What kinds of things would you expect that entity to be capable of that we are incapable of due to the (posited) inability of our ontology to adequately account for subjective experience?
I don’t consider this inability to merely be posited. It’s a matter of understanding what you can and can’t do with the ontological ingredients provided. You have particles, you have non-positional properties of individual particles, you have the motions of particles, you have changes in the non-positional properties. You have causal relations. You have sets of these entities; you have causal chains built from them; you have higher-order quantitative and logical facts deriving from the elementary facts about configuration and causal relationships. That’s basically all you have to work with. An ontology of fields, dynamical geometry, probabilities adds a few twists to this picture, but nothing that changes it fundamentally. So I’m saying there is nothing in this ontology, either fundamental or composite (in a broad sense of composite), which can be identified with—not just correlated with, but identified with—consciousness and its elements. And color offers the clearest and bluntest proof of this.
We can keep going over this fact from different angles, but eventually it comes down to seeing that one thing is indeed different from another. 1 is not 0; is not any specific thing that can be found in the ontology of particles. It reduces to pairwise comparative judgments in which ontologically dissimilar basic entities are perceived to indeed be ontologically dissimilar.
The reason I ask is that you seem to concede that behavior can be entirely accounted for without reference to the missing ontological elements.
What are we trying to explain, ultimately? What even gives us something to be explained? It’s conscious experience again; the appearance of a world. Our physical theories describe the behavior of a world which is structurally similar to the world of appearance, but which does not have all its properties. We are happy to say that the world of appearance is just causally connected, in a regularity-preserving way, to an external world, and that these problem properties only exist in the “world of appearance”. That might permit us to regard the “external world” as explained by our physics. But then we have this thing, “world of appearance”, where all the problems remain, and which we are nonetheless trying to assimilate to physics (via neuroscience). However, we know (if we care to think things through), that this assimilation is not possible with the current physical ontology.
So the claim that we can describe the behavior of things is not quite as powerful as it seems, because it turns out that the things we are describing can’t actually be the “things” of direct experience, the appearances themselves. We can get isomorphism here, but not identity. It’s an ontological problem: the things of physical theory need to be reconceived so that some of them can be identified with the things of consciousness, the appearances.
I understand that you aren’t “merely” positing the inability of a set of particles, positions and energy-states to be an experience.
I am.
I also understand that you consider this a foolish insistence on my part on rejecting the obvious facts of experience. As I’ve said several times now, repeatedly belaboring that point isn’t going to progress this discussion further.
I don’t consider this inability to merely be posited. It’s a matter of understanding what you can and can’t do with the ontological ingredients provided. You have particles, you have non-positional properties of individual particles, you have the motions of particles, you have changes in the non-positional properties. You have causal relations. You have sets of these entities; you have causal chains built from them; you have higher-order quantitative and logical facts deriving from the elementary facts about configuration and causal relationships. That’s basically all you have to work with. An ontology of fields, dynamical geometry, probabilities adds a few twists to this picture, but nothing that changes it fundamentally. So I’m saying there is nothing in this ontology, either fundamental or composite (in a broad sense of composite), which can be identified with—not just correlated with, but identified with—consciousness and its elements. And color offers the clearest and bluntest proof of this.
We can keep going over this fact from different angles, but eventually it comes down to seeing that one thing is indeed different from another. 1 is not 0; is not any specific thing that can be found in the ontology of particles. It reduces to pairwise comparative judgments in which ontologically dissimilar basic entities are perceived to indeed be ontologically dissimilar.
What are we trying to explain, ultimately? What even gives us something to be explained? It’s conscious experience again; the appearance of a world. Our physical theories describe the behavior of a world which is structurally similar to the world of appearance, but which does not have all its properties. We are happy to say that the world of appearance is just causally connected, in a regularity-preserving way, to an external world, and that these problem properties only exist in the “world of appearance”. That might permit us to regard the “external world” as explained by our physics. But then we have this thing, “world of appearance”, where all the problems remain, and which we are nonetheless trying to assimilate to physics (via neuroscience). However, we know (if we care to think things through), that this assimilation is not possible with the current physical ontology.
So the claim that we can describe the behavior of things is not quite as powerful as it seems, because it turns out that the things we are describing can’t actually be the “things” of direct experience, the appearances themselves. We can get isomorphism here, but not identity. It’s an ontological problem: the things of physical theory need to be reconceived so that some of them can be identified with the things of consciousness, the appearances.
I understand that you aren’t “merely” positing the inability of a set of particles, positions and energy-states to be an experience.
I am.
I also understand that you consider this a foolish insistence on my part on rejecting the obvious facts of experience. As I’ve said several times now, repeatedly belaboring that point isn’t going to progress this discussion further.