And as any modern physicist will tell you: most of reality is indeed invisible to us. Most of the universe is seemingly comprised of an unknown substance, and filled with an unknown energy.
How can we possibly know this unless it was made through an observation?
Most of the universe that we can see more directly follows rules that are unintuitive and uses processes we can’t see. Not only can’t we see them, our own physics tells is it is literally impossible to measure all of them consistently.
That’s a hidden variable theory, presuming that systems really have all these values and we just can’t measure them all consistently due to some sort of practical limitation but still believing that they’re there. Hidden variable theories aren’t compatible with the known laws of physics. The values of the observables which become indefinite simply cease to have existence at all, not that they are there but we can’t observe them.
But subjective consciousness and qualia fit nowhere in our modern model of physics.
How so? What is “consciousness”? Why do you think objects of qualia are special over any other kind of object?
I don’t think it’s impossible to explain consciousness.
You haven’t even established what it is you’re trying to explain or why you think there is some difficulty to explain it.
We don’t even fully understand what the question is really asking. It sidesteps our current model of physics.
So, you don’t even know what you’re asking but you’re sure that it’s not compatible with the currently known laws of physics?
I don’t subscribe to Nagel’s belief that it is impossible to solve, but I do understand how the points he raises are legitimate points that illustrate how consciousness does not fit into our current scientific model of the universe.
But how?! You are just repeating the claim over and over again when the point of my comment is that the claim itself is not justified. You have not established why there is a “hard problem” at all but just continually repeat that there is.
If I had to choose anyone I’d say my thoughts on the subject are closest to Roger Penrose’s line of thinking, with a dash of David Chalmers.
Meaningless.
I think if anyone doesn’t see why consciousness is “hard” then there are two possibilities: 1) they haven’t understood the question and its scientific ramifications 2) they’re not conscious.
You literally do not understand the topic at hand based on your own words. Not only can you not actually explain why you think there is a “hard problem” at all, but you said yourself you don’t even know what question you’re asking with this problem. Turning around and then claiming everyone who doesn’t agree with you is just some ignoramus who doesn’t understand then is comically ridiculous, and also further implying people who don’t agree with you may not even be conscious.
Seriously, that’s just f’d up. What the hell is wrong with you? Maybe you are so convinced of this bizarre notion you can’t even explain yourself because you dehumanize everyone who disagrees with you and never take into consideration other ideas.
What is it then? If you say it’s a wave, well, that wave is in Hilbert space which is infinitely dimensional, not in spacetime which is four dimensional, so what does it mean to say the wave is “going through” the slit if it doesn’t exist in spacetime? Personally, I think all the confusion around QM stems from trying to objectify a probability distribution, which is what people do when they claim it turns into a literal wave.
To be honest, I think it’s cheating. People are used to physics being continuous, but in quantum mechanics it is discrete. Schrodinger showed that if you take any operator and compute a derivative, you can “fill in the gaps” in between interactions, but this is just purely metaphysical. You never see these “in between” gaps. It’s just a nice little mathematical trick and nothing more. Even Schrodinger later abandoned this idea and admitted that trying to fill in the gaps between interactions just leads to confusion in his book Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism.
What’s even more problematic about this viewpoint is that Schrodinger’s wave equation is a result of a very particular mathematical formalism. It is not actually needed to make correct predictions. Heisenberg had developed what is known as matrix mechanics whereby you evolve the observables themselves rather than the state vector. Every time there is an interaction, you apply a discrete change to the observables. You always get the right statistical predictions and yet you don’t need the wave function at all.
The wave function is purely a result of a particular mathematical formalism and there is no reason to assign it ontological reality. Even then, if you have ever worked with quantum mechanics, it is quite apparent that the wave function is just a function for picking probability amplitudes from a state vector, and the state vector is merely a list of, well, probability amplitudes. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic so we assign things a list of probabilities. Treating a list of probabilities as if it has ontological existence doesn’t even make any sense, and it baffles me that it is so popular for people to do so.
This is why Hilbert space is infinitely dimensional. If I have a single qubit, there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1. If I have two qubits, there are four possible outcomes, 00, 01, 10, and 11. If I have three qubits, there are eight possible outcomes, 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. If I assigned a probability amplitude to each event occurring, then the degrees of freedom would grow exponentially as I include more qubits into my system. The number of degrees of freedom are unbounded.
This is exactly how Hilbert space works. Interpreting this as a physical infinitely dimensional space where waves really propagate through it just makes absolutely no sense!