Comment on double slit
space_comrade@hexbear.net 6 months agoIt doesn’t make it useful to consider it though.
Why not? My own consciousness is literally the one and only thing I have direct, ineffable evidence of existing. Unlike God, you actually have proof of your own consciousness existing, the same consciousness that doesn’t really fit anywhere in our purely quantitative descriptions of the universe. I think that’s reason enough to give the idea some credence.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
How does it not fit in our quantitative descriptions? We can measure its activity. It behaves differently when in a coma, or when thinking about different things, or when dead. We can grow neurons and form connections with them outside the brain to do computations. We can’t make anything as complex as the brain yet obviously, but we understand how it functions. What part of it doesn’t fit in a perfectly quantitative description.
I’d love for some mystical thing to exist, but literally every mystical thing people have believed for tens of thousands of years has been wrong. Why should we expect any different here? Lightning isn’t caused by spirits in the mountains dancing, a god throwing lightning bolts, or anything else mystical. We can’t fully describe the mechanisms at work perfectly, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand it. We could assume it’s something mystical into the gaps because it sounds cool, but theres no reason to think it isn’t something material that can be learned.
space_comrade@hexbear.net 6 months ago
I mean it just kinda fucking doesn’t. Our physical model of reality is a bunch of mathematical models and there’s no mathematical formula for consciousness yet.
But you’re literally experiencing the “mystical thing” right now. The mystical part is the part where you don’t really have a mathematical equation for it and yet it exists. Think of it like “dark matter” where you know it probably exists but you can’t really model it properly.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
So, by your definition, mystical stuff is just things we can’t explain right now. People in the past have thought the same thing and been proven wrong. That’s a bad method for understanding things.
space_comrade@hexbear.net 6 months ago
But a few comments ago you said physicalist science actually can explain consciousness, why the backtracking?
My entire fucking point is that nobody can explain it properly and you grasping so tightly onto only one of the possible explanations is you having a strong belief system, same as religious people, not you doing a heckin good science think.