alt Hacker NewsThose questions you mentioned apply across the board, just in nuanced variants. Do you really think that postulating a non-physical system that we can't describe in physical terms (red is not a wavelength), somehow magically creates a new dimension of "feeling" when the bits are arranged in the "right order" is less complex than the hypothesis consciousness forms arranges itself into "structures" in much the same way as matter does?
As for explaining consciousness, we can't even prove consciousness exists, so the thought of trying to explain "what" it is seems rather premature, but then that's humans for ya.
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> Do you really think that postulating a non-physical system that we can't describe in physical terms (red is not a wavelength)
There's no mystery about what "red" is - even computers have an internal representation of sensor data, and our minds certainly do as well. "Red" is a representation of some physical state which is also, presumably, physically encoded in the brain. This is what Chalmers classifies as one of the "easy problems" of consciousness - there's no mystery here.
The hard problem is that we have a conscious experience of color, along with everything else we're conscious of. Whereas we don't generally assume that a computer executing code such as "if color == red ..." is having a conscious experience while it executes that code. (Although panpsychists may believe that.)
> somehow magically creates a new dimension of "feeling" when the bits are arranged in the "right order" is less complex than the hypothesis consciousness forms arranges itself into "structures" in much the same way as matter does?
That's not a hypothesis, it's simply handwaving. Both options are, given current knowledge. I wasn't promoting the first option, I was pointing out that if panpsychism requires a theory of how consciousness aggregates, which is similar to what emergence requires in terms of aggregating matter in certain ways, then the whole panpsychist proposal starts seeming like a candidate for Occam's Razor: what is it buying us, other than saying "this can't be explained"?
I honestly don't see what the whole framework gets you. Red (or all qualia) is just the reaction of your nervous system to a stimulus. Since that reaction is shaped by common context/associations, the "subjective experience" is quite comparable between similarly raised humans.
I think the whole philosophy of mind/subjective experience field is one of the few remaining anti-reductionist hold-outs, but I simply don't see a good enough motivation to stick with that view, especially given the abysmal historical track record for anti-reductionism (just consider early chemistry/alchemy, early biology, astronomy, ...).