A bridging law such as Richard is proposing would be something like “when a physical system, i.e. like the brain, is in condition XYZ (a physical description), then it will be conscious of redness, and when it is not in condition XYZ, it will not be conscious of redness.”
I’m sorry, maybe I’m just not getting it, but such laws seem utterly obvious and completely unnecessary when taken from the position that the mind is determined entirely by physical processes (i.e. atoms, molecules, etc).
By way of analogy, I’ll use a computer display. What is seen on a computer display is a culmination of trillions of transistors being in a certain state at a certain time. I may see a picture of a dog on the display, but if I look real close I can see thousands of red, green, and blue lights which make up a pixel. Each pixel has a specific description for the level of light for each sub-pixel needed to create the proper color for that particular portion of the image. This description is held in a specific pattern of positively or negatively magnetized iron molecules. This pattern is used to “switch” certain transistors one way and other transistors the opposite way, creating a specific electrical path through the silicon—like a train lever switches the path a train is on—which culminates in the specific color combination of the pixel in question. This pattern for this pixel is part of a similar, larger pattern which includes thousands of such patterns. The result is a dog on the screen, created by a thousand very specific paths of electricity repeated 60 times per second.
Even in that description, I skipped over a lot of what happens, but you should get the gist. Put a computer scientist and an electrical engineer in the same room and they can explain in perfect detail how everything you see on a computer screen physically happens. I don’t see how consciousness in relation to the brain is any different from the computer monitor in relation to the computer hardware in my analogy above. The only reason someone might think the picture of the dog is not determined by a specific path of electrons is because they do not understand how a computer works.
I’m sorry, maybe I’m just not getting it, but such laws seem utterly obvious and completely unnecessary when taken from the position that the mind is determined entirely by physical processes (i.e. atoms, molecules, etc).
By way of analogy, I’ll use a computer display. What is seen on a computer display is a culmination of trillions of transistors being in a certain state at a certain time. I may see a picture of a dog on the display, but if I look real close I can see thousands of red, green, and blue lights which make up a pixel. Each pixel has a specific description for the level of light for each sub-pixel needed to create the proper color for that particular portion of the image. This description is held in a specific pattern of positively or negatively magnetized iron molecules. This pattern is used to “switch” certain transistors one way and other transistors the opposite way, creating a specific electrical path through the silicon—like a train lever switches the path a train is on—which culminates in the specific color combination of the pixel in question. This pattern for this pixel is part of a similar, larger pattern which includes thousands of such patterns. The result is a dog on the screen, created by a thousand very specific paths of electricity repeated 60 times per second.
Even in that description, I skipped over a lot of what happens, but you should get the gist. Put a computer scientist and an electrical engineer in the same room and they can explain in perfect detail how everything you see on a computer screen physically happens. I don’t see how consciousness in relation to the brain is any different from the computer monitor in relation to the computer hardware in my analogy above. The only reason someone might think the picture of the dog is not determined by a specific path of electrons is because they do not understand how a computer works.