CornflowerCicada
Dear CornflowerCicada,
thank you also for your response and appreciation for my arguments.
Of course, the quest for the existence of a Creator can be made logically independent of how the world works. And as such, it is my attitude to not see or use the assumption of a Creator as an argument against examining the world with all the tools we can find. It is only that I think that the other way round also does make sense: examining the world is not in opposition to the assumption of a Creator. It is more the question whether or not we need / will need that assumption or whether we may be able to find a “natural” explanation / definition (whatever “natural” then will mean) not only for what i. e. consciousness is, or choices, or Qualia and the like, but also how this would be linked to a possible original source of all there is (since it had to be linked in some way to the latter – if we assume that the world is a unity).
My take on this is, that every such explanation / definition, for reasons of logical consistency, must be constructed by some logical lines of reasoning and as such is subject to incompleteness or subject to unprovability. Even if these lines of reasonings are motivated by empirical data, I cannot see how for example neural correlates could ever explain the phenomenon of Qualia. But I am open for any attempt that someone eventually does so!
Some people say that there may be needed a totally new scientific “paradigm” in the future that would enable us to explain Qualia. A new maths, a new mode of thinking, a new philosophical twist etc. My take on that is that we depend on data about the brain and as such, data and its many possible interpretations / combinations is always just a way to arrange the data to achieve consistency, not necessarily truth.
If such a data arrangement should indeed – inherently – be the one that faithfully represents what Qualia is, then in my opinion that wouldn't be provable within that system. It wouldn't also be provable from without that system, means by human beings, since the problem of Qualia is that it is fundamentally different from particles, numbers, motions, vibrations and the like, even if the latter occur in vaste quantities in the brain and are supposed to have in-principle emergent potentials. The latter may be true, but in my opinion it is exceptionally hard to demonstrate / to prove with consciousness, even if some AI would be conscious (means aware that it exists and guesses – not necessarily knows! – that what it fundamentally is itself is some kind of information processing).
Therefore I also like to examine what it would mean when it where true that there simply does not exist any suitable deductively as well as empirically reachable theory for Qualia, one that at least convinces all philosophers and all scientists – and we humans do not and cannot know that.
In that case, the Turing machine in our heads will never halt, since it cannot arbitrarily change the tools with which it is working on the problem. In other words, I guess that the more we learn about the brain, the more questions will arise how we should translate the data we will find into what is called Qualia.
The hypothetical opposite would be that Qualia (then meant as the undeniable conscious impression that Qualia emerges from information processing) is able to explain Qualia. But in my view that would only amount to saying that information processing is able to explain information processing (if it where true that Qualia is merely a sophisticated form of information processing). Thus, if the information processing paradigm where true, then the question is why it should become conscious at a certain – highly abstract? – level?
With your own lines of reasoning and your argument for number jumps, in my opinion you gave a clever argument that there is at least something missing within the information processing paradigm. I would apprechiate when one could develop a bigger picture with your argument and its consequences for explaining Qualia / consciousness. I think we are only at the very beginning here, but your argument seems to be a good starting point in my opinion.
