Hidden matters

[dmm]

Rovelli and Vidotto seem to be saying that it might be that dark matter is simply "Plank sized while holes". I wonder if this would also provide a good enough explanation of dark energy (white holes if they exist would be wonderful sources of all kinds of things, and Plank-sized ones would create this feel that those things "just appear from nowhere", which seems like a nice setup for dark energy).

"Hard problem of qualia". The qualia-related part of the "hard problem of consciousness" is certainly hard. If one can factor out the "qualia problem", I am no so sure that the remaining part of the problem of consciousness is "hard" in the Chalmers-introduced sense of "hard".

So far, almost all provisional "theories of consciousness" just ignore the "hard problem of qualia" (which is why I quite skeptical of them).

The only approaches which seem to make sense are of "provisional dualism" (one provisionally introduces qualia as additional primitives
and build one's theories on top of that; if one admits qualia as primitives, the remaining part might be tractable). I just learned a couple of days ago that Johannes Kleiner made some rather nice progress in that direction in 2019.

Comments

[dmm]

how is your sentence different from "viewing electron as something magical and not of natural origin contradicts both Darwin's theory and the fact that we grow out of a single cell"?

"viewing electron as something magical and not of natural origin contradicts both Darwin's theory and the fact that we grow out of a single cell" would be a sentence which is puzzling on many levels...

let me split this into three smaller questions:

1) would it make sense to state, "viewing electron as something magical and not of natural origin contradicts both Darwin's theory and the fact that we grow out of a single cell"? does this statement have a well-defined semantics at all?

2) would it make sense to say, "electron is not of natural origin"?

3) is declaring something a primitive (either electrons or qualia of a certain kind) imply that this something is not of natural origin? is it that only compound phenomena are of natural origin, but not the primitive ones, like electrons and photons?

Perhaps, considering these three smaller questions separately would shed more light on your comment...

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Certainly, one would not want to consider consciousness as something magical and not evolutionary selected (which is precisely why it does look like a separate "active" entity which changes the outcomes, and not just an "epiphenomenon, an illusion on top of physical activity determined by physical laws", an epiphenomenon would not be adaptive, and thus would not be selectable).

But the question what the consciousness is formed from/is made of is non-trivial. I strongly suspect that "extra primitives" are needed on the elementary level, and that the evolution and the body facilitate formation of consciousness out of those primitives. If those elementary qualia are not new primitives, then we can at least confidently state that the existing theories of consciousness have made exactly zero progress towards understanding the nature of elementary qualia so far.

[juan_gandhi]

Well, I have no plan to simplify.

My general idea, pretty vague though, is that when things are getting more complicated than the regular level of our discourse, we are assigning them magic properties.

[dmm]

They don't "feel complicated" (at least some of them don't "feel complicated").

They might actually be complicated, but do we feel all elementary qualia (e.g. consider one of "red" colors) as being comlicated?

I guess, some acoustical or olfactory qualia do feel rather complicated... But some of them, e.g. many of the color qualia feel simple (while not necessarily being simple).

Consciousness is complicated, but I am agnostic about how complicated elementary qualia actually are. Who knows...

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But still, I think, this trick I just invented, to "substitute" word "electron" instead of word "qualia" into various statements people make about qualia, I think this is a useful trick, I should continue using it.

E.g. electron is actually fairly complicated (having spin in addition to charge, being a fermion with all this implies, having standard weird quantum properties, etc.) And, who knows, perhaps electron is magic, it is certainly a super-weird object, which is made "pseudo-normal" in our perception because we tend to downplay its weirdness in most contexts.

It is certainly not reducible to anything (even if we buy the conjectural theory about separate forces emerging during symmetry breaking; so it might be the case that it had emerged, if one believes that story of gradual emergence of multiple forces and such; but even so, having a story of emergence in the past still would not make it reducible to anything at present).

So, I don't even know if it's a bad idea to consider properties of electron to be of magic nature (all those equations it follows and such). Certainly, the closer one looks at them, the more weird they seem to be...