Evaluating this problem through pain is certainly interesting but I can't help feeling that it is terribly lacking. In my humble opinion, the specialised and reductionist approach to this specific subject matter makes biologists incapable of seeing or tackling the whole picture.
The preceiver is not the preceived and perception is a function of sentience not brain tissue. seeing is the function of the eyes but vision is preceived by a higher level of being. A tape recorder or computer can record and relay sound but you need the mind to discern language from music from random sounds.
I think this pain thing is one example of bias towards a purely materialist approach to science that is limiting the understanding and investigation of the scientific community.
I agree totally regarding the bias towards physicalism/materialism in science. As I said here, there are very good reasons for rejecting that our subjective experience can reduce purely physics - even a theoretically perfected physics.
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such a great answer, I don't even need to write mine ! @sentience you are indeed very sentient. these kind of limited theories are self serving anachronisms (in my opinion) ..good article, @samueldouglas, I don't think brain equates mind. the mind arises from the brain. I actually think consciousness is something we probably tune into like radio receivers and is an innate function of the Universe. The more sensitive the receiver, the more consciousness we can pick up / process and use. even tiny protozoa have a mote of it, larger more complex creatures have more. there are rare people who don't feel pain.
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I should have explained the link better. If mental states don't reduce to particular physical structures/processes, then it's not a huge step to wonder if they reduce to physical structures/processes at all.
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I gotcha. a very thought provoking argument. We understand far less about our own minds and the minds of animals partly through wilful ignorance and a lack of ability as a species to be honest about our relationship with the natural world. On the one hand, invoking spiritual forces as the basis of reality lost traction as the age of enlightenment progressed. material reductionism took over as a necessary antidote but became like organised religion had been for centuries. seeing itself as the sole gatekeeper to understanding. I think that was a blind alley to banality. If all knowledge is 100 we surely haven't even scraped 0.00001% of it yet. which makes us pretty basic. so although we can reliably measure weights and temperatures and even identify complex chemical processes, to say we definitively know what reality is, is foolish.. at best although we should try to be more honest with ourselves.
for example. I once had a dream of quite mundane events but with a high level of specificity which I remembered vividly. six months later the dream literally came true as I experienced many aspects, specific to the dream, in context with a location I had never been to and people I had never met. my conclusion ?
my sleeping mind can experience / travel through a version of time perhaps my timeline but the bigger picture to me was that we don't clearly understand reality, dreams or our own minds, so to proclaim we do with any authority is futile. subjective experience collated across experience of many people is empirical evidence for many spooky aspects of our ordinary world, yet is largely ignored. precognition, psi, etc. science changes.. until 1824 nobody had seen a dinosaur.. expect they probably had but didn't know what they were. until very recently nobody had seen an earth like planet. we live in fascnating times and we will no doubt discover so much more in the next few years. perhaps even a complete theory of physics. I'm still not convinced by dark matter / energy. I think someone's got the equation wrong !
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There's a lot in that reply! It's probably a good list of things for me to write about.
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lol, yeah it just fell out.. there's loads of problems with our worldview. it just doesn't add up to to our experience, yet the empirical evidence seems to suggest we require a paradigm shift. I'd like to think that we arrive at a new understanding in the not too distant future. we're so caught up in how smart we are, we forget that yesterday's geniuses were held back by faulty logic which could be understood by today's schoolchildren.
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Indeed. On that note, that's why I'm so keen to get the fundamentals of logic to schoolchildren.
Who knows, maybe we can thrash out a new paradigm here on steemit. Seems as good a place as any to do that.
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