Monday, September 23, 2024

Is consciousness grounded in matter or the other way around?

 Is consciousness grounded in matter or the other way around?

 

We will ask physics about physicalism, zombies, and consciousness.
This video is an as-simple-as-I-could explanation of this article https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23108/.
We will use a bit of physics and math, but I'll introduce these smoothly, to make the trip easy and interesting. You can verify each step of the proof, and if you can find an error, please let me know. Many of the implications of this result remain open to be discussed later. 


Abstract of the article

If the mind of a sentient being would be reducible to its structure, any system with identical structure should be equally sentient. Based on the structural symmetries of Physics, I prove that this thesis has two unexpected consequences:

1) There would be an inflation of minds, living in apparently different worlds.
2) The content of these minds would be independent of the properties of the external world. That is, these minds would be unable to know anything about the world.

Since this contradicts empirical observations, structure alone is insufficient for sentient experience.

This excludes the purely physicalistic approaches to physics and consciousness. For physics to be as we know it, all physical properties have to be grounded in something sentiential.



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