why [...] do brains in particular seem to have a lot of it?
We don’t actually have much (or any) evidence that they do. That is not the kind of thing that can be observed. (this is the main bitter bullet that has to be bitten to resolve the paradox)
I think magnitude of pleasure and pain in a system is going to be defined as experiential measure of the substrate times some basically arbitrary behaviourist criterion which depends on what uplifted humans want to empathise with or not, which might be weirdly expansive or complicated and narrow depending on how the uplifting goes.
the key word, the whole question, the only reason anyone is asking, is “seem to”. that’s where our inquiry flows from. and I think it gets resolved by something about structures representing other structures. neuroscience stuff, mental representation, etc. the “easy problem” ends up being mostly about “so, what lead to this structure forming those references and keeping them up to date?” which is an empirical question about how stuff impacting nerves gets integrated in a way that matches the external structure, and the hard problem is just “why do any structures get the privilege of existing” + “why locality”
another way to put this is, why are these atoms aware of more than just the brute fact of existence?
We don’t actually have much (or any) evidence that they do. That is not the kind of thing that can be observed. (this is the main bitter bullet that has to be bitten to resolve the paradox)
I think magnitude of pleasure and pain in a system is going to be defined as experiential measure of the substrate times some basically arbitrary behaviourist criterion which depends on what uplifted humans want to empathise with or not, which might be weirdly expansive or complicated and narrow depending on how the uplifting goes.
the key word, the whole question, the only reason anyone is asking, is “seem to”. that’s where our inquiry flows from. and I think it gets resolved by something about structures representing other structures. neuroscience stuff, mental representation, etc. the “easy problem” ends up being mostly about “so, what lead to this structure forming those references and keeping them up to date?” which is an empirical question about how stuff impacting nerves gets integrated in a way that matches the external structure, and the hard problem is just “why do any structures get the privilege of existing” + “why locality”
another way to put this is, why are these atoms aware of more than just the brute fact of existence?