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by thwest
4541 days ago
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Asking for a better level of explanation is not at all similar to staking out room for an extra-material homunculus type consciousness. "Put enough protons, neutrons and electrons together, and bam, bread" is a poor explanation of baking, but not so poor as to warrant skepticism on which fundamental particles we are eating. Nagel has an almost myopic view of the 'experience' in my estimation. His classic claim that a human could never experience bat flight starts by pondering about the possible structure of bat consciousness, and is in the end justified by the physiological differences. Yet somehow he mysticizes the impossibility of experience transfer. As for your grandpost about experience, perhaps you are conflating the experience with the description (thought experiment: have you ever been able to isolate the feeling of an electrical signal in your brain?). I have a similar background to yours, and for a while I was kind of stuck in a Nagel-Dennett-Russell sort of place that felt like it was probably correct but lacked any sort of richness that living through consciousness provides. My recommendation is to dive into the rabbit hole of continental philosophy. Deleuze has a great radical materialism (inspired by Spinoza?!), and wonderfully blurs psychology and philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus. Heidegger has an exploration of the experience of language being the bootstrapping tool of consciousness in Being and Time. And some psilocybin never hurt. |
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I'm feeling like the more I look for definitive, objective answers, the more I'm pushed towards things like art and aesthetics; human expression, shared being, and culture. Those things seem more real to me than quantum mechanics or string theory. I'm not sure what to make of it all, or that anything can be made of it at all, but something sure is happening, and I feel, simply, that I want to be a part of it and play with whomever will join me :)