It's great you're digging into this, but you will need to understand that you can't both agree with Chalmer's argument, and also hold that consciousness is physical. — Wayfarer
David Chalmers: "It's not physical"
he says it might be an additional property that is associated with matter (a position which is called 'panpsychism'). But it's crucial to recognize that he doesn't say it can be explained in terms of known physical properties. He says that science has to admit consciousness as a fundamental property. By that he means it is irreducible, it can't be explained in terms of something else. — Wayfarer
Right. There's your 'thinking stuff' again. — Wayfarer
I don't agree with it. I just don't have a problem with it — Philosophim
I disagree with his solution to the problem, because he also currently has no evidence to deny that subjective consciousness could be an aspect of matter and energy. — Philosophim
Space is a concept we use in relation to matter. We measure it with matter, yet space itself is not matter, but the absence of it. Time is not an existent 'material' concept, but it is is determined by watching and recording the differences in materials. Subjective consciousness as well, if it can only be known by being a material, is still known and defined in terms of the material that it is. — Philosophim
The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers.
Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe.
So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271
It is great that you like the idea of subjective consciousness as another category of thinking — Philosophim
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