Quote:
Originally Posted by Little Bang
Doesn't ontology sort of imply that consciousness has something to do with reality?
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I am a bit uncertain what you are asking about, but let it be said that certainly we attempt to build an explanation for "consciousness" or "subjective experience" as part of our worldview. And with that topic too, I do see people regularly constraining themselves by some undefendable assumptions that only exist in their particular worldviews.
For example, the "hard problem of consciousness" is partially caused by the assumption that reality is ontologically a set of tiny fundamental entities just like we conceive it; that leads one to wonder how can a huge collection of those tiny fundamental entities together have one subjective experience; why don't the smaller pieces have a subjective experience by themselves? Or what is it with a certain "colony of things" that causes it to have one collective subjective experience? Why doesn't an ant colony, or the New York traffic system have a subjective experience, or does it?
Here's an old post with some commentary about that particular conundrum;
Subjective experience
If I'm allowed to expand on that little bit,
though now I'm forced to speak entirely through my personal worldview; If you wonder what could then be the requirements that a "process" must meet for it to be "subjective experience" (since obviously we define "processes" ourselves, like the NY Traffic System, and we can do that in a completely free and overlapping fashion), it is interesting to note that our subjective experience seems to be entirely composed of an interpretation of the sensory data; interpretation according to a self-built model of reality. A rock falling down a hill is hardly conceiving its situation through a model of reality; it has hardly defined a "rock" and "hill" from some data. (Nor has the NY Traffic System
)
Not only that; the model always includes an identified "self"; data is always interpreted in terms of something happening to one's "self"... ...except maybe when we are infants, in which case we could never have any memories of what happened to ourself at that time, since the data was never interpreted as such... Which is just a specific explanation for infant amnesia.
Okay, hopefully some of that had something to do with what you were asking... ...because it most definitely had very little to do with the topic of this thread
-Anssi
