Physicalism isn’t actually making any sense. It is said that a real answer should make things less mysterious.
and
To use a programmer saying, “Some people when confronted with the hard problem of consciousness think, ‘I know, I’ll use reductionism!’. Now they have two problems.”.
If you have stripped down your motorbike engine and rebuilt it and gone for a ride, you have a paradigm of reductionism. You strip the thing down, to a few hundred parts (include all the little bits, the nuts, cir-clips, and washers) and if your are clever and don’t lose any bits and do the adjustments correctly, it works when you reassemble it and you pass the test. You understand how it works and you know that you understand how it works.
So naturally you carry that expectation over to the hard problems of consciousness. You study the brain, decide its really just a computer, and start coding a brain in Java. After failing hard, you realise that your motorbike engine paradigm just lost a connecting rod through its crankcase. Reductionism hasn’t made the brain any less mysterious, at least, not in the hands-on sense that you hoped. The brain is too intricately detailed to be understood mechanically, where mechanically is understood as implying comprehensible working parts, and hundreds of them, rather than comprehensible working parts and hundreds of billions of them.
So what next? My answer is that the human brain will always be mysterious, in the same sense that the source code of the Windows operating system will always be mysterious. There is too much of it; too much intricate detail. I just shrug. I never took mechanical to imply sufficiently few working parts that I can actually understand the mechanism. But I can seen lots of people understanding the mechanical aspect of physicalism through some kind of implicit motorbike engine metaphor and correctly realising that reductionism isn’t going to explain consciousness in the way that they had hoped.
I can sympathize a little with his first point
and
If you have stripped down your motorbike engine and rebuilt it and gone for a ride, you have a paradigm of reductionism. You strip the thing down, to a few hundred parts (include all the little bits, the nuts, cir-clips, and washers) and if your are clever and don’t lose any bits and do the adjustments correctly, it works when you reassemble it and you pass the test. You understand how it works and you know that you understand how it works.
So naturally you carry that expectation over to the hard problems of consciousness. You study the brain, decide its really just a computer, and start coding a brain in Java. After failing hard, you realise that your motorbike engine paradigm just lost a connecting rod through its crankcase. Reductionism hasn’t made the brain any less mysterious, at least, not in the hands-on sense that you hoped. The brain is too intricately detailed to be understood mechanically, where mechanically is understood as implying comprehensible working parts, and hundreds of them, rather than comprehensible working parts and hundreds of billions of them.
So what next? My answer is that the human brain will always be mysterious, in the same sense that the source code of the Windows operating system will always be mysterious. There is too much of it; too much intricate detail. I just shrug. I never took mechanical to imply sufficiently few working parts that I can actually understand the mechanism. But I can seen lots of people understanding the mechanical aspect of physicalism through some kind of implicit motorbike engine metaphor and correctly realising that reductionism isn’t going to explain consciousness in the way that they had hoped.