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The problem is the frame of reference of "subjective." For example, few would question whether or not coat color on cats is an explainable phenomenon, although it varies. So, why isn't qualia similar? Subjective experience is a property of a biological system, so it would seem that the claim that subjective experience is not scientifically explainable at some level would be a claim that biology is not explainable. I agree with your sentiment at some level, in that I think the explainability of certain things is at least open to question, or should be questioned, but I think the subjective/objective distinction is misleading or misguided because from some frame of reference, subjective is objective. The bigger issue maybe, that the article touches on, is the problem of emergence. One definition of emergence is basically that the complexity at one scale of analysis becomes so extreme that you have to move to another scale of analysis. I.e., emergence is associated with unavoidable information loss, where what is random at one scale is nonrandom at another, but predicting from one scale to another is impossible. It's kind of a measurement horizon, to borrow a cosmological metaphor: your measurements at one scale become so complex to model as a system at some point that you have to simply remeasure at a different scale. I think this is a more immediate pressing problem with science, that there may be some kind of information-theoretic limits to explainability across scale in complex systems. It's something that the reductionistic push kind of misses: just because something is physically reducible, and logically necessary, it's not necessarily informatically reducible, and logically knowable a priori (to borrow from the philosopher Kripke). |