The irony of one who charges another with exactly what they are guilty of doing. I'm not interested in continually explaining with someone who doesn't even accept and/or understand when an adequate explanation has been given. I'll add this and see how it goes...

Continually? You never explained anything even once. I explained in the opening post why the problem is hard, what exactly is not clear to you?

If consciousness is not adequately accounted for in terms of "objective" and "subjective", then any and all notions of human thought and belief based upon that dichotomy cannot take consciousness into proper account. Consciousness consists - in very large part - of human thought and belief.

You keep making vague and empty assertions. How does that have to do with anything I said?

The problem is based upon a gross misunderstanding(misconception) of human thought and belief as a result of being based upon the objective/subjective dichotomy. As is qualia...

Empty statement with no explaination, again. I conclude it is you who has gross misunderstanding of what the problem is.

In my thesis, the universe began as non-conscious creative Energy

You keep making empty statements. How does that have anything to do with this thread and what I said in the opening post?

The purported 'hard problem' is dissolved - as is many other so-called 'problems' - when we quit using utterly inadequate frameworks to talk about stuff.

Maybe if you are a robot and wish to claim qualia is an illusion. But what is it you want to say anyway, you forgot to explain.

No, again, the whole point is that the concept of a "system" is the most generic and fundamental. Properties are features and functions of systems.....It's a new vocabulary.

System can not be without at least two elements, each of which must have at least one property able to interact with a property of another which will then define the force between them, and the force will define how the system behaves. Right? So I am asking, can we agree then, sentience, or basic element of it, must be either property or force?

What experiment you suggest could help explain?

Consciousness is no less tangible than atoms. Yet it is also just as mysterious as the underlying laws governing universal forces.

Let us see how low can we get the bottom line. We only have one concept to explain everything - “property”. At atom scale there is electric and magnetic property of individual subatomic elements. Causal interaction between properties gives rise to forces. All the way up through emergent layers this repeats with new emergent properties which give rise to new emerging forces.

Can we agree then, sentience, or basic element of it, must be either property or force?

Does it make more sense if sentience was property or force, or neither? Why?

Color is analog variable, exactly like wavelength of EM waves. What meaning does it have if I say 'red' is just another name for 700nm wavelength? Is there not a possible reality where that statement is actually the answer, and what exactly would be missing from that description to make it fully satisfying?

Though it is possible to make an analogy, such as "red looks hot", or to provide a description of the conditions under which the experience occurs, such as "it's the color you see when light of 700-nm wavelength is directed at you", supporters of this kind of qualia contend that such a description is incapable of providing a complete explaination

Perfectly simple solution is that 700nm actually equals 'red' in some specific circumstances and in a way we yet don't understand.

Functional properties can emerge from complex arrangements of other things with simpler functional properties, but if some wholly new irreducible thing is supposed to emerge, you’re talking magic.

Emergence is what connects all sciences from atoms to galaxies. If emergent, then by content it must be reducible to lower level elements it emerges from, like everything else. Whether emergent properties are irreducible is another question.

More to the point, it's about something which is objective.

Yes. What I mean is that people keep putting forward different theories in terms of some process, function, some dynamics without realizing they are all the same in a very basic sense, which is that this type of mechanical explanation could never really end our curiosity and actually answer the question. It's simply not the category of description that could scratch that itch.

Consider emergent properties of liquidity or acidity. Imagine hypothetical entity living one complexity layer below at the scale of electron, and say, they actually can calculate and describe dynamic of molecules and chemistry, which to their scale are like galaxies are to us. They can describe liquidity and acidity in terms of motion without knowing what is it they are describing. How could they ever really comprehend those emergent properties which on their scale of existence simply have no meaning?

There is a distinction between distraction and daydreaming, yes?

Some people continue to play piano or drive a car as if nothing happened while having an epileptic seizure, which means totally unconscious. They of course don't remember anything, but can function almost normally - stop at red light, make correct turns, drive home safely. They only fail to react when something novel or surprising happens, they loose ability to act creatively.

Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is.

"Functional analysis" makes me doubt he explains anything. Can you sum it up what does he say about what a 'consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is'?

My thesis does not try to explain G*D, but merely takes the First Cause hypothesis as a reasonable axiom

Your thesis explains nothing, it postulates another question as an answer. And questions are not answers, you know?

Besides, far more reasonable axiom is that it is actually me who created both tHe FiRsT cAUsE and *G&O%D#, and you see how that already explains much more.

God did it! What a satisfying answer, let us pretend that explains everything about us and our world, so we are only left to explain it all over again for the gods and their worlds. Why make the problem worse for no reason at all?

In any case, consciousness has been studied scientifically and is amenable to scientific study.

The only type of answer we can give is in terms of motion, something moves somewhere and then poof, that's consciousness. That's all we can do. And panpsychism, but even there it's about motion as to how it is all supposed to come together.

We have the tools to explain consciousness as much as we have to explain god. We have no words to even point anywhere near it, except to call it "magic" and pretend that means something. We do not know if it's supposed to be a process, configuration, state, property, illusion... and even if we knew, all those are again based on some type of motion and mechanics.

