• Francis
    41
    Hello, everyone. I have been thinking about the mind/body problem for some time now and have come up with some things that I think we can be pretty certain of regarding this mysterious issue:

    1. There are certain combinations of interacting matter that produce Qualia/Consciousness.

    2. Qualia/Consciousness affects the way matter behaves. When I type "I am having a subjective experience that is different from the shapely aspect that the material in my brain is made out of" the fact I had that experience affected the material in my brain so as that I would type that sentence

    3. More than or two objects are producing and reacting to Qualia/Consciousness. It is not just one electron and one neuro-chemcial working together that create our minds it is many different objects working together to create it.

    4. Qualia/Consciousness evolved and became more complicated over time

    If we assume these four things to be true, then the material in our minds are moving in certain ways to produce something which changes the way in which they behave.

    This process had to start somewhere from and evolutionary perspective. So somewhere down the evolutionary timeline there was an initial shift in the causal mechanism that was typical for the matter used in the nervous system of said organism. The matter in that organisms nervous system interacted in a certain way that then had an affect on its behavior in a way that was evolutionary beneficial. This then had to happen repeatedly: matter moving in a certain way, changing the way in which it moved previously in a way that was evolutionary beneficial.

    But some how this thing which changes the movement of the objects in the brain has to get more complicated as well. The non-physical causal mechanism ITSELF also has to change in a meaningful way and give rise to what we call Consciousness and Qualia.

    In the next few years, I hope to have enough money and knowledge in order to perform experiments using neuro-chemicals in order to perhaps find this original shift in behavior and see if I can identify why it would be evolutionary beneficial.

    Anyway, let me know what you guys think and where you disagree.
  • ThroughAGlassDarkly
    22
    Hi! Interesting ideas, but a few things to consider with your points.

    1-2) Why is it matter that is combining to produce thought? Why not a more idealistic scenario where mind is more fundamental than matter? If qualia/consciousness also affect how matter behaves, which is more fundamental? Does matter cause qualia, qualia affect matter, or some dualist intermingling?

    3) More than two objects may be working together, but what is an object in this scenario? Is it predefined volumes of matter, or the space the object is or is not in? Also, what does this interaction entail? Why do some objects and interactions generate a set of qualia and some not?

    4) Evolution might guide the movements and processes of biological automata, but could experience of the color "red", and the color "red" itself, evolve from it? Also, one would need a model of free will in order for qualia to have any role in evolution, if qualia themselves are a benefit to organisms and not a deterministic byproduct of physics. If I can somehow act upon qualia, instead of just watching a movie of qualia flowing past, that strains strict materialist, deterministic models.
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