Yes, the idea of dark matter is really wild, yet there are people attempting to simulate the evolution of the universe. And you probably accept these simulations as a significant advancement for science, even though they include something we can’t measure or observe.
Look, all I do is present what I find to be the most plausible explanation for qualia. Now, if you disagree, tell me what the alternative is. Maybe this?
The approach the majority of neuroscientists take to the question of how consciousness is generated, it is probably fair to say, is to ignore it. Although there are active research programs looking at correlates of consciousness, and explorations of informational properties of what might be relevant neural ensembles, the tacitly implied mechanism of consciousness in these approaches is that it somehow just happens. This reliance on a “magical emergence” of consciousness does not address the “objectively unreasonable” proposition that elements that have no attributes or properties that can be said to relate to consciousness somehow aggregate to produce it.
Therefore a significant part of neuroscience seems to accept magic as the origin of consciousness, and you seem very comfortable with that. But I’m not comfortable with it because I want to understand where qualia comes from. So yes, I prefer something you cannot measure or observe but at least makes sense, rather than NOTHING or MAGIC, which I believe is your current position.
This paper also continues by saying…
If strong emergence is not considered to be a satisfactory explanation of how consciousness arises, then a reasonable alternative might be that, rather than it emerging at some point in a complex system, it was actually present all along – perhaps even as an exotic field or particle or similar component that comprises the fundamental fabric of the universe. Some ToC include a proposal that consciousness in some most elemental or fundamental form, is a currently unrecognized (in that it is missing from the standard model of particle physics) basic constituent of the universe. For example Benjamin Libet’s “conscious mental field (CMF)” that “would not be in any category of known physical fields, such as electromagnetic, gravitational, etc. ” (Libet, 1994). Such proposals recognize that in a more comprehensive appreciation of the nature of the universe’s most basic composition we would appreciate consciousness in the same way that we appreciate that the fundamental constituents of the universe we know about have properties such as mass and spin and charge. Variations of this idea either propose that everything is, to some degree, consciousness [panpsychism (Skrbina, 2007; Goff et al., 2018)] or that consciousness emerges in a recognizable form, or reaches a critical threshold, only under certain constructions. Clearly, brains would be one such construction (indeed currently the only such construction known to us), but even then, there needs to be an explanation of why some aspects of nervous system function have consciousness and why some have not.
This fragment feels like déjà vu of everything I’ve been saying here that you’ve called irrational. I want to ask a simple question: What is the alternative to panpsychism—magic? Please offer an alternative. Thank you.