Consciousness doesn't seem to be anywhere near any of those categories. It's something else, it's out of our dimension, perhaps literally, and these types of sci-fi non-verifiable theories actually make more sense than anything scientific based on bumping of atoms and electrons, or quantum randomness bubbling sentience out of its ass.

Some of us do.

Go ahead then, say it.

What do you believe and why and/or how did you arrive at that belief?

Problem is much deeper, it's called "symbol grounding problem". We don't know where do we get the meaning for anything at all. We don't really know what the word "meaning" actually means.

Can you trust your own mind?

Not really, because you are your consciousness, which is a virtual machine emulated inside the machine called subconsciousness. And from the consciousness point of view, being a virtual machine system, it is effectively running inside a simulator.

Although, this does not necessarily mean reality is an illusion, however we know it certainly is not the full or accurate description either, so likely it's just an abstraction, kind of like operating system graphical user interface hiding all the complexities of the underlying lower level details of the system.

As a field, Aether has mathematical structure and dynamics, but no material structure.

Maxwell got his equations based on fluid dynamic of Aether. There is no discussion here, you either do not believe this statement is true or you do not understand what it means.

You can't touch the immaterial field, but the atoms in your finger are affected by the spooky-action-at-a-distance of force fields.

Dear god! You confused transparent with immaterial and then just hallucinated total nonsense out of thin air. Quantum entanglement has nothing to do with attractive and repulsive forces of the magnetic and electric field. Clearly you lack basic knowledge in both classical and quantum physics. I'm out of here.

It all depends on what you mean by "conceptual". Of course atoms are not litereally concepts in the ordinary sense that we understand concepts to be ideas in people's heads.

What I meant is clear in my question and the whole last paragraph, both of which you ignored again.

On the other hand, if I take mountain/erosion as metaphor for change, then I must say experience doesn’t change; each is as it is in itself. Experience is singular and successive, not a unity and changing, the technical definition of consciousnesss.

Don’t want to take you off on a tangent, but......just wonderin’.

You are making exactly the right point - qualia is integrated information.

It's a physical effect, a realization in the form of 'inner representation'. See, looking at all the electric impulses in the brain and expecting to find consciousness is like looking at electrons running in the hardware components of a PC and expecting to see what program it is running.

All that information has to come to some place where it's finally integrated, realized, where the signals become qualia. For a PC that place is the monitor, only there all the movement of electrons in the hardware components actually realize their true meaning, and that meaning exist in a higher emergent layer - not scale of electrons and atoms, but scale of complex electronic components.

Similarly, we should not look for qualia between neuron signals, but at a higher level of complexity emerging from those signals, or even higher, i.e. somewhere between overlapping densities of electric and magnetic fields of the wrinkly cortex. It also means qualia can not emerge from neural network software, it needs actual 3D space and actual EM fields - it can not be simulated, only emulated.

All of those are items, in one way or another, of human experience; they are always already in conceptual form, so they are not what I have been talking about.

Do you perceive yourself as a conceptual form, without "self", without your own intention? Those layers are not conceptual forms, they are causal and autonomous entities in their own size scale. By the way, I ask my question in the sentence after the one you quoted, and I make my point in the paragraph you ignored.

Think experience in the sense of undergoes. Like the mountain experiences erosion. Conscious experience emerges out of a matrix of primordial process or undergoing which is beneath, I.e. transcendental to, conscious experience.

We see emergent layers of existence emerging directly from previous ones: atom - molecule - cell - organ - organism... Why then say conscious experience emerges from way down below instead from the previous size scale like everything else?

Mind emerges from the dynamics of overlapping densities of the magnetic and electric fields in the wrinkly cortex. Only now emergent layers reverse direction and new complexity of collective entities emerge inwards into the smaller and smaller size. We might be talking about the same size scale at the end, but I think I'm talking about a completely different realm, mental realm, quite real, testable and measurable, if we only manage to get sufficient resolution and recognize those emergent elements or "mental atoms".

Plato's Ideal Realm of Forms, and the Quantum Field, and the Akashic Field, and the Aether Field are all metaphors for something that is not real or physical, but ideal or metaphysical.

Aether has structure and dynamics, fluid dynamics of vortices to be precise. That is how Maxwell originally got his equations, but it was forgotten and what you today call Maxwell's equations are not his original equations that defined photon and EM waves.

In physics, a "field" is a continuum (non-particular empty space) where something can be mathematically defined, even though it can't be seen or touched. That void-vacuum-space is typically defined by an infinite array of mathematical "points" which are completely abstract loci of pure Information. They are all materialistic fantasies of ghostly invisible and intangible entities that exist only in the mind of the "observer".

Electric and magnetic fields can be touched, that's all you ever touch. They can be measured, and that means 'material' even if it is transparent to our eyes. Phantasies are ok if they give you predictive power, but what do you do with a theory which gives you nothing to measure and no way to confirm?

Where do you see the connection between Platonic realm of geometry and that of Quantum field? I say it's Aether, and that already makes more sense as it is material, i.e. measurable. Then I can say Aether contains abstract information from Platonic realm embedded in it. Surely, this is much better theory?

