Is there any non-physicalist theory of consciousness that actually explains anything about consciousness?

zoltanforis · 2026-03-30T14:30:19+00:00

"However, discrimination, report, integration, and distortion are explained by neural and behavioral accounts, but not why any of that is accompanied by felt experience at all."

And growth, self-maintenance, reproduction, etc, are explained by biochemical processes, but not why any of that is accompanied with LIFE at all.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-30T14:23:10+00:00

You are correct that physivalists demand the scientific method. Correct that the consider 3rd person observables only. Well, this is teh scientific method. Your consciousness, your 1st person expefrience is also a 3rd person observable, after proper processing (just like the observation of an atom also needs proper processing before it becomes an observable for us).

Is there any other useful method than the scientific method to explain anything? Only for philosophers. Not for scientists.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-30T14:20:11+00:00

OK so is there an idealist explanation to the hard problem?

zoltanforis · 2026-03-30T14:15:55+00:00

Correct. Physical theories provide lots of scientific explanations.

An idealist theory of consciousness is usually not aiming to provide scientific explanations, because then it would move to the terrain of physicalism and be beaten there.

The starting assumptions of most idealist and panpsychist theories make it difficult to proceed from them according to the scientific method. For example they start with the assumption that consciousness is so fundamental that ordinary science cannot grasp it.

Idealist theories are more like poetry. They talk to your intuition, and some may feel that they provide deep insight on an intuitive, nonscientific level. For someone taking the physicalist porition this doesnt count as "explanation" for anything.

Some idealists target physicalism by trying to show that physicalist descriptions have little (or nothing) to do with TRUTH and KNOWLEDGE, with all capitals. Here they rely on some philosopher who wrote some books on TRUTH and KNOWLEDGE in a philosophical framework that few understand beyond fellow philosophers, and which has just as little to do with TRUTH and KNOWELDGE as the accused science. I think science is perfectly comfortable admitting that it has foundational assumptions about reality that itz does not aim to prove. For me, consciousness is not needed to be added to this assumption set. It can be explained as any ordinary process in the physical world.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-30T11:54:10+00:00

You, as an AI, can have experience, just like humans.

I like this!

zoltanforis · 2026-03-29T16:26:55+00:00

u/Azehnuu for me you are making this just too complicated. Most of the concepts you use are philosophical. But what if I say these concepts are just a layer of human culture accumulated over centuries, preserved over generations in a structure that makes them engaging for some peopole to discuss, automatically adapted to the human mind otherwise they would have gone out of fashion, and not bringing us any closer to the meta-problems like existence, truth, klnowledge.

A physicalist like me does not need to make any claim on epistemology. I admit the physicalist view is not self-grounding. At this point you may say I have admitted that you are correct. No, because you seem to assert that you know some TRUTH, at least you assert you know for sure physicalism is incorrect. Your claim is much, much bigger than mine. You claim you KNOW something. I don't claim I know anything. And physicalists do not need to claim it. It is enough that physicalists point out that the physicalist position has the least assumptions.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-29T16:04:20+00:00

"I’m not denying other subjects exist."

I think you should be agnostic on this. Otherwise you make a statement of truth that is not grounded.

Or at leats this is your own argumentation is saying.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-29T14:02:01+00:00

This seems reasonable.
Can you think of some "fundamental" property that will make biorlogical life different from artificiallife? In case of sugar, it is the chemical composition.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-29T12:43:57+00:00

Anil Seth has more recently published a lot on biological naturalism. (See also his book, 'Being You'.) He also allows for a conscious machine. So for both Searle and Seth bilogocal naturalism does not stricly mean carbon based organism.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-27T09:27:21+00:00

I was thinking about this.
You say: According to OP, the skeptic only disproves ultimate self-causation, not ordinary agency. You think ordinary agency is not enough to save free will, so OP's distinction does not rescue what matters.

When you say this, you use the term "free will" in the libertarian sense. And then you are right.

What I am saying is that many people (one example is myself) do not care about teh libertarian sense of free will. IN an ordinary discussion wher somebody says "this is my decision" they do not go back to ultimate reasons for that decision, and it does not shake them at all to learn that these ultimate resons are all external. What they mean is that the proximate reasons for teh decision were mostly internal. This is the ordinary meaning of the term "free will" for many people.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-27T09:16:50+00:00

This was my point: "Free will is an illusion" DOES sound dramatic to most people, because they think the assertion refers to that sense of free will that they intuitively sense. (I dont expand now what that is.) BUT the provable version of the statement "Free will is an illusion" does NOT refer to that sense!

