Maybe the hard problem of how consciousness emerges from brain meat is something our minds are not able to conceptualise. We can see there is a problem but we are no more equipped to solve it than a monkey. The biggest dogma of empiricism is the idea that all things are knowable. Sorely, if we can see that a rat can't conceptualise cosmology, and that children can not conceptualise quantum mechanics, then we ought to accept that there are many areas where we can see that there is a conceptual problem, like how matter in the form of brains thinks and feels things, yet have no way of solving these mysteries. We are not evolutionarily finished yet though and may get conceptually more able. Equally we may not.
" what I want to suggest is that the nature of the psychophysical connection has a full and none mysterious explanation in a certain science, but that this science is inaccessible to us as a matter of principal. Call this explanatory scientific theory T: T is as natural and prosaic and devoid of miracle as any theory of nature, it describes the link between consciousness and the brain in a way that is no more remarkable or alarming than the way we now describe the link between the liver and bile...we are like a creature without spatial concepts trying to understand the possibilities of motion
The limits of our minds are just not the limits of reality. It is deplorably anthropometric to insist that reality be constrained by what the human mind can conceive. We need to cultivate a vision of reality, a metaphysics, that makes it truly independent of our given cognitive powers, a conception that includes these powers as a proper part. It is just that, in the case of the mind body problem, the bit of reality that systematically eludes our cognitive grasp is an aspect of our own nature, in deeds, it is an aspect that makes it possible for us to have minds at all and to think about how they relate to our bodies. This particularly transcendent tract of reality happens to lie within our own heads. A deep fact about our own nature as a form of our embodied consciousness is thus necessarily hidden from us. Yet there is nothing inherently eerie or bizarre about this enbodiement. We are much more straight forward than we seem. Our weirdness lies in the eye of the beholder."
Colin McGinn
Thursday, 28 February 2013
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Stars and Ivy
Here is Jupiter showing one of its moons passing across. Blue star Kachina is in the top corner of the picture.
Jupiter is crossed by one of its moons.
The blue star Kachina, according to Hopi indian prophecy brings in the fifth age. Destruction of the old order leading to change. I have been following it for a year or so.
Dark Days of Skreeworld
Chemistry all out. Each cell yearns, lost, confused, waiting for equilibrium to return.
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