| | Because I'm a subjective being of unique individual temperament, I agree with some of the article, and disagree with some of it as well.
Re;(How could the ineffable experience of tasting a strawberry ever arise from the equations of physics?)
Via selective individual feedback weightings in our wetbit neural network which either define or augment our possibly augmented by hard-wiring sense of self-preservation, via wiring.
Clearly, it's possible to cross wire some of the pleasure and pain feedback paths.
That is an answer to that 'how could?'
There is no objective evidence that rocks have the wetbits necessary to support neural network processing capability.
I think that possessing 'particles' is far too low a bar, and disagree with the premise, conflating physics with consciousness. Rocks might 'sense' things like gravity and temperature, in that they respond to such things. If someone wants to call that 'consciousness', then I don't know why. It might come from an old worldview of 'power'. John Locke, in "Essays on Human Understanding", expressed the concept of 'power' in an odd, symmetric way, as in "Fire has the power to change Gold, and Gold has the power to be changed by Fire." Do rocks have the power to respond to gravity and/or fire? Modern physics has changed that concept; energy is the ability to do work, as in, exert a force over a distance, and power is the ability to exert energy over time. An ability to direct power is not the same thing as the ability to exert power. Stephen Hawking is conscious, and even if he cannot directly exert much power, he can certainly direct power, and beyond that intelligently direct power to effect creative change in the universe.
If 'rocks' have consciousness, then that defines Hell in this universe; awareness, with no power to interact or effect change, even if just to flee the local insanity.
On the smallest scale, the structures that make up the wiring of our wetbits go way beyond 'particles.' Receptors wrap around transmitters, creating circuits, and the sensitivity/weightings of those circuits are self-alterable via chemical manipulation-- both autonomously and deliberately, via external augmentation; drugs, both medicinal and recreational.
The current quest to discover 'what' is incomplete, but much farther along than the 'how.' (Don't get me started on the 'why.')
Gradients drive everything -- at every level imaginable. I've yet to find an anecdotal exception, even for concepts such as 'love'(which is hugely dependent on the concept 'gradient.') In the universe, absence of gradient is pretty much 'death', an absence not just of 'life' but of identity. The concept 'uniqueness' requires an abrupt gradient of 'identity'- which at its root is why the collectivist 'we are all one, even the rocks!' movement is so insidious; at its root, it is targeting 'death', the end of all gradient, especially in regards to the 'self.' Not everyone of us might have the same neural net weightings in our 'self-preservation' wiring, so we are unequally receptive to this idea of 'death of life/the self.' This hypothetical does nothing to resolve the political struggle in the war of the we against the I, because it still comes down to an imperfect disagreement on where these incompatible beliefs are taking us. "I" believe, to both private and public ruin, but so do the "We," via their own arguments.
When it comes to self mind/brain function, I highly suspect we will find 'gradient' running loose, as one of the usual suspects.
I've often hypothesized, are memories stored as simple 'particles', like magnetic bits on a linear tape of consciousness playback(even that simple model implies gradient along the 'tape'), or, are memories stored as complex multichannel wave functions? Do we remember just sights, or do we remember sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and sensations, in phase? Similarly, can we imagine sequences of similar 'experience' that never happened? Clearly, we can and regularly do imagine(interesting word.) The 'how' is presently up for grabs.
Analogous to our DNA processes, where DNA is not just a linear sequence of GATC, there is also 'rate' information encoded into our DNA. It is not just sequences of bits, but an encoding of rates of change. "Time" is wired into the unfurling of our DNA process.
Our self testing for consciousness in other entities -- not just rocks, but other human forms -- is ultimately a leap of faith on our part, because not only might others be a simple 'Data' automaton-- life inside a machine -- but deep inside of us, our 'self' could be the result of the 'machine inside of life.' You must ask your 'self', what set of self-preservation neural network weightings will balk at that, if it was the truth?
When you see 'yellow', you think 'yellow.' When I see 'yellow', I think 'yellow.' But, we confirm that with each other only by comparison with external third parties. Our common eyes and their common enough wiring feed signals to the sight processing centers of our common enough but not nearly identical neural network processors, with their individual and always changing subjective feedback weightings, and we perceive 'yellow', as an integrated, singular whole being, senses plus perception.
But, how could I ever prove to you that the perception I experience as 'yellow' is the identical perception that you experience? Only by external comparison. That flower is 'yellow' -- reference to an external standard. Yes, you say, that flower is yellow. It's not the 'blue' we see when referring to the sky. But, if 'I' were magically inside of 'you' at the perception end of the event, the act of viewing that yellow flower, would I perceive the actual same color as I do inside of my own neural net? What I perceive as 'yellow', you internally might experience as my 'blue' or even, a color I've never remotely imagined, and vice versa. But via external reference, we are all aligned, so this is never an issue at all. "The sky is blue" only tells me that you call the perceived color of the sky 'blue.' But, that is all I need to objectively interact with others; 'the sky is blue.' Even if I subjectively perceive that color totally differently. How would anyone know? So, do we actually perceive the 'same' color?
Probably. But yet unprovable. Because I can't. For all I know, what you perceive as 'yellow' I would perceive as 'blue.' But we are aligned by our common external reference to objects that we commonly sense with our similar senses, and we have learned to call that common experience 'yellow.'
There would be no consequence to the fact that we all perceived different colors. We would not call the same flower both 'yellow' and 'blue' at the same time, we would agree on the external object's attributes, 'yea, that's yellow all right.' (I'm discounting arguments over 'it's more of an off-white.')
Is it necessary to any axiom of Objectivism that all consciousness perceive reality identically, or only consistently? The sky we both look at has one color, and we agree, without hesitation or consequence, to call that color 'blue,' no matter how we subjectively perceive that color. We agree on external reality--and have no need, in any context, to actually perceive identically the same reality on every level of detail, such as 'color.'
How would this ever be proved or disproved, one way or the other? But moot, because it is also as difficult to imagine a context in which it has any consequences, subjective or objective.
Now, imagine the ability to hook into the sensory apparatus of another individual. Hook what? Our perception processing apparatus. Given the same stimuli, we'd likely still 'see' the same color for the sky. But, what would that prove? That, given similar stimuli, our neural nets perceive the same sensation.
Now imagine the ability to hook into the perception apparatus of another individual. Hook what?
My self-preservation wiring is balking at that concept, telling me that two is a crowd.
But is it? Not for me to dictate to the universe, as it is, with me in it, if it is or isn't. It just either is, or isn't, modifiable under the rules we find ourselves playing.
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