The problem of how a subjective world of experience is able to emerge from gooey material in our bodies is still a total mystery. As in, there isn't even one decent guess as to how subjective experience can come from matter as far as I can see.
If you think about all the biological processes that occur within us they seem to be reducible or explanable in terms of physiological concepts. For example, the nephron is the unit of kidney i.e. one nephron = one bit of kidney (roughly speaking). The nephron does what it does because of its shape, its composition and the surrouding fluid concentrations. You can model and explain how the nephron is able to filter out waste materials using these ideas from physiology. Digestion, muscle contraction, respiration, etc all seem to be explainable in much the same way; we look at the relevant structures and suggest models of action from the physiological concepts.
So taking our cue from other biological processes and assuming that consciousness is one of those maybe the magic comes from the particular way our brains are arranged in space. But this seems to get us nowhere. Neurons are a very peculiar shape and the agglomeration of neurons in the brain and rest of the nervous system is highly ordered (as in any unordering apparently leads to no consciousness or death). Impulses are carried around quickly by the particular method of cell-to-cell communication. A stimulus from my finger hitting these keys is carried to my brain and from there it whizzes about and fizzes and pops and whatnot and then I feel the keys. Where in that process is the feels?
There's a whole cascade of action/reaction going on when I see this screen. But none of it seems to imply blueness. There is always a gap.
Most days I'm confident (almost sure) that at some point, with enough work, we'll make the empirical and conceptual breakthroughs which will get us over the hump towards a science of consciousness.
Am I excercising faith in science?
Sorry if this post itself isn't highly ordered, this stuff confuses me no end.
A simple way to explain subjectivity is connected to the way the animal and human brain creates and writes content to memory. When memory is created, aspects of the limbic system, in the core of the brain, add emotional tags to the sensory content, as it is written to memory. Our memory has both sensory content and an attached feeling tag. Our strongest memories, such as birth of a child, graduation, marriage, death of a family member, have the strongest feeling tones. There is a correlation.
This memory schema is helpful to the natural animal. If they encounter a similar situation and a memory is induced, they can react to the induced attached feeling without having to think. If the dog sees a biscuit and remembers it was tasty, he will eat without having to reinvestigate and think. Acting from impulse, without thinking, comes from the emotional tag side of the memory. This is the gateway to subjectivity.
The emotional tags are limited in number and tend to be recycled and used for similar situations. For example, all memory of the foods we like, have a similar emotional tag connected to good and tasty. Although the emotional tags are limited and recycled, the content side is far more diversified, like reality itself. Using the same example, each food we "like", can be very unique, with different ingredients. However, each has the same emotional tag.
Relative to being objective versus subjective, the objective person approaches memory from the content side. The subjective person approaches memory from the more limited and recycled emotional tag side. The subjective person's mind will go where the feeling is acceptable or appropriate. However, since this same emotional tag is often used in many places, the wrong content, with the same tag, can come up. This can seem irrational and subjective.
If we approach memory from the content side, this side allows all the unique details, even from different memories, with the same or different emotional tagging. This allows one to pick the correct content even among those with the same or different emotional tags. Science tries to avoid emotions. Mr Spock was the archetypical scientist who shuts off the emotional tag side of his consciousness, so he can focus on the content side of his memory. The content is closer to truth since specific memory content can much better overlay real time environmental inductions than a recycled feeling and a batch of related emotional tagged memory content.
I was concerned about the feminization of America culture, since this was/is being sold as being connected to emotions and feelings. This approach, to me, means conditioning leftist to use the emotional tag side of memory. This approach to the memory allowed the majority of leftist to be lied to for several years, via the Russian collusion delusion. It felt right. If one had looked at content first, it was always a lie. That was no the appropriate feeling. This created a dumb down of the left, due to being conditioned to be brain dead with a big heart.
Science can be cold, but this is designed to avoid the emotional side of memory and stay in the content side, since content is how nature is delineated, Nature is not delineated by how we feel.
If you look at racism and sexism and all other ism, as well as the placing of blame, this is due to emotional thinking and subjectivity; emotional tag side of memory. The one size fits all; recycled emotional tagging, feels right. But if you look at this from the memory content side, there will be many exceptions, making this approaches to life seem irrational. The cure for this is simple in theory, but harder in practice. It is not easy to shift how you approach your memory, when peer pressure will not help choose content over feelings.
Censorship by big Tech is based on emotional thinking first. If it was content first thinking, both sides of the political isle would have things to be censored. How do you deal with brain dead billionaires with big biased hearts? One can approach memory from content side for business needs but political needs works better with the dumb down to emotional thinking ,so biased seems reasonable and a one size fits all solutions makes more sense.