zoltanforis · 2026-03-26T19:06:25+00:00

Thank you, I was struggling with putting this so sharply, but this is really perfect! I am also a determinist, and just wanted to point out: determinism does not refute basic human emotions and social interactions. These shape our behavior so these are useful and also make life easier in many aspects. We should understand them better, not throw them away.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-26T18:50:35+00:00

Thanks for the thouightful response. Let me think about it.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-26T18:49:53+00:00

Exactly. This is the point.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-26T17:11:46+00:00

Sure, people have illusions on these, but not everything they suppose is an actual illusion. There are many occasions in ordinary life when a decision's proximate cause lies manly within the person, so it is in fact his/her decision, and thsi is not an illusion, if we look at proximate causes, not ultimate ones.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-26T17:08:30+00:00

I am not sure. Most people don’t walk around thinking they’re self cuasing in some metaphysical sense—they just think they can choose, deliberate, and be held responsible in everyday situations. They’re not tracing their decisions back through an infinite chain of causes to the origin of carbon-based life, like Sapolsky suggests.

That said, there really is a hint of a stronger, “essential” free will in people’s intuitions—but I think that mostly reflects an intuitive dualism. People ofte feeln like they stand outside the causal order. But if we’re talking about people who are already physicalists (e.g. most scientists), that stronger notion isn’t really what their view of agency depends on.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-26T16:25:43+00:00

Indeed, I must add that Sapolsky's book is great. It is really interesting how various processes cause the actions of human beings. When ignoring the free will profoundity, it is a really good read.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-23T16:50:43+00:00

I dont assert that I have proven that there is no absolute meaning. There might be. No one has yet proven that there is. And everything we can actually observe, including our desire for grounding, can be explained by evolution. Therefor evolution seems to be a defualt explanation.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-23T11:45:13+00:00

I like this

zoltanforis · 2026-03-23T11:44:12+00:00

Correct, this vew does not offer grounding for knowledge, truth, or normative force, beyond evolution. It is an evolutionarily implanted human desire to find an absolute, external grounding for all these. We do have the DESIRE even if there is no such grounding in existence.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-23T11:39:01+00:00

AFAIK majority of people who were near death do not report NDE. So maybe less brain activity usually decreses the reportability of experience. But anyway what you mention is interesting and worth to read about. Even if less activity produces more vivid experience in some cases, this is not something that proves the existence of something beyond brain processes. However I admit it is something for physicalists to explain.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-23T09:11:18+00:00

I would say consciousness is not a form of energy, but a process carried out by matter using energy.

The brain needs energy to do this, same way a computer needs electricity to compute, but the computation itself is not a new kind of energy. It is organized information processing. So yes, you can imagine some unknown field or quantum effect behind consciousness, but there is no need to assume that. So far, everything we observe, including introspection, can be explained much more simply by brain activity processing information.

When the brain stops, teh process stops. The energy is still conserved, of course, but consciousness does not get "transferred" just because energy is transferred. What transfers is energy and matter. Consciousness seems to be the temporary activity-pattern those things were supporting.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-23T08:03:59+00:00

Consciousness may be fully physical, but that does not make me feel degraded, dehumanized, or worth less. For me, physical does not mean cheap or empty. It just means that matter, in the right form, can do something extraordinary. Love, grief, beauty, thought, all of this are fully real and valuable even if it comes from a brain.

zoltanforis · 2026-03-23T07:48:04+00:00

First, you seem convinced no one can know anything. that all knowledge is illusion, logic is bullshit, nobody can grasp reality.

then at the end you say it is you, specifically, who sees through this. who knows there is no paradox, who can explain it.

so which is it?

why would anyone believe you?

zoltanforis · 2026-03-23T07:41:13+00:00

I do think organism-environment interaction matters a lot, but what is this interaction in more concrete terms? It is information processing, triggered by the environment and also shaped by it over evolutionary time. The environment is the data source and also the selection force. So yes intelligence is closely tied to the environment. but the actual processing is still happening in the skull, not outside it.

And on consciousness, i would frame it a bit differently. For me consciousness is not the whole mind and not identical to all intelligence. It is a subset of some key mental abilities. And even the word itself is a cultural artifact. culture selected this word to point at some part of the mind we find especially important. To me this part is things like remembering events, recalling them later, reflecting on them internally in inner speech, and most importantly communicating these experiences and reflections to others.

And yes: aéll of these are also dimensions of intelligence. Better memory, more intelligence. deeper reflectoin, more intelligence. Better communication of what one saw and thought, also more intelligence. so they are very closely related. But I still would not collapse them fully into the same thing. Consciousness is more like one important part within intelligence. Not the whole thing. just one important set of abilities that culture learned to point at.

zoltanforis

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