It's interesting because I'm from a neuroscience training and have traditionally and reflexively and argumentatively sided with the idea that things like consciousness and free will are emergent illusions.<p>However, I've recently had a crisis of confidence when for some reason I tried to think about the fact that my experience of consciousness and color and etc does actually exist somehow inside the universe and that others seem to experience it similarly. Of course there's a similarity of physical structure that's common to brains that have those experiences. But more from the point of view of if you stumble upon some complex object for example, you could wonder whether it is experiencing the illusion of free will. If that's all purely emergent from known physical laws, we should be able to determine whether a particular object possesses/produces the illusion, right? So, that got me wondering what is the minimal hardware/spatial configuration that could produce this sort of illusion and are illusions actually "something"? It seems like it's presupposing that certain arrangements of matter generate "illusions" and yet we seem to want to insist that at some level these "illusions" don't really exist. How far down do illusions go? Some people are born blind or deaf/have strokes, so the illusion of color vision or sound can be isolated and removed from the illusion of consciousness. Do "and gates" experience some sort of atomic illusion of "and"? Can the presence of illusion be tested? Anyway, not sure I'm making a cogent statement, I'm still not entirely clear on what's bothering me about this, but something "feels" intuitively wrong/missing to me about the purely physical emergent neuroscience approach now.
Makes me wish I had taken a class with him while at Tufts. It's a hard truth that you can usually plot a good course through your university experience AFTER you are finished.
> The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.<p>I wonder if the qualia debate isn't just an elaborate exercise in missing the point. Experience doesn't work the same way as matter, you can't subdivide it until you get the "experiential atom". Divide an experience into parts, what you get is separate experiences, each unique in their own right.<p>What if, instead of trying to define the "fundamental experience", we instead acknowledged all experiences as unique, subjective to context and underlying biology, and moved from there? Someone's experience of red will depend on his rod/cone balance and his neuro-chemistry. He can think about a "abstract, ultimate red" but that will be an experience of thinking about red, not an actual ultimate red.