NEVER? Then you are arguing that magic exists. Either physics is able to explain a certain process, or that process violates the laws of physics. Right?
Wrong , our
understanding of physics .. not physics.
Back to the 10th century , our understanding of physics was limited, and we did not understand what gravity is, does that mean that it was "magic" back then?
No.
Magic is defined as something that is not subject to physical and natural laws ... Unless we have a theory of everything, you cannot say that such and such is
magic.
Oh, well here is our disagreement right there. I claim that there is nothing in physics which can't be known to us. Claiming otherwise is to claim that magic exists.
I claim that there are physical material truths (not magic) that are forever hidden from us. why?
because logic necessitates that they be hidden from us.
That's why I hold skepticism , (the view that knowledge is impossible in principle).
Tell me, do you really believe that given unlimited advancement we still wouldn't be able to replicate or understand the human brain? Even 10,000 years from now? 10 million? 10 billion? Why?
I think we would be able to do that, and I even think that we will be able to even replicate consciousness in doing so.
But we will never be able to know that we did that. Even if we could do that. 'Can' does not imply "Know".
If you properly understand how an atom works, and you properly understand what is required for a subjective experience, then yes you absolutely can. For instance, if we are able to replicate the process of consciousness to such a degree that we can say "a subjective experience requires a minimum of 13 million interactions", and we know an atom has only 4 interacting parts, then that will PROVE that it's not possible for a single atom to have a subjective experience, as it lacks enough parts. In much the same way that we can conclude that a single bit on a computer does not have enough parts to run Microsoft Office. But the only reason we can conclude that is because we understand both of them well enough.
Yes, but the problem is in what I highlighted, I simply claim (this is my claim) that such knowledge (such understanding) is impossible.
Why?
Because to know what is required for a subjective experience, you have to verify which conditions are met when a subjective experience emerged.
But you cannot know whether the system you are observing has subjective experience, you cannot verify that with certainty. There is always a room for doubt. That's why I say that knowledge is impossible here.
And even my claim, I take it with a grain of salt, it is not only that which I don't know, even my claim I don't know whether it is true or false.
Given all that epistemic doubt, when I say that we will never know, I mean : Probably.
Why probably?
Because I never tried to do that in the lab, my argument is solely dependent on logic alone. And not everything we can logically argue for is necessarily the truth.
Maybe there is a way to verify subjective experience in the lab, which defies logic, and which cannot be reasoned with using formal traditional logical arguments (like quantum mechanics).
And maybe there is not.
And since I only have logic as a tool, I say probably logic is valid : there is probably no way we can know anything about subjective experience, based on objective observations.
And that's not to say that consciousness is magic, or that it does not emerge from the material. Sure, it is the material interactions that produce that conscious experience. But how? I don't know.
My point isn't that we do understand them well enough to conclude that, but rather to try to get you to admit that your statement of "we can't know if an atom has a subjective experience" is, in principal, a false statement. The only way out of this is to claim that certain laws of physics are literally impossible to know. Again, this is the equivalent of magic.
We can, reasonably, observe which neurons fire when one sees a red quale, and compare that to which ones fire when they see a blue quale.
But we cannot BE those neurons to see things from their perspective. This kind of knowledge (the knowledge of what it is like to be something else) is probably forever hidden from us.
For example : if you take just two interacting atoms, it is impossible to conclude that they are "not conscious" from observing their interactions.
This is my argument :
- Premise 1 : IF you can know the subjective experience (or the lack of it) of a complex system THEN we could know the subjective experience of a simple system.
- Premise 2 : We cannot know the subjective experience of a simple system
- Conclusion : we cannot know the subjective experience of a brain.
I will further elaborate : Premise 1 , means that if we can know everything about the brain, and conclude that it is conscious , then it would be possible to use the same principles to conclude that two atoms interacting with each other are not a conscious system.
But we cannot know whether a simple system (a water molecule for instance) does not have conscious experience. I mean, there is no way to start from the fact that we observe a water molecule, to conclude that it is not conscious, that it lacks subjective inner experience (no matter how this inner experience is negligble)
Therefore it follows that the antecedent in the conditional is false : we cannot know anything about the subjective experience of what it is like to be another brain, even if we know everything about the neurons and their interactions.
And because my argument is only a deductive logical argument. I keep an area of doubt and say that my argument is probably sound.
