Originally posted by Chrawnus
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1. We are in 'the matrix' / playing a computer game (we exist as entities outside this universe, and that accounts for our minds/qualia, and this universe is a set of data being fed into our minds)
2. There are two universes - this material universe and a universe of qualia/consciousness and the two are able to interact at the quantum level. Throughout the evolutionary process, evolution found it useful (or possibly the universe of consciousness found it useful) to construct brains that utilize that connection into the universe of consciousness and connect and utilize those pieces of consciousness. This may have given these organisms survival advantages through increased mental capacities in a similar way that my laptop opening a remote connection to a supercomputer gives my laptop increased computing power. In this situation the brain is acting somewhat like a radio and receiving a signal from elsewhere. Depending on how one characterizes this second universe of consciousness, it could be portrayed like in Buddhism where it is a sea of consciousness and we are like drops taken out of it, or like in Gnosticism where it is the True Spiritual Realm and the material realm is Evil for trapping pieces of the divine in bodies inside it, or that universe of consciousness could be termed 'God' and then we would be pieces of God.
Probabilistically I think #1 is more likely simply because we are highly likely to develop fully-immerse computer games within a few hundred years, and after that the number of in-game lives a person leads (i.e. the number of times they do a full playthrough of a game where they live out a simulated life) is going to be an order of magnitude higher than the number of real lives they lead as each person will likely play dozens or hundreds of computer games in their lives. Hence given we are currently living a life, chances are it's an in-game one.
But I think #2, some form of dualism, is the second most likely option.
I agree with you in not seeing any way of reconciling qualia with physicalism currently.
And no, advances in neuroscience won't ever solve this problem.
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