Virtual particles which are actually real, and abstract realm which is actually material. Again, it is semantically impossible to talk about it if some words can flip their meaning 180 degrees. Phase change is property of matter, you can not extrapolate that to abstract without asserting that abstract is actually material or embedded in something material to start with.

The pain evaluation part is an extra and unnecessary step as far as objective behavior goes. It actually slows reaction time. What's the point?

Let me try. Sensors existed before consciousness and they caused chemical and electrical reactions. When sentience appeared it could not choose how to interpret that signal. Information in the signal was not in the form TYPE:PRIORITY, but TYPE:INTENSITY, which has the advantage that now consciousness can decide priority, and it just so happens this intensity for the signal of pain feels like it hurts. If unnecessary, maybe 10,000 years in the future humans will feel the pain hurts less, which will make them more adventurous, and that is good, or bad, who knows!

In any case, suffering of the pain may just be a side effect. The purpose of qualia I expect to find in functions like intention and imagination, something along those lines, something that can not be computed, for some reason.

I like to hear any theory, but have too much to read already. Can you say anything about the actual process of materialization of those abstractions?

I admit properties of atoms are mysterious and magical just as the concept of god, but it's simpler assumption, leaves us with less questions to wander about, and thus is more reasonable

People have been talking about Plato's "Forms", and Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover" for thousands of years. Yet they don't exist in space-time. So what was the point of their Philosophy? Was it about physical Things, or metaphysical Ideas?

Abstraction (information) needs matter/energy to be causally relative. Abstractions exist in minds, which do exist in time and space. Unmoved Mover can also be a bunch of particles with incredible properties as we see them, rather than magical being with properties that can not be seen. What assumption is more fantastic?

Perhaps if you said every and each atom is Unmoved Mover by itself, I would see no objection unless you want to ascribe to them some new magical properties.

This reminded of Starflight game fom DOS days, where the fuel they used for interstellar travell turned out to be sentient lifeform.

Perhaps I should have explained the parallel with the brain in detail. Anyway, the point was that our definitions are far too wide to grasp the concept, and I think PC-monitor example precisely points where we need to dig deeper and be more specific in order to understand _what is_ consciousness or sentience, not just what it does and how it works.

I don’t even see any ideas trying to explain ‘what is’ question. We are creating an AI hoping sentience just might pop up somewhere in there, but we have no idea what to look for or where exactly. It could be right under our noses, right in front of us on our computer screens and we would not know it.

If nothing moved, time wouldn't stand still, it would end

It would end, or it would begin.

Time is generally considered to be the fourth dimension, isn't it?

Yes, for other reasons. Time is abstract, does not exist separatelly from the concept of velocity, like angle does not exist without two lines. Time can not be measured directly, all we measure is rate of change, i.e. velocity. Unfortunatelly, velocity is also abstract, it does not exist without time, so neither time nor velocity actually exist.

That's a bit strong. There's much talk, in the Land of Metaphysics, of what is or may be beyond time and space. Like Donald Trump, for instance.

I mean semantically it is impossible to talk about the existence of something if there are separate special meanings for the word "exist", "never" and "nowhere" which only apply to that special 'something'.

Btw, time is not actually a property, there is nothing it can be a property of, except "change' itself. Thus it can't be a dimension in literal sense, it's just an abstract consequence of motion. You could say there is always time, but it stands still if nothing moves or there is nothing to move.

The only reasonable answer to that fundamental question is "creation" ex nihilo. Which is why I assume that the Creator must exist eternally outside of space-time (i.e. nothingness). I

To exist outside of the time is to exist never. To exist outside of space is to exist nowhere. It means it does not exist and that it never existed. If this simple logic is not obvious there is really no point in talking about this anymore, or about anything really.

But the "intention" I mentioned was in the mind of the encoder/programmer, who tilted the playing field in order to influence the outcome without presetting all the intermediate details. Thus, allowing a degree of freedom within determinism.

Yes, it makes no sense we just happen to exist. The problem is this god would be thinking the same thing. This god could also be shapeshifting lizard aliens who put us in the simulator, but they too would be thinking it makes no sense they just happen to exist for no good reason.

However you turn it around it doesn't make sense because the real question underneath is - why is there something rather than nothing? And whatever answer goes there must seem magical to us. But what is more fantastic, that 'something' is simply a bunch of particles that just happen to encode in their properties huge number of combinatorial possibilities, some of which look like what we see around us, or that 'something' is simply a bunch of something that just so happens to be conscious and magical being.

It could also be said then, the purpose of sentience is imagination, the ability to create ideas. But still, why qualia?

As for why pain needs to be unpleasant rather than just a signal to the brain, I suggest that if it were merely a signal it could be ignored, like spam in one's inbox, to the detriment of the survival of the organism.

I feel there might be some truth there, but if it's all just about computation, then much simpler solution is to simply flag signals by priority, just like PC.

With all the thinking/doing of the brain areas already done and finished and represented as qualia, sequential consciousness is too late in the cycle to do any conscious thinking of its own, but the cycle continues…

Too late at the momement, but maybe not for the next time.