Cosmin Visan wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2024 8:28 pm
My theory is about what the fundamentals are: you have self-reference with such and such properties and then an infinite ocean of formless from which self-reference brings forms into existence. Now, to what forms it is capable of giving birth, my theory cannot say. It might be the case that it is a problem for empirical science or even for theoretical science, but that would be well beyond what I am capable to bring to the table.
I will leave other people to take the fundamentals that I provided and see what other theoretical conclusions they can draw from them.
This is precisely the problem I pointed at few posts ago. By laying fundamental in this way you sweep the hard problem from your field and leave it to others to bang their heads against. Now you may say that your theory doesn’t suffer from a hard problem because it is all consciousness through and through, there’s no dualism between conscious experience and some non-conscious stuff of reality. However, the hard problem of consciousness is only an instance of a more fundamental hard problem which applies to
every attempt to explain existence through an intellectual model.
To understand this problem we need to shift our attention from the particulars of the theory towards what we are doing with our thinking. What is hard problem of consciousness becomes the hard problem of qualia in your theory. Now you may object again “Haven’t you read my paper? It’s all about explaining how qualia arise!” But the key here is what does it mean to
explain something?
Intellectual models today are ones of
correspondences. They are
mappings between intellectual thought-forms and other experiential conscious phenomena. The physicalist says “matter in such and such configuration
corresponds to experience of red.” Your theory says “self-reference in the form of {{}..}
corresponds to the experience of red.” But what is matter in the first case? It’s really mental images, intellectual thought-forms in the mind of the physicist. What is self-reference in the other case? Once again intellectual thought-forms. So at the foundation of intellectual thinking – no matter in what kind of theory it casts itself – the problem is that we can in no way recombine our intellectual thought-forms not in order to map but to reach the experience of some conscious phenomena. No matter how I juggle the mental images of photons, waves and frequencies, the experience of red won’t emerge from the construction. No matter how I play with recursion, the experience of red won’t emerge. In the end I’m left with exactly what I juggle with – mental images. Then I say “well, I can’t produce the experience of red but I can
pretend that this configuration of mental images
corresponds to it.”
This holds true for any theory that tries to build a thought-model of reality. They all suffer from some kind of hard problem and if we trace these hard problems to their root cause we inevitably reach the hard problem of
abstract thinking – the fact that the intellect wants to build reality from its thought-forms but unable to do so, it has no choice but put up with mere correspondences.
This hard problem becomes obvious when we try to move from the abstract modelling to reality. For example, can we
apply your theory, swirl the recursions and produce in our consciousness qualia of a color that
we have never seen before. This is what I would call ‘explanation’ of qualia in the full sense. Otherwise we’re left with an abstract map of correspondences and we don’t even know how to pass from correspondences to realities.
Now that you mentioned the duck-rabbit again, we can connect that with the previous topic about intellectual bases. The duck-rabbit illusion switches perceptions but our sense of self remains intact. When we switch intellectual bases, however, things feel much more intimate. It is as if something of the geometry of our self changes. This is not very comfortable, especially if we have spent a lot of time to show that reality is a rabbit and not a duck (or vice versa).
For example, we can reproject our experience of reality on a pan-psychistic intellectual basis. Instead of starting with “I am” singularity, we start with infinite plurality, like infinitely fine lattice of units of consciousness. Then higher order conscious states appear as kind of standing waves (see
cymatics) or alternatively – as Bose-Einstein condensate as it were. Now we understand the “I am” potential as inherent in every unit but when they cohere in a condensate this “I am” is experienced in a macro state.
Now you may say: “but these are completely different theories. In one there’s fundamental unity from which everything emerges, while in the second there’s fundamental plurality. Surely only one of them can be right!” But is this so? Either rabbit or duck – only one can be right?
This was just for an example that as long as we remain in completely abstract metaphysics we can reproject our experience in many different ways and in the end there’s no way to say which is right. In the end it will turn out into a confrontation of purely personal tastes and preferences. Some like fluffy things so they’ll see rabbits as more true. Others – the other way around.
But this is not even the primary problem. The thing is that both reprojections suffer from the same problem described above – they all remain abstract schemas with no conceivable way to move from the map to the real territory.