As far as I understand it the conscious mind is an emergent property of the workings of a physical brain.
I am not sure this is the case. I mean they have mapped a lot of the brains ativity correlating to some conscious states but they certainly hav't explained how such experiences can come from what amounts to wires and electrical signals. Its like saying potentially we could wire up a robot to have consciousness.
This is one of the Hard Problems for trying to explain what is basically a 'qualitative experience' with 'quantitative measures'. The two don't even go together in the first place to be using a quantified mechanical explaining. It's like using algerbra to explain joy. So its really a category problem for material science to explain consciousness.
Even if you had a mind made of nothing, floating in the nothing, what would it think?
It would have no concept of time or things even. There would be no time and so no sequence of events or thinking would be possible. Basically, you wouldn't be able to think things through.
I don't think a Mind is made of nothing in the sense of 'nothingness' in a material terms. Even material conceptions of nothing are not particles or matter but wavy energy that is fundemental. I am not sure what consciousness is, what form it takes as a field or energy source and is not yet understood.
Some say it will take a paradigm shift in thinking to even pose the right theory which some are doing now with various ideas like Panpsychism and similar ideas.
This mind wouldn't have any idea of the concept of light, or colour or shape, or temperature, or time. It wouldn't have any idea of the concept of objects, or movement, or life. It wouldn't have any idea about solid, liquid or gas. No concept of mass, inertia, acceleration, gravity, atoms, before vs now vs after.
If particles, colours (light waves), shapes, temperature or time are just a surface view or reflection perhaps of something more fundemental then it is mind that is creating the concepts of time, objects and colours ect. We know that perception can be warped, we know we can percieve things which are not real. So perhaps this is a glimpse or better still glitch in the matrix of the object world we create.
We have this constant intuition that things don't appear as them seem and that there is something going on that really matters beyond the material world. Perhaps our perceptions of the world are deigned to help us navigate the surface the objective world in a practical sense. There are more than one level of reality going on at the same time.
But fundementally all roads seem to lead back to us and I mean our Minds and conscious experience of the world. Two people can have different experiences about the same thing and each are just as real as each other. Wheeler, Wigner and Stapp formulated theories along these lines where consciousness and Mind were fundemental to reality.
Nobel Prize winner, John Archibald Wheeler, noted that “we live in a participatory universe”: physics gives rise to observer-participancy, which results in information, which gives rise to physics.
This agrees with Niels Bohr‘s suggestion to his students, at the end of a life-time of thinking about our quantum reality, that Man is inside the equation, simply by being there. Man is “entangled” in this “participatory universe”.
Henry Stapp has for 60 years been a leader, perhaps the leader, in exploring the role of mind (psyche, consciousness, experience) in the ontology of quantum mechanics. Henry's contention is that the very structure of quantum mechanics implies a central and irreducible role for mind: an experiential aspect of nature distinct from that of the physical matter and energy described by the dynamical equations of physics.
There has to be a place for the subject in the equation of what is going on as we can never seperate ourselves from what is going on and how we measure things. So every interaction has some entanglement with between objective reality (space and time) and Mind and consciousness. What that entangle is or how it exactly influences things is still yet to be dicovered.
But we get glimpses of it with intuition, and research into the mind and cognition especially in psychology where we are finding that humans are not just passive rmeat robots subject to outside material forces but have agency and control in the world and able to shape and change reality.
How would you explain any of these things to a mind that has never seen, never heard, never tasted, never smelt, never felt?
This mind could not learn, because it cannot observer or experience. Given that there is no time, it cannot FIRST learn and THEN apply its new knowledge.
You wouldn't even be able to explain to it, the concept of cause and effect.
Thats the point we cannot explain Mind and consciousness through the material way your just describing because its something that precedes it. Like you said 'we wouldn't even be able to explain things' in that way about consciousness or mind being fundemental.
It may be that the universal consciousness that permeates everything has always been there. Its the substrate for which objective reality come about. But it takes a conscious being to experience that connection with that universal consciousness. I remember reading about Thomas Edison I think when asked where he got his ideas from for inventions. He say they just come to me somewhere out there in the universe.
It seems fundementally our universe comes down to information, math and not actual matter which points to Mind being fundemental. We also see this universal consciousness in how humans can be attuned to each other even over long distances. How many relate to ideas that transcend this world as something just as real as a solid object. Just not measured in the same way.
Material science says this is an illusion or even delusion. BUt our history of experiences tell us different tthat these experience are insights into a deeper level of reality at work that can actually change the material world.
The idea of a mind without a physical brain is absurd.
Not really, we already know that experiences like of colours, of awe and pain are real but cannot be explained by the physical brain. So already we have a category mismatch in explanations that the physical theories are not even in the same paradigm to account for conscious experiences.
This points to something beyond the physical brain. An epi-phenomena is grossly inadequate to explain such powerful, rich and real experiences some secondary effect from a mechanical process.
The idea of a mind with knowledge without existence and time is insanely absurd.
No its actually a reasonable and well supported idea that solves a lot of problems that material science cannot overcome. When you think about it knowledge and information are beyond time and space. You can't measure knowledge in any physical way. Yet it is so powerful and able to change reality. That knowledge has always been there and we are just dicovering it.
Like how what we thought was reality 100 years even 50 or 20 years ago has changed with new knowledge. That knowledge keeps updating our reality. We may have much more to dicover and who knows what reality will look like in another 100 years from now. Our idea of reality may be completely different and what we thought was reality now was just a surface view.
I like what Wheeler said about the observer participating in the unvieling of reality and the universe. The universe is now looking back on itself through conscious humans and observing itself into existence. That not only create the present but also can create the past. By updating our knowledge we are continually changing the past as we know it, as we believe reality to be.
What we thought reality for the beginning of our universe even 20 years ago is changing as we speak with the JWST. So who knows how we will think about space and time and what is fundemental in the future.