Re:We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop ac...
by strogonoff on Monday June 13, 2022 @02:29PM
(#31729468)
Thanks, I was trying to make roughly the same point in a roundabout way. The comment I replied to seemingly made an implicit assumption not supported by physics, being outside of its scope, that reality causes consciousness, while as you say it could equally be the opposite as far as the framework of natural sciences is concerned.
If so, we should mind both possibilities, and I very much agree that philosophy is key to learning about the issue (as opposed to physics, chemistry, biology and so on), though I might add Kant to your list.
You don't falsify philosophical problems; the definition of consciousness is metaphysical, not scientific (the Chinese room, philosophical zombies, qualia and Mary the color super-scientist, the Turing test...).
You can make falsifiable scientific predictions by building theories about your philosophical concepts, by creating detailed definitions of the process you want to study (e.g. studying brain waves and correlating them with the perceptions of people subject to certain perceptual stimuli, to predict how people respond to certain images or sounds). But this approach doesn't capture the philosophical problem in its entirety, so you can't prove or disprove it in full.