can completely model itself, or anything larger than itself. That would require a system larger than the system to be modeled.
Just some thoughts.
The answers lie in between.
- By Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
- By iamstephanieejike
- By Sy Borg