[sterlind]

I suspect nearly all of physics is some sort of emergent behavior from.. basically nothing. Like that if you could push it hard enough - if we had the tools - you could push it back to set theory, a multiverse of all self-consistent rules or some fundamental property of information.

But that doesn't explain qualia. I see orange on this screen, damnit. Sure, I know it's light interacting with rhodopsin, depolarizing neurons in my retina, relayed to the visual cortex and assigned to a color wheel of cortical columns.. but it looks orange. No amount of physics will ever explain that to my satisfaction. You all could be philosophical zombies for all I know - I don't know for a fact that any of you are subjectively experiencing color, maybe it's just me. But I know I do, and since physics relies on objective measurements that's a dead end.

But then how do I reconcile having written the above, convinced of my subjective experience, if my neural processes can be fully emulated with physics? That requires some sort of binding. But we understand physics at the scale of the brain very well, and there just isn't any place for that binding to look. And the duplicating teleporter thought experiment causes major issues too.

Anyway, lacking any explanation for color or other qualia, and unable to resolve this paradox, I've chosen to believe qualia are external to physical reality in some way, and mine might last beyond death. Maybe a soul. Hopefully.

[actually_a_dog]

I think you would enjoy the Wolfram Physics Project. They've been able to get quantum mechanical behavior to emerge from some very simple mathematics. It's also not the type of mathematics that is traditionally used to describe quantum mechanics, which is more descriptive and mysterious than emergent.

I don't really know if ultimately there's any "there" there, and Wolfram is pretty widely regarded as a bit of a blowhard, but take a look and let the work speak for itself.

https://www.wolframphysics.org/

[GoblinSlayer]

A philosophical zombie can repeat all your thoughts about colors, so you can't prove even to yourself that you're not a zombie.

>But I know I do, and since physics relies on objective measurements that's a dead end.

You don't assume you understand all physics, do you? Objectivity in physics isn't the same as that of a layman: it has relativity, which proved many times to be counterintuitive.

>But we understand physics at the scale of the brain very well, and there just isn't any place for that binding to look.

What. We understand some physics at the scale of a neuron, but almost nothing at the scale of the brain. Ask anybody, inability to see any place is undoubtedly ignorance.