Hypotheses For Dualism

Most of the world's dualists are substance dualists who believe in a soul, not property dualists who believe in qualia. Attributes of thought, like the ones that you list, may play a part in cementing the idea that mind is different from matter. But the belief in life after death, and survival of the self despite death of the body, must play a huge psychological role. If you can live on even when your body is gone, then you must be some other thing that still exists. Thus the soul, and thus dualism.

Interesting post. Have you read Being No One? He derives a similar system based on studies of interesting neurological phenomena.

I would offer an additional hypothesis for why humans like dualism: We implement dualism neurologically to compactly model cognitive agents. Hence we perceive mind to be ontologically fundamental. This would have had utility in minimising cognitive resource needed to figure out that the growling cat with extended claws "intends" to eat "you".

So that's my thesis: consciousness is the simulation of reality run on the hardware of our brains, and qualia is the Level3+ observation that the reality we perceive is simulated.

One critique: Your thesis puts qualia as higher level than conciousness. As I see it qualia are the neurologically basic distinguishable stimuli; they allow reality to be compressed and conversely error-corrected. Hence we see in colour in spite of being unable to perceive colour across most of our visual field, and can't reproduce stimuli as well as we can distinguish them (disregarding savantism).

I agree in broad terms with your assessment of conciousness as self-simulation. That puts the two things as largely orthogonal; neither requires the other. In practice, I'd assert qualia came earlier - simulating other minds (and your own) being far easier once you're already compressing reality; as these simulations just temporally compress actions.

First, yes, our conscious experience may be of a simulated reality. This is a little surprising, because there are so many topographic representational maps in the brain. I heard a lecture on a type of brain disease which removes a person's perception of moving objects. A woman with this disease explained that she only sees things when they're not moving. So, if she's at a party, and someone walks up to her to talk to her, she doesn't see the person at all until they stop in front of her, when they suddenly appear in front of her and startle her so much that she doesn't go to parties anymore.

If we had conscious access to the topographical representations of our visual field, she would see something in that area of her visual field obstructed by the person.

However, the larger purpose of your post is, I think, a rebuttal to Mitchell Porter's previous post (and you should link to it if it is), which I don't think you understood. (And, judging by its current rating of -4, you're not alone.) You don't want people to say consciousness has a "metaphysical" aspect. I think that you think "metaphysical" is a synonym for "magical", and that the admission of the metaphysical is a denial of Reason and Science.

Newton's theory of gravity was one of the key paradigm-changing developments that gave us science in the first place. But at the time, a lot of people objected to Newton's notion of gravity because it is metaphysical. "Physical" here refers, at any moment, to the set of behaviors explained by your beliefs and intuitions about the physical world. For most of us, the physical is basically kinematics and optics at human scale, and chemistry.

Gravity posited action at a distance. And not a repelling force, which would have been a little more accessible by way of analogy to things like wind or air pressure; but an attracting force.

(I said gravity is metaphysical, not was metaphysical, because IMHO gravity is still not explained by our physics. We have equations that let us make predictions, but our familiarity with them has made us forget how deeply weird gravity is. Using equations to make predictions involving gravity is not very different from using matrix mechanics to make predictions involving quantum mechanics. The fact that you can write F = GmM/r^2 doesn't mean that the force involved fits into your existing ontology. Yes, people say that gravity doesn't act at a distance because things are actually responding to the local curvature of spacetime; or that the gravitational force is communicated by particles called gravitons, which somehow pull things back the way they came from. I don't understand that bending spacetime stuff. It's voodoo to me. I'm not convinced anyone really understands why gravity exists.)

Radioactivity was also, initially, metaphysical. It was a new source of energy that did not fit into the existing physics. Electricity and magnetism were also metaphysical. (As with gravity, I'm not convinced that anybody understands them even today. I gather that they have been reduced to quantum physics by attributing their effects to the interactions of subnuclear particles. That reduces the number of mysterious concepts, but doesn't solve the mystery.)

When someone says that consciousness is metaphysical, all they are saying - all they can be saying; there is no other coherent way to interpret the statement - is that they involve some process not described in our textbooks.

It seems to me at least as likely that there exists something undiscovered that is needed to explain consciousness, as that we can explain it with our existing concepts. If you're going to insist today that we can understand everything without adding any more fundamental concepts of physics, then I conclude you would have also stood against Newton, Gilbert, and Boyle.

Your use of "metaphysical" confuses me. I assume you mean "non-physical", where "physical" is shorthand for "explainable in terms of our theories of physics such that every aspect of the phenomenon can be accounted for".

The observations in your first three hypotheses seem accurate enough. When I ask myself "Where is this thought", what it feels like is that it has a definite location (I can't bring myself to feel as if the thought is located in a different body part than my head), but no definite extent. (Perhaps because it's a small thought. I seem to remember thoughts - insights - that felt bigger than that.) I can think, and apparently make others think, of things that are anywere.

We sometimes simulate reality (e.g. I can imagine getting up from the computer and leaving the room, and even envision consequences of doing that) but I would deny that this is what's going on when I look at my hand, or (since I can no longer now look at my hand in a way that I ordinarily look at it - you have effectively bumped me into simulation mode) an everyday object.

I've just looked at my Mac's menu bar to tell the time - I wouldn't say that I have simulated my computer for the sake of knowing the time.

I know that when I look at my hand, the experience is not as immediate and straight-forward as it seems. It's not me "looking at my hand" -- if by 'me' I mean my conscious self. Instead, my brain is putting together an image of my hand based on sensory information it is receiving from my eye. Nor is it even so simple as "it is me that is aware of a constructed image of my hand". Because the part of me that 'sees' the image is still not my conscious 'me'. What is actually going on is that I imagine 'myself' seeing my hand -- that is, I imagine a 'me' and I imagine this 'me' is seeing a hand. So when I think about it quite carefully, I realize that when I think to myself that I am seeing my hand, this means I am simulating myself seeing a hand.

Since I have been putting a lot of time into learning about what people like to call consciousness this part of the post really leapt out at me.

What am I if I am not the processes that constitute both the physical matter of the brain and the physical patterns that allow the various senses to both operate and combine to produce a model of the outside world (and place me within that model)?

This quote seems to beg this very question. Both Douglas Hofstatder's I am a Strange Loop and Jeff Hawins' On Intelligence maintain that our consciousness is the sum total of the operations that take place in the brain, and that the I that is observing your hand, is just the result of recursive patterns within one's brain.

So, this quote seems to be a strange observation to make for a monist point of view.

This quote reminds me of comments by Searle on how Computationalist or Connectionist theories of mind assert a form of Strong Dualism that really fails to be a criticism of these stances, due to a false implication that these stances are somehow cartesian.