| Sometimes I wonder if the core problem of this disagreement depends on the certainty of our understanding of information - how it works and scales. This isn’t a strong rebuttal to this paper, though I read it closely, enjoy both sides of the mind-body problem, and do my best to seek some sort of external truth in the matter… But I’m inclined to disagree with Jaron on the following point: What if the contents of the mind (consciousness notwithstanding for a moment), which surely must include information or data, doesn’t represent the complete anatomy of the systems involved in the mind-body problem. What if subjective experience is an objective realization of some sort of a information-vitality singularity. Then we could not be confident that the argumentation (mainly the metaphors) in this paper accurately model reality - at least as far as I can tell. And that’s really it: What if the mind-body problem, with its dual objective/subjective complexities, cannot be modeled until we first understand consciousness. Put differently: What if we can’t model the M-B problem until we first solve it. Perhaps objective experiment? Some sort of truly demonstrable proof by induction? Whatever gets us away from abstracting the problem itself. In the meantime, I’m fond of some of the various theological approaches. And if I was put to the question, my bet is that this answer is unknowable. I’m not sure if I’m a zombie? I’d rather be a cynical zagnet; I certainly don’t think that subjective experience does not exist. I ought to buy anyone who reads through this comment a drink. Here lies my knee jerk reaction. Thanks for posting, and thank you to Jason for giving me a bit to chew on. |
Speaking of, I'll take you up on the offer for a drink.
I tend to think something like a combination of the 3rd substance and panpsychism model accounts for our experience in context of discoveries that make descartes pineal gland theory seem dubious.