Posted: Nov 15, 2020 3:03 pm
aufbahrung wrote:zoon wrote:aufbahrung wrote:…….With the soul we have no Newton whose invented gravity yet. The circular questions and impossible diversions are endless. The breakthrough is yet to be. Same with consciousness I suppose. We know everything and nothing about it.
All the evidence suggests consciousness is an artefact of our social evolution.
Human brains are very similar to each other. We have evolved to make use of this fact when predicting other people. A number of brain processes, known collectively as “Theory of Mind” or “mindreading”, enable us to imagine what another person may be thinking by using our own brains as models (Wikipedia article here). It’s all evolved guesswork, but so far it’s massively more effective than the best of modern science for predicting people in ordinary social life.
This means that the way we think about other people is fundamentally different from the way we think about inanimate objects. I see another person by default as having consciousness “like me”, and then track the differences for each individual in what they can see, what they believe, who they are close to etc. All the scientific research on our brains indicates that they follow the same mathematically described laws of physics and chemistry as everything else, but while Theory of Mind remains the most effective way of predicting people, we continue to see each other as having an otherworldly consciousness.
Qualia though? and I'm still conscious when no one is around to predict. Possibly my brain is running on fumes then?
When you are conscious, your own brain is still active, so there’s somebody around. Our qualia feel inherently and qualitatively different from the real solidity of the external world, but this may well be a case of our brains misrepresenting their own workings, as suggested by Pereboom in his 2011 book (abstract here). In the same way, we see blue and red as qualitatively and inherently different, while science tells us they are just different wavelengths of light being picked up by different molecules in the retina. My brain attributes a ghostly consciousness to other people (because this helps me predict them), and then attributes a similar ghostly consciousness to itself (the prediction is helped if I can guess what they think of me). Even when I’m on my own I’m still thinking in social terms.
Admittedly this is speculation, because so little is scientifically known about what goes on in brains, but it seems to me that this is at least one plausible way qualia might be accounted for on a physicalist model.
Another approach is to ask how I might react if I thought everyone else was a zombie, with no metaphysically “real” qualia, but with brains and bodies of humans as described by science. What difference would that make to the way I interact in practice with those people? I think, none. Zombies or not, I want to interact effectively with them, and the best way to achieve this is to make use of my brain’s evolved capacity for predicting them via attribution of consciousness, whether or not they “actually” have it.
Neuroscience may eventually improve to the extent of predicting people more accurately than via evolved Theory of Mind, but we are nowhere near that point yet.