Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

Yeah that's exactly what I was saying. It doesn't need touch receptors because it's inside your skull.

It makes sense to evolve pain sensitivity in your bones because if you are doing something which is causing damage inside your bones, you had better have a signal to stop. For most of the evolutionary history of humanity, if your skull was compromised, you would be dead.

This was my interpretation of Carroll's interpretation of the may worlds interpretation :-)

I'm an avid listener to mindscape podcast and read of his books, so I'm likely "indoctrinated", as I don't really know much of these things.

But I had the distinct impression that Carrol believes that all there is is the wave function of the universe and everything else (including the many worlds) are emergent phenomena. In a way many worlds are "real" in the same way that "chairs" are real.

Because the web application is only an emergent phenomenon once consciousness has already entered the equation. Without an observer, the website is nothing more than the sum of its parts; only we view it as something else. The CPU, machine code, all of the I/O mechanism, eventually just create an illuminated image on a screen that is only its emergent whole when viewed by a conscious observer who sees it that way.

Far from having an even remotely non-referential understanding of consciousness, we don't even have a non-referential understanding of the referent website as it exists in our perception--it just comes back to the same questions that a lot of physicalists seem to refuse to even acknowledge. I know that when I view this screen I see what I see as red, and I know that the material of my brain and the screen are responsible for that, but that does nothing to address what the referent red is in the first place.

How can consciousness be an emergent construct when emergent constructs are only identifiable as distinct from the sum of their parts by making use of consciousness?

To respond to another part of this, it doesn't matter if we can look at a brain scan and predict perfectly exactly what the scanned subject is thinking. That only answers the question of "how do thoughts occur" not the question "what are thoughts?"

We have no way of even constructing the concept that gets around this. "This brain state corresponds to these thoughts." Okay, but where/what are the thoughts? In order for something to corresponds to the thoughts, they must exist in some capacity, right? So long as consciousness exists at all, which anyone who experiences it can say with certainty that it does. If I drink a beer, I feel a certain way. Neurochemically, we understand exactly why this is happening. What we don't understand is how there are "ways to feel" in the first place.

Understanding how objects interact with one another doesn't answer the question of what those objects are; they just are. Understanding the effects of electromagnetic force doesn't answer the question of what electromagnetism is; it just is. With objects, we can actually break things down into a small number of basic components (particles) that depending on their organization make all objects. But these particles are already a thing with no reason; just an axiom we've been able to use to get a mostly logically consistent view of objects.

Consciousness, we have been totally unable to break down into anything. We can see evidence of it in others, and feel it in ourselves, and we can understand how to make it seem to go away, and also what seems to bring about certain effects in it's space (red, happy, warm, salty, etc.), but our understanding is not of those effects--it's only of how a certain material arrangement seems to bring them about.

Oh I'd say we have plenty of ways to measure and observe consciousness. We can measure brain activity during sleep and understand with some precision whether someone is dreaming or not, which is a state of consciousness. We can give someone a psychoactive drug, and ask them questions about how their consciousness has been altered.

> Forward movement can be measured. And if you removed parts of the car you would eventually get down to the bare minimum required for forward movement because you could observe it. You cannot do this with consciousness.

What makes you so confident of this? We actually have plenty of evidence in this direction with consciousness. We can observe that lesions in different parts of the brain have very predictable effects on consciousness. We can observe that psychedelics like LSD reduce sensory inputs to the thalamus, having very predictable effects on consciousness. Consciousness is obviously a process which responds to physical intervention, so why should we jump to the conclusion that it somehow exists outside the bounds of the physical world rather than assuming that it's just one of many physical phenomena we have yet to fully understand?

To give an example, we cannot reliably predict the movement of the economy. We can understand some of the forces guiding it, we can try to understand it in terms of certain metric, and we can take some actions to get the results we want, but ultimately we can't point to any one thing and say: "this is the economy". It's an emergent property of a vastly dynamic interconnected system of billions of independent actors, and as a result we will probably never be able to fully pin it down. But we don't assume that the economy moves as the result of some magical force controlled by the gods, we rightly know it's just something out of our grasp.