@Darth Sonic
Yes, qualia is. Lumping it in because they’re two sides of debate, but all on the same topic; existential questions and the meta level of reality.
@Silent Wing
There is evidence, actually. People can write it off - the levels people will go to to handwave away evidence that contradicts their beliefs is amazing, enough to make “Feeling Pinkie Keen” look realistic in terms of Twilight’s denial.
Now, that being said, there’s pointers you can find in both directions.
But right now I’m just reading this neat book -
‘‘Life Before Life’’ by Jim B. Tucker, M.D., which details study done on one of these odd sort of phenomenon - apparently there’s hundreds of well-documented and researched cases of children being born with accurate memories of a forerunner’s previous life, knowing many things it should be impossible for them to know - and there’s even distinct patterns, such as most of these relating back to someone who’s died about 16 months ago with a few outliers outside of the 8-24 month range.
Whether it’s some sort of cell memory (which would only explain the familial cases) or something else, I dunno. But the more I study physics the more I realize it’s somewhat preposterous to just write this stuff off.
Now, granted, if any’ol person comes up to me and claims this stuff, I’m not going to take them seriously. All of my personal, anecdotal experience, has been people making stuff up, basically. But when there’s hundreds of cases of accurate description of things the person - in this case, young children - has no ability to know,
that’s when things get interesting.
To put this in physics perspective, 80% of the mass in the universe is just missing. You’ve probably heard of this as called Dark Matter. Its evidence is the spin rate of galaxies is contrary to orbital mechanics, and we can see this mass’s gravitational lensing - it’s most certainly there, but if you add up the mass of the stars in a galaxy (you can accurately tell a star’s mass since its spectral emissions are intimately and unavoidably tied to its mass), it only comes out to about 20% of the gravitational effect we’re seeing, and is not concentrated in the distribution required to make galaxies spin in the way they do.
String Theory - yes, it’s not proven, and it
could be nigh unto impossible to falsify, but nonetheless it’s a very promising and amazing grand unification theory - even describes other spacetimes (in some sense, “universes”) that could lie just millimeters from us in a direction that’s not any of the 3 dimensions we’re familiar with, but completely unable to interact with known baryonic matter except through gravity, or any other particles with a certain property (namely, having spin-2, gravity, afaik, is the only one with that). What’s even more astounding, is the way that fundamental particles interact - what might be called the “laws of physics” themselves might differ in these universes.
Now, I’m not saying anything so audacious as “we’ve proven heaven and hell exist”, but I’m saying that there’s very good reason to think such ideas are plausible, and indeed, we’re only barely scratching the surface. This is just
physics, not even
metaphysics.
When you really delve into these topics, I think you realize that everything is not nearly as cut and dry as people make it out to be. Even our theories are nothing more than models used to predict certain physical situations, not reality itself. Reality isn’t the equations. We can use the equations to predict reality,
in certain circumstances, but reality itself simply
is. I linked this earlier, but I think I want to quote it explicitly;
Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.
[omitted last two sentences to emphasize the parable] -
Albert Einstein, when asked about the existence of God
I guess my point is not that we don’t know, but whatever seems like the answer from our limited knowledge, is probably wrong because our knowledge is so limited.
As I’ve written elsewhere, my own sort of take on Einstein’s parable;
We only understand the universe in terms of ourselves – we create math to understand physical theories because we do not understand the universe, but we can understand math, so we work the math, and if we follow certain rules, this sometimes applies to certain situations. This is all of physics. Attempts to understand the universe that is so far beyond our comprehension, yet somehow so able to be understood.
We are an ant, that has realized that it will be hotter on a hot day if it walks on asphalt, than if it walks on grass. We have found certain patterns and tested them, and found that they give us a greater understanding about the universe, but just as that super-intelligent ant knows nothing of heat transfer or thermodynamics, there is so much lying underneath our understanding, just waiting to be discovered. Yet if this ant is like us, it is thrilled beyond measure to walk in-between grass and asphalt, and realize its hypothesis is correct, that it has discovered one of those secrets of the universe.
We’ve learned to walk on grass - to build laptops, spaceships, and medicine, but like the ant scarcely comprehends the thermodynamics behind why it’s warmer on asphalt, we can but scarcely begin to comprehend the reason and order behind the physical laws we do know.
As for near-death experiences - so you, in your psychological studies, have not come across, you know, the near-death and out-of-body experiences where patience describe the tools on a cabinet in the surgery room that the staff themselves hadn’t known were there? I know often these sorts of things are just ignored with “you hallucinate on oxygen deprivation”, but if a brain is really unconscious due to oxygen deprivation, doesn’t that also mean it can’t/shouldn’t be able to form memories?
But now, onto what the thread was really about…
Consider the
Chinese Room thought experiment. Say there is a man in a room who only speaks English. Outside is someone who only speaks Chinese. The person outside the room slips a note under the door in Chinese. The person who speaks English doesn’t know how to reply, but fortunately, he has a huge set of manuals. The manuals give step-by-step logical instructions, saying “if there’s a line here, like this, AND a line here like this OR a line like this, AND a line like this… then draw a line like this and this… and if there’s…”. He follows these instructions telling him how to put lines on paper, then sends the note back outside the door.
He has effectively communicated in Chinese, without knowing Chinese. In fact, having a man in the room is completely superfluous, this is an analogy for an AI program.
This is the Chinese Room thought experiment.
It was originally made as a disproof/response to the Turing Test as a way to see if an AI was sentient, and to combat the philosophy of “if it acts sentient, it must be sentient.” After all, it’s just a bunch of books, and the replies are coming, intelligently, without any sentience behind them.
It is acting sentient, but it is not sentient.
This is profound because it’s a rather solid disproof to your “pragmatic” position. It is a solid example of a
p-zombie. It is something that can act, talk, and behave as if it is sentient, but it is not.
Now, this is where things get interesting. Because this means that something that merely behaves as though it is sentient but is not (a p-zombie) is physically indistinguishable from something that actually
is sentient.
I absolutely do not deny that you can trace every feeling, sensation, and emotion back to some neurological process.
But you can also absolutely never prove to me that another being is actually sentient. You can only show me how a p-zombie or Chinese Room works, but never prove its actual sentience.
Ergo, sentience is not physical.
Behaving sentient and reporting sentience is. But actually possessing it, is not.
I quoted Descartes in that comment earlier, because oftentimes, when a
physicalist like yourself runs into this, the reaction is to say that sentience as I describe it - or
qualia is merely some kind of illusion.
But this, to me, is absurd. Physical reality is only the second most certain thing. The first most certain thing is that I, some being
experiencing physical reality, exist. Physical reality itself is only secondary. I could be dreaming, hallucinating, or a brain in a jar being fed information, or something I can’t even comprehend because this reality doesn’t have a version of it. Physical reality is therefore secondary. My own existence as a qualia aka sentience experiencing this reality is primary.
Therefore, I cannot use physical reality to say that my sentience does not exist. But physical reality has absolutely no room for sentience.
Yet here I am, sentient, and in a physical reality.
And so I face the unresolvable paradox of the mind-body problem.
