@Alex Your concern is based upon what I believe is a dubious assumption - the assumption that humans could potentially know enough about physics/chemistry/biology to create an arbitrarily accurate model of the human brain. I’d say it’s possible that the mind is so complex that humans can never fully “understand” it, since it is also the apparatus with which we do the “understanding.”
@wizzwizz4 "If you understood, you could describe how those neurons lead to the experience of, say, experiencing the sight of a red thing."
But eventually neuroscience will be able to explain exactly how we see red. From the neurons that receive color input, to the neurons that compare them with memory to give that color a name, and finally the neurons that make the decision of saying "I see red".
Even if it's too complex for us to understand, I don't get why it's a philosophy problem.
It's a neuroscience problem. Philosophy is trying to explain why this extra thing (consciousness, qualia, etc.) supposedly exists.
But it doesn't, it's all just computations.
Like, imagine we wrote a very complex program that can learn things. At first, it would learn how to recognize colors, without being able to explain why it can do so. But eventually it will learn about programming and explain exactly how it works.
You'd ask it "describe how those [lines of code] lead to the experience of, say, experiencing the sight of a red thing.", and it would explain you in detail what code is called from when it gets the input to where it gives the output.
Anyway, suppose we give this program a book on computer science, and it learns all of it perfectly. Then we give it a book on philosophy of the mind, and it gets stuck on the first page and asks:
What's this qualia? CS already lets me answer any question I could have about myself. I know exactly how I work, from the input to the processing and finally output. This description of philosophical zombie is a perfect description of what I am. It takes input, processes it and creates output.
But of course we don't consider "electrostatic field" to be the same thing as "touching", the same way the program doesn't consider "instructions" as "recognizing colors" or whatever
One is a physics concept, the other is associated with a certain input
Apples roll down hills, and make a soft crunching sound when you bite into them; many other arrangements of atoms don't. So there's an important difference.
Yeah, we don't disagree.
If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?
Yes, it exists. And the reason I say that is that part of my brain tests the memory where I have the definition of "heat" stored, to the part that stores previous experiences, and finds that an experiences matches that.
The same way a program would say it exists
But there's no philosophy here, it's all neuroscience (or for the program, computer science)
There isn't a one-to-one mapping between neurons and concepts, and we don't see the regular macroscopic structure that would be required for the logical rules systems to exist without that.
Philosophy of the mind is less useful nowadays, because we can just wait for neuroscience to catch up, but there's still plenty of stuff it can't do yet.
Discussion on answer by wizzwizz4: Ar…
Discussion on answer by wizzwizz4: Ar…