Von Neumann's conclusion, reached not as a mystic but as the most rigorous mathematician of his century, was that the break must happen outside the physical. Consciousness is what collapses the wavefunction. Consciousness is what turns the possible into the real.
The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you'll never know whether other people are really conscious, you'll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they're conscious.
Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself.
1mo ago
The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of things in the world—food, safety, beauty, knowledge—and the universe cooperates by containing those things. But there are other things in the universe that do not call to any instinct, that have no utility, that simply exist in their own right.
If there can be no physicalist explanation of subjective mental experiences, then the project of physicalism falls apart. "If we acknowledge that reality surpasses our comprehension [...] then we are back to mystery".
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
