I’m not gonna deny that my analogy wasn’t great, but I was only aiming at a section of the analogy, just the part that would make the person who asked the question roll their eyes at the answer and be like “Oh come on that’s not what I was asking.” That’s the gut reaction I get when a person calls squishy matter and a series of synapses the same exact thing as bone chilling fear that I’m feeling as someone chases me with a knife.
There is an explanatory gap when someone tries to say that physical/chemical mechanisms become alive and have experiential qualities, however this explanatory gap is not present when you are explaining physical sequences. A detailed explanation of physical mechanisms does makes sense, and it makes sense at every single turn. But the only aspect of the physical mechanism’s relation to mental phenomena that ‘Makes sense’ is the ‘When’ part. We can understand pointing to a certain stage of development and saying “That’s when it happens”, but what exactly it is, and how it happens is a gapping hole of understanding.
We know, more than we know anything, that we are conscious. So consciousness is therefore an undeniable aspect of reality. When we know that something undeniably exists in reality, and when physical descriptions runs into explanatory gaps when trying to explain them then there is either more to reality than just the physical, or we just don’t know enough about reality yet. But my problem with it being the latter is that I can’t even make sense out of what a coherent explanation would even look like! Physical mechanisms at some point being experientially alive, what does that even mean from a cause & effect standpoint where you’re analyzing each sequence? So IMO we have the meshing together of two different fabrics of ultimate reality. They correlate with each other very much so, but if the scientific method isn’t able to lead us to “Aha that cause & effect sequence makes total sense” then a physical cause & effect platform isn’t enough to explain everything in reality. I can’t see how adding 100 billion more physical cause & effect sequences to the process would somehow create a moment of “Ok now it makes sense that it’s alive.” Or a trillion, or 100 trillion. That is a reply that I see a lot, that just adding more physical complexities is supposed to give it explanatory power.
So the way I see it is that we know of two forms of knowledge, scientific based knowledge and experiential based knowledge. The advantage to experiential knowledge is that it is our most direct form of knowledge, but it’s disadvantage is that it’s easy to misinterpret. The advantage to scientific based knowledge is its incredibly impressive precision, but its disadvantage is that it is a knowledge that’s one level removed from immediate experiential knowledge. We can’t throw experiential based knowledge under the microscope quite like we can with scientific knowledge, its the great humbling factor that makes it impossible to ever have exhaustive knowledge. And I think that part drives some people crazy, they refuse to admit that we can’t close in on exhaustive knowledge. So they act like the second half of the equation doesn’t even exist.
I notice that Scientism is in the habit of chopping off sections of reality and claiming that they don’t really exist “If they can’t be assimilated into the scientific method.” If the scientific method can’t verify it you do one of two things…#1 claim that it’s not real, or #2 claim that A = non-A (squishy matter and a series of synapses are the same thing as (fill in the blank) experience.
