I said nothing of qualia. Science has no tools to even begin trying to model, describe or explain them. All I am saying is that from a physical perspective, a mind is just as deterministic as an orbit. So far nobody has discovered anything to suggest otherwise. You're taking a concept that exists outside the conceptual space of physics and using it to make statements about physical systems.
Re:The Consciousness of Invertebrates
by betwixthewires on Thursday June 10, 2021 @09:20PM
(#27468242)
>So far nobody has discovered anything to suggest otherwise.
Except that every one of us experiences otherwise daily in our own decision making.
How exactly are you down voting me? I thought HN doesn't allow us to down vote responses to our own comments.
This is in stark contrast to modern materialism, the view that what's real are the observations and measurements of the world around you. But to me, to question the existence of consciousness and free will, things every one of us can verify we have with simple thought experiments, while holding our external observations as true, even knowing full well we can never verify them with certainty, is a bit absurd. And if there is free will, that is, capacity for a living creature to decide a course of action on it's own, then there is necessarily some nondeterministic element to it's behavior. And that is what we observe when we look at living creatures, and one defining distinction between living and non living things.
Again, to chock something we experience directly up to illusion while holding things we don't experience directly as truths is a bit absurd. So I do think there's something very interesting going on with the whole consciousness and free will thing, one that we don't understand, and I think those phenomena are intimately tied to the phenomenon of life as well as the phenomenon of evolution.