"I argue that what breathes fire into the QM equations is field-theoretic what-it's-likeness: "microqualia" to use a philosopher's term of art. The different values of the solutions to the ultimate physical equations exhaustively yield the abundance of different values of subjectivity. There is no room for dualism; "nomological danglers"; causally inert epiphenomena; classical, porridge-like lumps of otherwise insentient but magically mind-secreting matter, etc. There is no "explanatory gap" because there aren't any material objects - not even brains or nerve cells as commonly (mis)perceived. Instead, over millions of years, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and universal, (neo-)Darwinian principles of natural selection have contrived to organise a minimal and self-intimating subjective sludge of microqualia into complex functional living units. Initially, these units have taken the form of self-replicating, information-bearing biomolecular patterns. Eventually, selection-pressure has given rise to complex minds as well, albeit as just one part of the throwaway host vehicles by which our genes leave copies of themselves. Conscious mind, on this proposal, is a triumph of organisation: our egocentric virtual worlds are warm and gappy QM-coherent states of consciousness. Contra materialist metaphysics, sentience of any kind is not the daily re-enactment of an ontological miracle. Moreover the idea that what-it's-like-ness is the fire in the equations is (at least) consistent with orthodox relativistic quantum field theory - because the theorists' key notions (e.g. that of a field, string, brane, etc) are defined purely mathematically. In other cases, they readily lend themselves to such a reconstruction. Using the word "physical" doesn't add anything of substance."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Essayists from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandActivists from the United KingdomTranshumanistsUtilitarians
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"Why Does Anything Exist?", "Section Eight", BLTC Research, 1998
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Pearce_(philosopher)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
David Pearce (philosopher)
81 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by David Pearce (philosopher) →
Related Quotes
"All that matters is the pleasure-pain axis. Pain and pleasure disclose the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Our …"
"[N]othing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature [...]."
"Nature documentaries are mostly travesties of real life. They entertain and edify us with evocative mood-music and tr…"
"By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true."
"As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it wil…"
"The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional…"
"When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, …"
"[T]here is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love…"
"[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demoni…"
"[U]nlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfill…"