this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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i don't think i'm confusing anything, for further clarification i am specifically arguing that reductivist physicalist realism - the belief that all of reality including consciousness can be 'reduced to' or entirely explained in terms of our current understanding of physics or a trivially modified version of it - a relatively common belief among 'reddit atheists' (see 'love is just chemicals' trope, 'meat computer' ideas, etc.) - entirely precludes the possibility of any kind of subjectivity whatsoever as an inherent logical consequence of its base assumptions. A mostly unmodified version of our current understanding of physics or information processing has no explanation for things like 'subjectivity' or 'consciousness' at a fundamental level, and therefore any worldview that would explain such phenomena in terms of physics will necessarily fail to account for, or erroneously posit the lack of existence of, such characteristics ('consciousness is an illusion'). kind of like the difficulty of finding a coherent way to unify quantum physics and 'macro' physics into a single 'theory of everything', the ideas in use are more or less incompatible - you can't really 'reduce' a thrown baseball and explain it purely in terms of quantum physics without losing important information, even though quantum physics is smaller scale/more 'fundamental' to macro phenomena.
I don't agree with that. I don't see what's impossible about understanding consciousness as an emergent property of matter in the same way that many individual ants collectively bring feats that you can't explain looking at a single ant. The fact that we haven't gotten there just yet doesn't mean it can't be done, or that biology is completely independent from physics and/or psychology completely independent from biology. I just don't see how from "we don't understand consciousness" it follows "therefore it can't possibly be explained with physics in the way we understand physics".
the problem is that every ant in the ant colony is ostensibly a purely physical phenomena (at least, we usually do not concern ourselves with the ant's subjective experience as much as their information processing capabilities - we watch their movement, monitor pheromones and chemical signals, note the structure and changes to their nest, etc., all very physical and mutually compatible ideas), whereas something like the concept of subjectivity is entirely incompatible with our ideas about physics. you can do 'information processing' without subjectivity very efficiently, as with any calculator or computer, so subjectivity seems entirely superfluous in the sense of a purely physical explanation.
you have to prove something is true before you believe it, assuming 'we will figure it out later with no significant modifications to our theory' is intellectual laziness/unsound epistemology. no one is saying that biology is completely independent from physics or that psychology is completely independent from biology, i am only saying that our understanding of such topics are far from a unified 'theory of everything' and are therefore incomplete in a non-trivial way at best, and fundamentally flawed or incorrect at worst. obviously the subjective component of human consciousness is somehow related to brain function, we can prove and accept this empirically without any kind of metaphysical claims or assumptions tacked on. obviously physics isn't completely BS, it helps us solve a lot of problems. but at the same time, we cannot fully explain (i.e. reduce, hence why i am arguing against 'reductivist physicalist realism' and not non-reductivist versions of physicalist realism such as the one you seem to espouse) psychology in terms of atoms and their locations and velocities and mass without losing information. the fact that you believe in 'emergent processes' itself means you are likely not a 'reductivist' physicalist realist like i am arguing against.
usually when a theory fails to account for a phenomena, it is assumed to be flawed or incomplete somehow, and the significant explanatory gap for subjectivity in physics and information processing (what information processing algorithm produces a first-person experience? is there a fundamental particle or wave of subjectivity, a 'subjectron'?) would seem to imply a non-trivial incompleteness or flaw.
I agree with basically all you've said, I just want to point out that "physics can't explain this, so we probably have an incomplete version of it" doesn't point towards the existence of the supernatural. This comes up in a conversation about atheism, so I don't see how this is any different than the "god of the holes"
I agree with basically all you've said, I just want to point out that "physics can't explain this, so we probably have an incomplete version of it" doesn't point towards the existence of the supernatural. This comes up in a conversation about atheism, so I don't see how this is any different than the "god of the holes"