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I think you're on the right track here. I usually try to reason down a similar line. I wouldn't say that the claim is that the equations and laws combined can be conscious. Instead, I would say that none of the equations or laws that we come up with involve mental attributes (such as consciousness or qualia) as either inputs or outputs. You look at all the proposed laws of the universe, and they involve things like energy, mass, time, position, work, etc, as inputs or outputs. No equations have inputs of these sorts of natural quantities and outputs that entail consciousness or that first-person experience. We can see from these equations how things like tree leaves blowing in the wind, or mountains, might arise. These things involve motions and mass and things interacting with each other. While we might not be able to paint the full picture, we can see that the inputs and outputs of those equations are the right kinds of things that might plausibly lead to mountains and leaves blowing in the wind, at the right scale. We can't see from these equations anything that might plausibly lead to the first-person experience, the what-it's-like to be something. Note that the naturalist cannot then just inject these mental/consciousness related parameters into their equations. That would amount to a form of dualism, and destroy their project. What I think the naturalist needs to do is somehow explain away consciousness, because I don't see any path they could take to explain it in purely natural terms. They need to deny that there's anything here that needs explaining at all. |