Mathematically, it has a large number of degrees of freedom, and I suppose that in reality, those degrees of freedom are busy being your conscious thoughts, perceptions, and so forth.
Whoa, how do you get to make the jump to the degrees of freedom being my conscious thoughts? Whenever anyone else does that, you call it a deficient ontology, denying reality of experience, vaguing out, etc. But you’re doing the exact same thing!
You have no standing on which to object to someone saying, “The brain state consistent with a certain wavelength of EM radiation hitting my eyes is my conscious experience of blue.”
I plead guilty to talking in a way which is ambiguous about the relationship between the actual thing and its mathematical description. I am frankly not sure what the right way to do so is. My objection to the similar identity statements that people produce is that they can’t explain how the identity could be true, and will even define away the phenomenon they are supposed to be explaining.
Whoa, how do you get to make the jump to the degrees of freedom being my conscious thoughts? Whenever anyone else does that, you call it a deficient ontology, denying reality of experience, vaguing out, etc. But you’re doing the exact same thing!
You have no standing on which to object to someone saying, “The brain state consistent with a certain wavelength of EM radiation hitting my eyes is my conscious experience of blue.”
I plead guilty to talking in a way which is ambiguous about the relationship between the actual thing and its mathematical description. I am frankly not sure what the right way to do so is. My objection to the similar identity statements that people produce is that they can’t explain how the identity could be true, and will even define away the phenomenon they are supposed to be explaining.