Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat
tomalley8342@lemmy.world 2 months agoI believe the academic label for your concern is the mind-body problem, which, going against the grain of the OP picture, is definitely still firmly within the realms of philosophy, not at all a settled science.
pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 2 months ago
This problem presupposes metaphysical realism, so you have to be a metaphysical realist to take the problem seriously. Metaphysical realism is a particular kind of indirect realism whereby you posit that everything we observe is in some sense not real, sometimes likened to a kind of “illusion” created by the mammalian brain, called “consciousness” or sometimes “subjective experience” with the adjective “subjective” used to make it clear it is being interpreted as something unique to conscious subjects and not ontologically real.
If everything we observe is in some sense not reality, then “true” reality must by definition be independent of what we observe. If this is the case, then it opens up a whole bunch of confusing philosophical problems, as it would logically mean the entire universe is invisible/unobservable/nonexperiential, except in the precise configuration of matter in the human brain which somehow “gives rise to” this property of visibility/observability/experience. It seems difficult to explain this without just presupposing this property arbitrarily attaches itself to brains in a particular configuration, i.e. to treat it as strongly emergent, which is effectively just dualism, indeed the founder of the “hard problem of consciousness” is a self-described dualist.
This philosophical problem does not exist in direct realist schools of philosophy, however, such as Jocelyn Benoist’s contextual realism, Carlo Rovelli’s weak realism, or in Alexander Bogdanov’s empiriomonism. It is solely a philosophical problem for metaphysical realists, because they begin by positing that there exists some fundamental gap between what we observe and “true” reality, then later have to figure out how to mend the gap. Direct realist philosophies never posit this gap in the first place and treat reality as precisely equivalent to what we observe it to be, so it simply does not posit the existence of “consciousness” and it would seem odd in a direct realist standpoint to even call experience “subjective.”