And though I cannot prove it, I'm going to take it on trust that you too Bugmaster have subjective experience, and that you are not just a very sophisticated Turing machine.
Yes, but that's exactly my point. On what basis do you extend this trust to me ? All you know of me is what I post on this forum. If I was "just" a very sophisticated Turing machine, how would you tell ? If you cannot, in principle, distinguish a human being from a robot, then your only choices are to consider everyone to be human, or to consider everyone to be a robot, or to simply stop caring about the distinction. I don't see what else you could do, though I could be wrong.
Reality may or may not obey those same limits. In fact I'd go further and say some aspect of reality does not. Subjective experience being the proof.
Are you saying that subjective experience has an independent existence, just as rocks and gravity do ?
At some point the superposition of the probability functions collapse into a real event.
Yes, but it doesn't have to. Furthermore, you run into problems even with relatively simple things such as Fourier transforms; as it turns out, there's no way to accurately represent a square wave in frequency domain (but that's ok, since square waves don't exist in reality, anyway).
There is a logical and categorical difference between being able to say physical interactions X, Y and Z are the cause of Robby experiencing the aroma of coffee, and being able to explain how and why a physical interaction can produce an experience at all.
Well, seeing as I believe that experiences
are physical interactions, this is not a problem for me...
In case I am drifting into rambling incoherence, let me draw my incoherence plain. Subjective experience = physical causal mechanism + non causal aspect. (Logically we can and do know that experience as it is felt/experienced does not fit into a causal/material explanation.)
... I am not positing new physical or metaphysical entities to resolve that equation.
Didn't you just propose the existence of a "non causal aspect" ?
So here I am at point D, about to post this reply to you, and I'm doing it because I feel like it - and science can't explain the feeling from anything other than causal/material perspective. ...
I'm saying that this is not a one way street. Feelings can move the atoms and forces. In fact we can makes this a definition of what it means to have free will.
There are several potential problems with this statement:
* If feelings can move "atoms and forces", but cannot be moved by atoms and forces, it implies that feelings are a separate entity from atoms and forces. But, previously you have denied the existence of any additional entities.
* If feelings cannot be moved by atoms and forces, then you still have no explanation of how the photons on your screen are linked to the feelings you have that cause you to post a reply to my post. In fact, you don't even have an explanation of how the atoms in an anvil, combined with atoms in your toe, cause you to experience the feeling of pain.
* It doesn't really matter what science can currently explain; what matters (at least, to me) is whether there's any explanatory power at all to subjective experience in general, and free will in particular. That is, if a world without free will is completely identical to a world with free will, then why do we even care if it exists ?
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