Personally I think it’s silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience… Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.
I’ve been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism… Maybe I am just tripping idk
What I often think about are the human brainlet experiments, where they have 100s or 1000s of human brain cells in a dish and they use them to like compute math. They say that it’s ethical because brainless of that size don’t think or experience.
My thought on that is that nobody knows what thinking or experiencing is or means or emerges from. How can they know this?
Anyway, it’s not entirely relevant, but I think it’s related in a way to this discussion through the researchers’ certainty of what thinking is, when we don’t really have any clue.
Brain cells without the ability to predict future harm or remember past harm or even the ability to interpret harm are probably not suffering. At least it’s hard for us to imagine a state of suffering without those aspects.
My question is how do you know any of that? Nobody actually even knows what constitutes a thought, nor what a memory is or how they are stored, nor the capability of a small number of cells. How would you without assumptions?
The problem with that logic is it collapses in to solipsism. How do you know any other being in the universe is capable of any thought at all? If we assume that because of our biological nature we are wholly incapable from deriving the truth, we may as well have given up from the jump.
You’re making scientific assumptions about a topic where there is no science to back it up, and establishing the framework for the thought experiment. I feel like you’ve already made the assertion that only biological structures can think, so why bother even posing the question if not to just reinforce you’re already held belief?
The problem I’m pointing out is that nobody even understands how the actions of the biological systems you’re talking about even do the things you’re attributing to them (memories, thoughts, reasoning) - we don’t have a structure property relationship to show that there is a known relationship between the biology and the actions – except that we can ask humans. We can’t ask other things, or brainlets.
What does it mean to “think”? Is the bundle of brainlets not biological in this scenario?
I may be misunderstanding you, but would a scan of the brain not demonstrate how the brain maps? I am pretty sure, that we are pretty sure, that the amygdala is responsible for your flight or fight response, the right half of your brain is responsible for creativity, the left objectivity (or vice versa, you get the point) and only showing data to one side of your brain has incredibly profound impacts on how you interpret said data. Is this not science to back up my beliefs? I guess I haven’t cited them, but nobody has cited their “consciousness is foundational” beliefs either.
I think its a grave undersell to state we have no idea how the biological systems at play interact… we have very very vague ideas. Much more than 0.
Showing that brain “activity” seems to correspond with vague concepts around capability (auditory, creativity (the left brain right brain thing I’m pretty sure has been debunked, but that’s irrelevant) fight or flight, etc.) is one thing, but nobody knows what makes an experience, a thought, or a memory. Nobody can point to a biological structure or function and say “hey there’s a memory,” or “hey, there’s a thought in the scan!”
Anyway, maybe I’m not explaining what I mean well, but unless you do have research that shows what the biological basis of a thought is, then we’re both working on same level of unknowns.
My whole point is that we actually have exactly 0 understanding of what makes a feeling or a thought or a memory. Anything you think you know about is probably incorrectly popularized ideas of how the brain works from the 50s and 60s that have permeated into mainstream culture.
Looking at how specific fMRI excitement of a brain region “turns on/off” certain body functions does not provide us insight into what makes a thought or memory. Measuring re-learning after TBI doesn’t really give us knowledge into what it means to subjectively experience the world and how that relates to feelings, thoughts, or ideas. Does that make sense?
I don’t know if anyone has ever done this exact test, but I imagine if we plucked someones eyeballs out mid MRI scan they would quite literally have less brain activity than prior… or at least increased brain activity in different places due to the pain of plucking ones eyes out.
As far as I know, left and right brain activity has only increased in evidence. The idea that people are “left brained” or “right brained” is complete pseudo science, but the idea that certain tasks are assigned to certain halves of the brain is well founded. Both halves can perform the same tasks, but the left half is better at linguistic function (which can be tested by only presenting information to your left field of view (NOT just left eyeball, but left side of both eyeballs)) and the right is better at creative function. Heres a wikipedia article thatll probs lead you where you need to go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_visual_field_paradigm
Yes, it is pseudo science, which I said. We are getting away from the actual basis of the question which is that we don’t know what thinking or memory or the actual capability of even the only biological system we are vaguely familiar with (mammalian brain).
My whole point is that we don’t even know enough to say that consciousness exists in the brain (we can see capabilities, and activation of muscles, and “processing” over general regions whatever that means), or what thinking is or what is needed to think ---- in biological systems. How can we possibly know that it’s impossible in other, less familiar structures?
It really isn’t. One can very easily be presently in a great deal of pain.
Yeah but present pain only seems to really matter if it entails future pain as well. Thats a great Zen Buddhist trick I learned many years ago: you aren’t afraid of pain: you’re afraid of future pain. Current pain is already happening and you’re already bearing it.
If I am constantly feeling present pain, but completely incapable of acknowledging the past, I cannot ground my present pain in any relative sense.