Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Jul 19, 2021 11:13 am
I gave you my assessment of how physicalism has the answer:
Ultimately we have no real handle on how things come to be as they are. With science we can give finer and finer descriptions but when all is said and done we can only throw our hands up in wonder.
I regard consciousness as a secondary or emergant property of neural matter. We know from science that matter and energy in combination produce special qualities. Add carbon to iron under extreme heat and you make steel which does not rust. COmbine pig shit with charcoal in the right quantities and you can blow stuff up. For some reason that can never be stated all matter in the universe exerts a force on all other matter such that all things are attracted one to the other. We can call that gravity but there is no explanation for it.
What bahman has done on this thread is that he has effectively invoked magic. If he were talking about gravity it would be a magical fairy pushing the Moon round the earth.
You can trace dualism from way before Descartes to ancient times. This "theory" has progressed precisely zero steps in all that time. It has offered a poor and unfalsifyable description but has not begun to answer any questions. It's a dwead end street with nothing on it.
On the other hand neuroscience is making great progress, and continues to astound us.
Is there ever going to be an ultimate explanation? What would it even look like? As most answers we have tend to be metaphorical even for the most complex scientific theories - they tend to say what it is "like" - I doubt that there will ever be a satisfactory descrption or explanation that satisfies those amongst us who want to beleive in magic.
But one thing is for sure ALL reasonable, effective and responsive descriptions are going to be "physical", since that is all that can ever be demonstrated.
If there is a ghost in the machine behind it all, it puzzles me what it is supposed to be doing.
As an emergent property of the complexity of neurones and electrical charges, hormones, enzymes, and neurotransmitters: consciousness is physical.
You have to ask if it is not physical then what the fuck do we need with all those ganglia and synapses?
OK, so neuroscience does not have an answer yet and it seems you are saying perhaps it will not or perhaps it will be metaphorical. You say you....
doubt that there will ever be a satisfactory descrption or explanation that satisfies those amongst us who want to beleive in magic.
leaving open the question of whether a satisfactory description will satisfy those who do not believe in magic. It seems implice that, so far, we do not have that answer, but you assume consciousness will be demonstrated to be an emergent property of neurons, etc.
It seems like you have finally answered what was first a question. I asked a question. I wanted to know if Neuroscience has an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Your answers were unclear, it seems now, but fine, we have reached what I think really could have been handled earlier without the 'fucks' and snarling in a rather short answer.
And of course the answer in science will be a physical one. The properties that something can have and be considered phyiscal have been expanding. Massless particles, fields, particles, even objects in superposition and so on are now all considered physical. Physical just means real and anything determined to be real by scientific consensus will be called physical.
Now where is YOURS.????
Stop avoiding the question and contrinute something. All you have done is criticise others but offered nothing in return.
I asked a question and you avoided or wrote unclearly and unpleasantly in post after post and you continue to do so. You seem to represent yourself as on the rational team. Well, great. Why not be polite, be direct and not play the games of your last posts. The rest is just noise blotting out any signal you have to offer.
Questions and even just critique, in a philosophy forum, is just peachy. At least as peachy as your guesses about what future scientific research will demonstrate.
You understand that no reputable journal will publish your guesses about what future scientific research will demosntrate right?
So, if there's room for your speculation, in a philosophy forum, there is room for people asking people to back up claims or explain what they mean.