“Those sensory qualities have come back to bite us,” Goff writes. “Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious.”
In other words, Galileo’s scientific method required walling off the study of consciousness itself, which is why it’s perhaps not surprising that even centuries later, his method’s inheritors still struggle to explain it.
I don't think the so-called "hard problem" is the main, or even a significant, focus of neuroscience. It's mostly the philosophers who worry about it. — Janus
Maybe there is more of focus now than thirty years ago...I don't really know. Maybe it's a category mistake to expect neuroscience to explain consciousness as we intuitively understand it. Maybe that understanding itself is due to reifications of linguistically generated ideas. I don't think it's a problem which really matters much to how we live our lives—there are far more pressing problems facing us right now. — Janus
You can only paper over problems for so long. Eventually the shut up-and-calculate approach fails, and the hard problems become more and more embarrassing. — RogueAI
Galileo is hardly to blame for any of this. — wonderer1
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Mind and Cosmos pp. 35-36
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. — Tom Storm
When did consciousness first show up? Are insects conscious? Can machines become conscious? — RogueAI
A theory of “consciousness” is just the pursuit of a ghostly spirit stuff. Or can you frame the task in a way that is scientific rather than a search for immaterial being? — apokrisis
Science should be able to explain something as fundamental as consciousness, shouldn't it? And why is "consciousness" in quotes? — RogueAI
What first counts as a living organism? — apokrisis
A theory of “consciousness” is just the pursuit of a ghostly spirit stuff. Or can you frame the task in a way that is scientific rather than a search for immaterial being? — apokrisis
Science should be able to explain something as fundamental as consciousness, shouldn't it? — RogueAI
And why is "consciousness" in quotes? — RogueAI
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