Explaining Explanations
The history of philosophy is polluted by centuries of ersatz "explanations" that are really simple stories to be told around the campfire. For example, the sun rises and sets "because" a god is riding his flaming chariot across the sky. Nobody around the campfire asks why the god is doing this or how the storyteller know this is the case.
I carried my own twisted ideas of "explanation" into my first year of University physics whereupon, after mastering the math behind Newton's theory of gravitation, I asked the instructor, But what is gravity? He said that it was not a proper task of physics to answer such questions. Physics only describes the world. Of course, this does not stop some physicists who still want to know "why" the gravitational constant is what it is, or "why" the Big Bang happened. It is obvious to anyone, that such explanations if they are ever discovered, will only lead to more questions.
Most people are not terribly disturbed by the fact that we don't know what gravity "is". However, they expect to know that consciousness "is". Philosophers and brain scientists are happy to describe the physical workings of the brain and sprinkle their writings with words like "neuron", along with speculation about how neurons "talk to each other" but this is all observation from the outside. The "hard problem" of consciousness is, Why is there an inside? Why does this lump of meat between my ears experience being in the world?
There is no shortage of totally obsolete and absurd "explanations", such as the idea of the soul which somehow lives in the body but migrates on to better things at death. But this is just another story like the god who rides the flaming chariot. It is not based on anything we would call evidence and even if it were, we would still be left to ask, Why does consciousness act like this? What is consciousness made of? Why does it feel this way?
Well, consciousness is just another amazing fact of the universe. The amazing, indisputable fact that we experience the universe. We just do.
I carried my own twisted ideas of "explanation" into my first year of University physics whereupon, after mastering the math behind Newton's theory of gravitation, I asked the instructor, But what is gravity? He said that it was not a proper task of physics to answer such questions. Physics only describes the world. Of course, this does not stop some physicists who still want to know "why" the gravitational constant is what it is, or "why" the Big Bang happened. It is obvious to anyone, that such explanations if they are ever discovered, will only lead to more questions.
Most people are not terribly disturbed by the fact that we don't know what gravity "is". However, they expect to know that consciousness "is". Philosophers and brain scientists are happy to describe the physical workings of the brain and sprinkle their writings with words like "neuron", along with speculation about how neurons "talk to each other" but this is all observation from the outside. The "hard problem" of consciousness is, Why is there an inside? Why does this lump of meat between my ears experience being in the world?
There is no shortage of totally obsolete and absurd "explanations", such as the idea of the soul which somehow lives in the body but migrates on to better things at death. But this is just another story like the god who rides the flaming chariot. It is not based on anything we would call evidence and even if it were, we would still be left to ask, Why does consciousness act like this? What is consciousness made of? Why does it feel this way?
Well, consciousness is just another amazing fact of the universe. The amazing, indisputable fact that we experience the universe. We just do.
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