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Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
The explanatory gap
Our grasp of what it is like to undergo phenomenal states is supplied to us by introspection. We also have an admittedly incomplete grasp of what goes on objectively in the brain and the body.
But there is, it seems a vast chasm between the two. It is very hard to see how this chasm in our understanding could ever be bridged.
For no matter how deeply we probe into the physical structure of neurons and the chemical transactions which occur when they fire, no matter how much objective information we come to acquire, we still seem to be left with something that we cannot explain, namely, why and how such-and-such objective, physical changes, whatever they might be, generate so-and-so subjective feeling, or any subjective feeling at all.
Given that experiences and feelings have irreducibly subjective, non-physical qualities, is this explanatory gap then unbridgeable?
We can both see "green" or "red" as light waves (of different wavelengths) as they are received by the sensory cells (cones) of the retina. But a color name refers to our perception of the prototype of a range of wavelengths. Your "experience" of green maybe completely different from my experience of green.
We seem to rely so much on the "human experience" to understand, judge, and consequently inflict. How can we ever truly understand the human experience when I can never know yours and you can never know mine?
But there is, it seems a vast chasm between the two. It is very hard to see how this chasm in our understanding could ever be bridged.
For no matter how deeply we probe into the physical structure of neurons and the chemical transactions which occur when they fire, no matter how much objective information we come to acquire, we still seem to be left with something that we cannot explain, namely, why and how such-and-such objective, physical changes, whatever they might be, generate so-and-so subjective feeling, or any subjective feeling at all.
Given that experiences and feelings have irreducibly subjective, non-physical qualities, is this explanatory gap then unbridgeable?
We can both see "green" or "red" as light waves (of different wavelengths) as they are received by the sensory cells (cones) of the retina. But a color name refers to our perception of the prototype of a range of wavelengths. Your "experience" of green maybe completely different from my experience of green.
We seem to rely so much on the "human experience" to understand, judge, and consequently inflict. How can we ever truly understand the human experience when I can never know yours and you can never know mine?
Comments on this journal
thanxs for the link Feroz...
However whatever subjective feelings it brings will vary from person to person, for e.g. RED could mean warmth to some, danger to others...
Again if the two people we compare are ETs (for "Experiential Twins", just coined it) rather BETs (Biological and Experiential Twins)...perhaps the subjective feeling should be the same too!
Quite intrigued by Dr Iqbal's thoughts about "object in space is actually an ACT"...will read more on it inshaAllah.
Quite thrilled reading these posts. Thanks.
Styx,
For Dr Iqbal's book, I found a PDF copy here on the web:
islam.rameez.net/downloads/reconstruction.pdf
Hope the link works.
Will look up the web, but any direct link on Professor Kevin's work will be useful. Thanks.
I'd say I'm still an amoeba.
The point, perhaps, is never to really know each other's experience as one knows one's own intimately. It is simply to transcend the limits of one's understanding and reach a level of empathy whereby one can share this experience. There is little point in being able to recreate one's life experience, simply because the differences between you and me would make us ultimately deal with the same situation differently. Therefore, recreation is moot, and at best, human beings should attempt to empathize with each others' experiences.
sound?" I like that!
I was thinking about this "interdependency" the whole mind/body issue. Feeling physical pain for example, you can still feel excruciating pain even though the limb may have been amputated! (Phantom Limb)... fascinating!
Taking the optimistic view, I am not certain that consciousness is an absolutely, fundamentally irreducible concept such that it cannot be explained within the framework of a unified physical theory. The most appealing explanatory attempt to me is the Penrose-Hameroff theory of Quantum consciousness. It does have its flaws (pointed out by Max Tegmark), though a similar quantum consciousness theory embracing some of the same ideas could also be on the horizon.
Of course, this doesn't eliminate the fundamental level of subjectivity to reality that is accurately described by questions like "What is space? What is time? What is an electron? What is consciousness". I simply posit that trying to understand consciousness is the same as trying to understand those other questions --- meaning that consciousness should not necessarily be defined as an emergent phenomenon arising from simpler physical interactions, but rather that it may be as fundamental to reality as the essence of space or time --- in fact they are all intertwined as one; since without consciousness we would have no conception of what space or time mean anyway. If we don't consider consciousness, the universe becomes a completely objective phenomenon. It's a variant of the question: "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a
sound?"
Now, understanding the final level of subjectivity may be impossible. There will always be an infinite regress of explanations, and at one point we just have to stop and at some level and take it as axiomatic. In a way that could almost be a blessing; there would always be a deeper layer of reality to understand to appease our human desire to keep furthering the boundaries of our knowledge.
I can imagine that one day humans could invent machines that allow us to hook up our brains and truly share the subjective experiences that we individually percieve. Never underestimate the human intellect and imagination :)