Comment by trane_project
7 days ago
What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.
But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.
Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.
> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience.
Two things here:
1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind?
2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not a satisfactory answer to you?
I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.
I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.
Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.
> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.
> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?
How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
> The simplest answer is that it is not
You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.
> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water
At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
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