These two worlds may be correlated, that is being demonstrated every day by neuroscience, but they simply cannot be identified under the physical ontology we have.
What exactly do you take the purpose of an ontology to be? If you have a scientific theory whose predictions hit the limit of accuracy for predicted experience why do you need anything in your ontology beyond the bound variables of the theory?
An ontology is a theory about what’s there. The attributes of experience itself, like color, meaning, and even time, have been swept under a carpet variously labeled “mind”, “consciousness”, or “appearance”, while the interior decorators from Hard Science Inc. (formerly trading as the Natural Philosophy Company) did their work. We have lots of streamlined futuristic fittings now, some of them very elegant. But they didn’t get rid of the big lump under the carpet. The most they can do is hide it from view.
We don’t have access to “what is there”. What we have are sensory experiences. Lots of them! Something is generating those experiences and we would like to know what we will experience in the future. So we guess at the interior structure of the experience generator and build models that predict for us what our future experiences will be. When our experiences differ from expected we revise the model (i.e. our ontology). This includes modeling the thing that we are which improves our predictions of our own experiences and our experiences of what other humans say are their experiences. One thing humans report is the experience is seeing color. So we need to explain that. One thing humans report is the experience is self-awareness so we have to explain that etc. You seem to want to reify the sensory experiences themselves just because they look different in our model than in our experience. But the model isn’t supposed to look like our experience it is supposed to predict it. You’re making a category error. Presumably you know this and think the problem is the categories. But you need to motivate your rejection of the categories. All I want are predictions and I’ve been getting them, so why should I reject this model?
The attributes of experience itself, like color, meaning, and even time, have been swept under a carpet variously labeled “mind”, “consciousness”, or “appearance”,
But lots of scientists study these things! Last semester I learned all about auditory and visual perception. There is a lot we don’t know which is why they’re still working on it.
We don’t have access to “what is there”. What we have are sensory experiences.
So we know that whatever is there must include those sensory experiences. They themselves are part of reality.
But the model isn’t supposed to look like our experience it is supposed to predict it.
Most models of reality are partial models that implicitly presuppose some untheorized notion of experience in the model-user. Medicine and engineering aren’t especially focused on the fact that doctors and engineers encounter the world, like everyone else, through the medium of conscious experience.
But there are two types of explanatory enterprise where conscious experience does become explicitly relevant. One is any theory of everything. The other is any science which does take experience as its subject matter. In the latter case, scientists will explicitly theorize about the nature of experience and its relationship to other things. In the former case, a theory of everything must take a stand on everything, including consciousness, even if only to say “it’s made of atoms, like everything else”.
So some part of these models is supposed to look like experience. However, as I have been saying elsewhere, nothing in physical ontology looks like an experience; and the sciences of consciousness so far just construct correlations between “physics” (i.e. matter) and experience. But they must eventually address the question of what an experience is.
What exactly do you take the purpose of an ontology to be? If you have a scientific theory whose predictions hit the limit of accuracy for predicted experience why do you need anything in your ontology beyond the bound variables of the theory?
An ontology is a theory about what’s there. The attributes of experience itself, like color, meaning, and even time, have been swept under a carpet variously labeled “mind”, “consciousness”, or “appearance”, while the interior decorators from Hard Science Inc. (formerly trading as the Natural Philosophy Company) did their work. We have lots of streamlined futuristic fittings now, some of them very elegant. But they didn’t get rid of the big lump under the carpet. The most they can do is hide it from view.
We don’t have access to “what is there”. What we have are sensory experiences. Lots of them! Something is generating those experiences and we would like to know what we will experience in the future. So we guess at the interior structure of the experience generator and build models that predict for us what our future experiences will be. When our experiences differ from expected we revise the model (i.e. our ontology). This includes modeling the thing that we are which improves our predictions of our own experiences and our experiences of what other humans say are their experiences. One thing humans report is the experience is seeing color. So we need to explain that. One thing humans report is the experience is self-awareness so we have to explain that etc. You seem to want to reify the sensory experiences themselves just because they look different in our model than in our experience. But the model isn’t supposed to look like our experience it is supposed to predict it. You’re making a category error. Presumably you know this and think the problem is the categories. But you need to motivate your rejection of the categories. All I want are predictions and I’ve been getting them, so why should I reject this model?
But lots of scientists study these things! Last semester I learned all about auditory and visual perception. There is a lot we don’t know which is why they’re still working on it.
So we know that whatever is there must include those sensory experiences. They themselves are part of reality.
Most models of reality are partial models that implicitly presuppose some untheorized notion of experience in the model-user. Medicine and engineering aren’t especially focused on the fact that doctors and engineers encounter the world, like everyone else, through the medium of conscious experience.
But there are two types of explanatory enterprise where conscious experience does become explicitly relevant. One is any theory of everything. The other is any science which does take experience as its subject matter. In the latter case, scientists will explicitly theorize about the nature of experience and its relationship to other things. In the former case, a theory of everything must take a stand on everything, including consciousness, even if only to say “it’s made of atoms, like everything else”.
So some part of these models is supposed to look like experience. However, as I have been saying elsewhere, nothing in physical ontology looks like an experience; and the sciences of consciousness so far just construct correlations between “physics” (i.e. matter) and experience. But they must eventually address the question of what an experience is.