Stuff and Consciousness by Pereira Toby

Author:Pereira, Toby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Toby Pereira
Published: 2016-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

The Science of Consciousness – Inferring the Experiences of Others and the Other Minds Problem

As I said in chapter 5, if at some point it can be shown logically that consciousness does follow from physical processing, then the logical relationship, along with our empirical data, can form a science of consciousness and a better understanding of our own consciousness. The logical connection without the empirical data would not be enough to understand consciousness, because the processes would be far too complex to work out from first principles. Analogously, we cannot work out the science of weather systems directly from the laws of quantum mechanics.

Even without the logical connection (which we currently do not have), you can still make inferences from your own (alleged) consciousness. If you have a conscious mind resulting from your brain, then with more advanced technology, you could examine your brain and see the way in which your conscious thoughts seem to follow from it. You could then make inferences about how consciousness results from brains in general, and make an estimate of other people’s experiences. This is effectively what scientists do now anyway – they try to find what they call the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’. It’s just that our understanding of it is currently not that advanced. Examining your brain properly requires a great understanding!

It doesn’t matter that we don’t have any empirical evidence for the consciousness you are looking for. All you really need to do is consider psychological consciousness, which we can be sure does exist. There is certainly nothing philosophically mysterious about psychological consciousness, and we are going by the view that phenomenal consciousness is merely a reflection of that. So if you record and understand what someone is experiencing psychologically (according to a reasonable interpretation system), your epiphenomenal mind should then understand it in phenomenal terms, since one is a reflection of the other. If we can psychologically understand what someone is psychologically thinking (which seems reasonable), then we should be able to phenomenally understand what they are phenomenally thinking. It does not matter that the phenomenal understanding cannot be directly communicated – it is enough for you to know that you have it!

It is not worth worrying too much about the possibility of multiple conscious minds existing (discussed in chapter 6). If you think of yourself as an epiphenomenal mind resulting from your brain, and you use recorded output to infer other people’s experiences, then it does not matter too much if you are only inferring the experiences of minds resulting from the same interpretation system as your mind. At least it is a start, and as discussed, there may only be one ‘sensible’ mind that comes from each brain.

However, having a way of inferring and recording other people’s experiences will still not solve all of our problems. Each conscious experience is very complex; a list of what colour experiences someone has in each part of their visual field, along with what sounds they can hear, the feeling of their

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