The Greatest Contradiction of Common Sense - Video

[lorenzop]

Who says every experience can be described with an equation? No one that I know of. There are many non-computable problems.

As Robert suggests, materialism says that if one could know everything re the physics, every and all experiences can expressed as a computation. Introduce any other notion and the WOO flags flare.
Put another way, if we have two identical brains, and two identical inputs - - the two experiences would be identical. (Various flavors of) Idealism would not predict this.

[Jim Cross]

Who says every experience can be described with an equation? No one that I know of. There are many non-computable problems.

As Robert suggests, materialism says that if one could know everything re the physics, every and all experiences can expressed as a computation. Introduce any other notion and the WOO flags flare.
Put another way, if we have two identical brains, and two identical inputs - - the two experiences would be identical. (Various flavors of) Idealism would not predict this.

This is all a straw man argument that has to go back to a Newtonian machine view of the world. Physics is well beyond that. QM itself tells us there is much that is probabilistic. Chaos theory tells us not everything can be predicted. They don't invalidate physics. They are a part of it.

To repeat again, materialism doesn't require that experience be reduced to a computation. You're trying to refute something that isn't claimed.

[lorenzop]

Actually, that is what is claimed by materialism - - Any physical process can be expressed as a computaion. QM does not change this.
The brain is a machine - and there is no ghost in the machine.

[Eugene I]

"The hard problem of consciousness" is not about how the qualia are produced by or caused by or correlated with physical brain states. That is the "easy problem" (which is not actually "easy", but at least it might be solvable in principle). Even if qualia could be described computationally or by any other way or "analog representation", such description would not explain how and why the qualia are consciously experienced, and this is exactly what the unsolvable "hard problem" is about. How is that possible in principle that a conglomerate of material molecules can actually consciously experience anything at all?

[Jim Cross]

"The hard problem of consciousness" is not about how the qualia are produced by or caused by or correlated with physical brain states. That is the "easy problem" (which is not actually "easy", but at least it might be solvable in principle). Even if qualia could be described computationally or by any other way or "analog representation", such description would not explain how and why the qualia are consciously experienced, and this is exactly what the unsolvable "hard problem" is about. How is that possible in principle that a conglomerate of material molecules can actually consciously experience anything at all?

Many problems arise from the assumption that there actually is a self (or something) that is having the experience of qualia. Even Bernardo falls into this when he argues for survival beyond death. Many Eastern approaches (especially the Buddhist) have the belief that this apparent self is an illusion. Without a self to experience, there is only a single reality with qualia as a part of it. So asking how qualia are produced is the same as asking how does the universe exist. To answer that you could posit a God or First Cause but that only leads to the infinite regression of asking how does God exist. Or, you can accept it as a meaningless question.

[Robert Arvay]

Jim Cross wrote:
the brain does not compute in a Turing sense but that is actually simulating the world. Simply modeling the world, rather than try to compute it, does not require the computing resources which the biological brain would lack. If the modeling is based on analog and wave principles, the existence of qualia makes complete sense as internal representations.

I disagree that qualia could make any sense in physicalist terms.
The experience of experience is ineffable. No one can explain to a man blind from birth what it is, to see the color, red.
There is nothing in physics that can transmit that experience--not wavelength, not frequency, not amplitude. Nothing.

Moreover, consciousness is the only observed phenomenon that observes itself, and
it does so from within itself.

The acts of consciously observing, perceiving, choosing a course of action, and so forth, are outside of the physicalist
paradigm.

What is it that has the experience?
The answer to that is -- YOU. You have the experience. What is it that is that YOU?
Is it atoms? Is it math? Or, is it something outside the physical realm?

These have been matters of discussion and debate for a very long time, and the resolution seems
to defy attempts at human discourse.
.

[Robert Arvay]

Jim Cross wrote:
Many problems arise from the assumption that there actually is a self (or something) that is having the experience of qualia. Even Bernardo falls into this when he argues for survival beyond death. Many Eastern approaches (especially the Buddhist) have the belief that this apparent self is an illusion. Without a self to experience, there is only a single reality with qualia as a part of it. So asking how qualia are produced is the same as asking how does the universe exist. To answer that you could posit a God or First Cause but that only leads to the infinite regression of asking how does God exist. Or, you can accept it as a meaningless question.

If the self is an illusion, then one must ask the recursive question, what is it that is having the illusion?
Can an illusion have an illusion?

the infinite regression of asking how does God exist

This question does not involve an infinite regression, no more so than asking how does anything exist.
Infinite regression assumes linearity -- a linear chain of cause and effect--easy to diagram as a line.

However, if you diagram the origin as a disk with a center, then the regression vanishes.
Instead, you have a core principle, which already exists independently of causation, and
from which all else arises.
-

[Eugene I]

Many problems arise from the assumption that there actually is a self (or something) that is having the experience of qualia. Even Bernardo falls into this when he argues for survival beyond death. Many Eastern approaches (especially the Buddhist) have the belief that this apparent self is an illusion. Without a self to experience, there is only a single reality with qualia as a part of it. So asking how qualia are produced is the same as asking how does the universe exist. To answer that you could posit a God or First Cause but that only leads to the infinite regression of asking how does God exist. Or, you can accept it as a meaningless question.

I know, and the Buddhists answer to this is that there is conscious experience as an experiential fact, yet no "self" (the "experiencer entity") can be found to which such experience pertains. So, the fact of the reality of conscious experience has nothing to do with the existence of "self". The bare experimental fact is: there is conscious experience of qualia. This fact has nothing to do with the question how exactly the qualia are produced ("the easy problem"). It has to do with the question of how is it that they are experienced at all. And there are a few options regarding that question:

1. To pose that the conscious experiencing is an epiphenomenon of material processes. If that would be true, then materialism would be complete and consistent (pending the explanation of how the qualia are produced by EM states, but that arguably can be a solvable problem). However, materialism in principle fails to explain how the conscious experience could be an epiphenomenon of material processes (per "the hard problem"). This failure make materialism incomplete because the conscious experiencing remains unaccountable and unexplainable ("new mysterianism").

3. To pose that the conscious experiencing is fundamental to nature and not an epiphenomenon. But in this case such paradigm is not materialism anymore.

[Jim Cross]

It isn't that "conscious experience could be an epiphenomenon of material processes".

It is a material process itself would be the materialist position.