There are some faculties of human consciousness direct introspection cannot explain.
For example, the way our minds make sense of words, concepts, and perceived phenomena.
Sitting under a tree and reflecting directly on our experience of how we understand the difference between a chair we sit on and a chair on a board of directors will not reveal the way it actually occurs in the brain.
We need to look from outside ourselves, using external tools, to get at the processes of those aspects of our immediate experience.
That fact has not prevented people from persisting with inquiries through direct reflection and discussion, the same way philosophers and other intellectuals did before science discovered we could not figure these things out by only thinking about them, about our own experience of consciousness directly.
Some very clever people continue coming up with explanations they believe define the qualities of things that exist, by using direct reflection on their own experiences of consciousness. They are doing what Descartes and others did, using that approach.
They want to convince the rest of us this is how we know something such as our own immediate existence. This is, however, not scientifically accurate, simply because it doesn’t explain anything.
Here is an example, which I don’t expect anyone to read with any seriousness. It is enough to look at the Axioms, “the essential properties of experience,” to know that this is not science but semantic wrangling in the same manner as Descartes: http://www.scholarpedia.org/…/Integrated_information…
When we try to get at certain underlying phenomena using only our direct mental faculties and words, we run into the problem of circular reasoning and this other mental process by which our ideas wrap back around themselves.
Not precisely the same as circular reasoning, in which A equals B by definition, the wrap-around effect includes a concept of yes and no being the same when there is a central question, the answer to which is one or the other.
We identify things as some thing or not that thing. The theory (IIT) for instance seeks to identify what is something from what does not exist, which presupposes that is worthy of our attention and energy.
My purpose here is not to denigrate the serious attention people still give to these questions and approaches. It is merely to point out that this is not science in the current sense of how actual scientists go about discovering the underlying principles of reality.
Furthermore, I have no problem acknowledging the potential value of continuing to ask direct questions and coming up with elaborate answers and theories.
It is no less worthwhile than sports, for instance. We should look at it as a kind of performance art in a long tradition of similar practices.
Of course, I am not writing anything particularly original here. Google Noam Chomsky YouTube for similar reflections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vfLKaLvDuk
In case anyone disputes the ultimate veracity of this, consider that even in the example of IIT cited above, the color blue is blue only because in English we define that wave length of light as perceived by the letters on the page and the corresponding sound we associate with those letters in our minds.
We can recreate those sounds because of other shared anatomical features and replicated processes in our brains, on which our minds and consciousness depend.
To get at what is actually going on there, just as with DNA and evolution, it is insufficient to reflect and discuss.
Even what I just described did not come from walking and talking about my experience of who I am and consciousness.
People performed and replicated experiments and discovered the underlying features and processes, the same way earlier humans worked with materials to gain a knowledge of liquids, solids and gases and, later, subatomic particles.
As much as I would love to sit in a coffeeshop and chat my way to a cure for cancer, that is not the way the universe works after all. Discussion is useful. Even discussion about theories from Plato to IIT can yield incredible insight.
They are just not breakthroughs of any kind for practical outcomes in and of themselves, and we should consider them no more or less interesting than that NBA game recently where Lebron and the Lakers gave the game away.
Now, that’s one for the ages.
Afternote:
The choice of the Lakers game is by no means random. Consider why the two guys who came up with IIT chose laundry on a bed as their example.
Rhetorically, this is to draw us in with specifics that are seemingly simple and familiar. But for the theory to be true even its own terms, it must apply to a basketball game or the Battle of Waterloo.
The problem, of course, is that as the “set” or observed existing things become more complex and must exist noticeably in time from different points of view, it becomes more difficult to account for what exists and how we perceive it.
These guys want to isolate the questions, setting aside General Relativity and other theories between now and Newton, Descartes, Hume, et alia.
Again, that’s fine, but let’s not kid ourselves about what they are doing.
I Dwell In Possibility 