▲ | yeoyeo42 18 hours ago | |
it's not meaningless, it has several direct implications about the nature of reality. consider that subjective experience - to put it in the weakest and most general statement - clearly has a physical component. I'm being careful to not say that it is a physical phenomenon, is caused by physical phenomena, and so on, because while I think that's a reasonable assumption, we technically have no evidence for it. but we do have plenty of evidence that, even if it is some supernaturally created magical process, subjective experience interacts with the physical world. for one, it clearly exchanges information with basic physical systems in your body - if it did not have some way to exchange information about what your eyes are seeing, you wouldn't be able to experience sight. subjective experience is also easily altered with simple physical phenomena like chemical substances in your brain. so either these physics directly modify your subjective experience, or the subjective experience you have is mostly a physical product of your brain and the subjective experience part is only the end point of the process that receives all the information. it's interesting because in physics, any exchange of information implies the existence of some directly measurable physical process. anything that is the product of such a process, you can generally speaking measure. all the things you can measure in an experiment are the things we eventually call the fundamental components of nature - like the charge, spin and so on of particles, as well as their place in time and space. so subjective experience is either already some part we haven't observed of those fundamental components - which would in some way imply that everything is subjectively experiencing all the time - or it's an extra element we have not yet observed, but may be able to directly observe in experiment in the future. |