PyramidHead
Contributor
I mentioned this in another thread, but I read somewhere that a lot of the confusion about the mind/body problem and how to account for qualia seems to stem from the assumption that first-person experiences should be interpreted either as substances (so that it makes sense to say "aha, no matter how closely you look at my brain you'll never find the experience of seeing red!") or properties (with the apparent dead end of explaining why certain physical events have this weird property of feeling like something). But when you reflect on the issue, the ineffability of the subjective has a lot in common with the ineffability of a dimension. Here I'm using "dimension" in its sense of describing an extent in which measurements can be made independently from measurements in other dimensions. Not in the sloppy way people talk about "alternate dimensions" when they really mean parallel universes and such.
So, the ordinary concept of a dimension like height, which cannot be approximated even in theory when you're only looking at length or depth, is what consciousness behaves like in practice. Think about it: for the denizens of someplace like Flatland, where everybody is a height-less line segment or simple polygon, height isn't even something that can be put into words. Their philosophers would struggle to make sense of it, suggesting perhaps that it was a special substance that could appear and disappear magically, or a special property of some lines and not others, or perhaps some would claim all lines have height in varying degrees. Eliminativists about height would counter that a complete physical explanation of everything in Flatland could be provided without requiring anything like height as a substance nor a property, so it's actually a fairytale, an illusion.
None of these views would quite capture the reality of the situation, of course. Height isn't a substance, for one thing. It's kind of like a property, but not in the same way being bald or being an accountant is a property. You don't say of someone: she is 36 years old, wears a leather jacket, has brown hair, and has height. In actuality, you'd say she is tall, short, or some specific height, which is how dimensions work. They aren't properties in and of themselves, but the stage or span in which properties are located relative to one another.
The subjective world seems amenable to this interpretation. We can't make sense of it as a substance without running afoul of physics, and it seems useless as an explanatory tool when we treat it as a property. But as a dimension, it naturally takes on the qualities we expect from it. Things seem to be situated within it, like buildings and trees are apparently situated in the vertical dimension relative to the ground, and descriptions of it seem to be independent of descriptions based in other dimensions, like the measurement of an object's height is fully independent of its weight or temperature (I'm simplifying for argument's sake).
Thus, looking for consciousness by scrutinizing the brain down to its smallest details is unlikely to ever reveal first-person sensation, not because qualia are some new kind of substance or immaterial property of all matter, but because we are like Flatlanders, unable to take a view that looks "down" upon the plane of our experience, unable to experience experiencing per se as itself an object of experience. We just have to accept the fact that the inner, outward-looking perspective of the mind is a dimension of reality that we shouldn't expect to be causally linked to any other, in much the same way that we normally don't believe height is caused by certain configurations of length, or that time arises only when there is a particular degree of complexity in an object's width. Consciousness is a dimension like those, and the mysterians are right that we will never describe it in terms of the other dimensions.
So, the ordinary concept of a dimension like height, which cannot be approximated even in theory when you're only looking at length or depth, is what consciousness behaves like in practice. Think about it: for the denizens of someplace like Flatland, where everybody is a height-less line segment or simple polygon, height isn't even something that can be put into words. Their philosophers would struggle to make sense of it, suggesting perhaps that it was a special substance that could appear and disappear magically, or a special property of some lines and not others, or perhaps some would claim all lines have height in varying degrees. Eliminativists about height would counter that a complete physical explanation of everything in Flatland could be provided without requiring anything like height as a substance nor a property, so it's actually a fairytale, an illusion.
None of these views would quite capture the reality of the situation, of course. Height isn't a substance, for one thing. It's kind of like a property, but not in the same way being bald or being an accountant is a property. You don't say of someone: she is 36 years old, wears a leather jacket, has brown hair, and has height. In actuality, you'd say she is tall, short, or some specific height, which is how dimensions work. They aren't properties in and of themselves, but the stage or span in which properties are located relative to one another.
The subjective world seems amenable to this interpretation. We can't make sense of it as a substance without running afoul of physics, and it seems useless as an explanatory tool when we treat it as a property. But as a dimension, it naturally takes on the qualities we expect from it. Things seem to be situated within it, like buildings and trees are apparently situated in the vertical dimension relative to the ground, and descriptions of it seem to be independent of descriptions based in other dimensions, like the measurement of an object's height is fully independent of its weight or temperature (I'm simplifying for argument's sake).
Thus, looking for consciousness by scrutinizing the brain down to its smallest details is unlikely to ever reveal first-person sensation, not because qualia are some new kind of substance or immaterial property of all matter, but because we are like Flatlanders, unable to take a view that looks "down" upon the plane of our experience, unable to experience experiencing per se as itself an object of experience. We just have to accept the fact that the inner, outward-looking perspective of the mind is a dimension of reality that we shouldn't expect to be causally linked to any other, in much the same way that we normally don't believe height is caused by certain configurations of length, or that time arises only when there is a particular degree of complexity in an object's width. Consciousness is a dimension like those, and the mysterians are right that we will never describe it in terms of the other dimensions.
Thanks as usual for your compelling contributions.