Thursday, September 4, 2008

I Found A Loophole

...in my proof that consciousness isn't physical.

While any assumption that consciousness is a physical phenomenon leads to contradiction, there is a conception of consciousness that works around this limitation without necessarily positing dualism.

You can roll it into the mystery of existence.

Here's the problem; dualism, monism, doesn't matter, why does stuff exist at all? This is not a physically resolvable question because humans can make mistakes. Even if it turns out that under any system we can conceive, there is only one way and one reason for stuff to exist,* we might have missed something. Maybe our brains, having been manufactured in this existence, cannot properly conceive of alternatives.

*(That would make stuff, specifically our stuff, inevitable.)

The only consistent solution to monist consciousness (that I've found) is then to say consciousness just exists. Consciousness still has to be panpsychic - without differences in fundamental particles, it is impossible to isolate consciousness to brains - but it just exists, and its first property is that, for instance, it gathers around areas of high Φ.

It just does, okay?

This loophole suffers from the flaw usually levelled at dualism; it puts the question beyond answering.

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