This is not the first time you have stated this position.
While it is a fair point it makes me uncomfortable. History is full of examples of things that have become subject to the scientific method as the necessary tools become available. Subjective consciousness may well fall into this class in the very near future.
Rather than locking the subject away as a point of dogma, it may be more productive to state what kind of tools would be required to slay the subjective beast. Multi-point recording? Higher resolution (time and space) non-invasive scanning methods? Highly accurate simulation?
Before you offer that “we” can’t know what someone feels and that these methods are very indirect, I would counter that many “legitimate” branches of the scientific method are currently at the same state of indirect observation supporting some theoretical base.
I suppose they didn’t puncture peoples neocortex right?, obviously it wouldn’t be cool to poke needles at people’s brain cough neurallink cough but just placing electrodes on top of it should be fine as long as they are made of bio-compatible materials.
People often puncture me to deliver drugs.
I puncture myself every day to sample my blood.
Poking very fine needles into the brain need not be destructive. Often these studies are done to map brain functions prior to removing portions of the brain for therapeutic reasons. They don’t want to remove anything important if possible.
we are getting the subject of easy vs hard problems of consciousness here, and we have to admit that science is not there yet. so I’ll make my postulate about it without fear of being hand-wavy. it is purely a opinion:
I really wish I’m wrong because I’d much rather live in a universe where magic and spirits exist but…
I dont think there’s such a thing as subjective experience, in the sense that there’s no magic or quantum voodoo, you obviously believe a experience exists but thats a product of the brain attempting to model its own activity, it cant model infinite recursion so it has trouble modeling its own self-models beyond a certain depth which leads us to have trouble grasping the full picture.
we call this incomplete self-model “the hard problem”
Many report that they are experiencing “something.”
The fact that there are no tools to explain what this “something” is should not be a barricade to pressing on to move this into the scientific sphere.
For a very long time electricity was a loose collection of seemingly unrelated phenomenon: static attraction, lightning, nerve twitches in frog legs, … There was “something” going on but there was no scientific theory to explain much of this and it took centuries to move this into the realm of scientific explanation.
I offer that consciousness studies are in about the same state that electricity was for centuries. There is “something” going on but we can’t explain it.
If I am correct that experience is part of a loop process, parts of which are not available to report, and parts of which are feed-back from the “immediately prior” experience, and parts that are of distantly prior experience; we have a process with fuzzy and constantly moving boundaries.
I won’t say that understanding and mapping all this is easy or that we even have the mental hardware to intuitively understand this process but that should not move the process to the realm of an unsolvable problem.
The key point is that science is based entirely on objective fact. Subjective experiences do not and cannot provide objective fact. Without objective fact there is no science.
You can either (a) dispute that proposition, and provide examples of science that do not require objective fact, or (b) propose a mechanism by which the subjective experience of C can be made objective. Hand-waving about ‘tools’ won’t do it.
My personal opinion is that C is an evolved capability of the model-making parts of the brain, with the survival advantage of improving complex thinking tasks. The models are ‘seen’ as sensory inputs such as images, sounds and words. Science may in due course find out whether that is true, but from objective data, not from the subjective experience.
Painting is an imaginary manipulation, which requires longer term insight into the future (planning horizon / temporal depth / column sequence length). That would necessitate holding a larger complex long term set of activations, which in a loop refresh/itterative development process, is this “part” of what we label conciousness ? They understand a far greater temporal complexity (than say cats and dogs) and I summise this is all down to the working space in the brain (size of activation pool within PFC / temporal lobe).
maybe math? you may argue that its too good at modeling reality so it must be objective, but there’s the number 3, its just a made up symbol, there’s no such a thing as a three in reality.
Maths is not science but it has some science-like properties. It is not based on objective properties of the real physical world, but it is still has a wide set of objective facts.
The key thing is it’s not subjective: there is nothing in maths that depends on the observer or their personal experience. It’s a fact that 2+2=4 and it’s the same fact for everyone.
2+2=4 is a mathematical object, it models a property objects in the real world contain, namely numerosity.
but objects in the real world dont contain numerosity, we assign this property to them because its useful, its a truth and you can prove it using math, but the proof doesn’t it exist physically, its not empirically observable.
well, regardless of being a science or not, you can’t deny how useful it is and thats what matters.
In order to pour some gas on the roaring fire upon consciousness, I would add that there-s no such thing as “objective consciousness” .
If you refer to measurable correlates of consciousness, the most useful feedback comes from a person relating its own subjective experiences when exposed to stimuli, or producing observable outputs - being either as behavior, speaking, or other “cranial” measurements like EEG or MRI.
Consciousness IS by definition the fact of having some kind subjective experience, no matter how “wrong” or “unscientific” that is.
Nature doesn’t care about objective truth and science, it promotes only whatever enhances the evolutionary fitness. If e.g. a belief in souls and hills and rivers being “animated” helps a group of people outperform another group, than that false model gets propagated.
We suggest that there is confusion between why consciousness developed and what additional functions, through continued evolution, it has co-opted. Consider episodic memory. If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system—prone to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system. We argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system—quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information. We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language. We suggest that this theory is compatible with many phenomena, such as the slow speed and the after-the-fact order of consciousness, that cannot be explained well by other theories. We believe that our theory may have profound implications for understanding intentional action and consciousness in general. Moreover, we suggest that episodic memory and its associated memory systems of sensory, working, and semantic memory as a whole ought to be considered together as the conscious memory system in that they, together, give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness. Lastly, we suggest that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that makes consciousness possible, and that every cortical region contributes to this conscious memory system.
The real world doesn’t do maths. No real world object has properties. In fact the real world doesn’t even have objects, as such.
The truly astonishing thing is that the real physical world appears to our senses (and those of every animal) to be observable, consistent, predictable, etc, etc.
And once we invented/discovered maths we find the RPW conforms to those rules with astonishing precision. And yet every measurement is still an approximation. The real world really does not do maths, or properties, or objects. All our invention. Bizarre.
The word conscious has various shades of meaning; one of those is ‘alert and reacting to surroundings; not asleep or comatose’. In that sense it is objective: an observation of an animal or human subject. So: objectively conscious.
And the noun from that would be: objective consciousness, meaning ‘observed to be alert and reacting to surroundings’. Except it then gets confused with other senses of the word. But it really is a thing.
Chaos thoery of weather, markets, etc.
Fibonacci series in plant growth, wave sequences, etc.
Fractals - snowflakes (not the human kind)
Financial markets are a human crated “nature”, which is based on maths. Just because the primary “root” of an initiation is not direct primary “natural” the derivatives of that natural evolution (humans) do carry out “maths” in the real world…
