[mightyham]

> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".

[hackinthebochs]

There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out is consciousness. It's reasonable to think it will also fall eventually.

[mightyham]

It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience.

Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.

[hackinthebochs]

Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.

[gizajob]

“Fields” such as the electric field or Higgs field are essences.

[hackinthebochs]

See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178366

[mightyham]

Really? You are telling me that the discovery/development of general relativity or quantum mechanics has not thrown new increasingly complex doubts on the accuracy of previous physical models due to these new "essences" implying contradictions with classical "essences". What could possibly make you so confident that new datapoints, theories, and discoveries as it relates to consciousness will be completely flawless?

[hackinthebochs]

You're not using the term essence in the way philosophers mean it. An essence is a categorical descriptive/reasoning context. In mathematical terms, an essence is a lot like a descriptive/measurement basis. A naive scientist sees a world full of distinct reasoning contexts, length is categorically distinct from speed, which is categorically distinct from water, which is categorically distinct from life. The progress of science has been to progressively reduce reasoning contexts/measurement bases to other contexts/bases thus leading to a more unified theory of nature.

Quantum mechanics does increase the physics reasoning contexts owing to the incompatibility between classical and quantum mechanics. But this is not an in principle divergence in the way that philosophers understand essences. We can describe and reason about quantum mechanics and classical mechanics using the same language and the same descriptive tools, namely mathematics. When it comes to phenomenal consciousness and physical behavior, we cannot reason about them using the same descriptive language. Hence they count as distinct categorical essences until we discover the bridging principles that reduce consciousness to physical behavior.