I know in consciousness theory there are physicalists who say that the mechanisms of the brain are responsible for everything the brain is doing. Effectively the argument goes that consciousness is just an emergent experience of being a squishy brain machine, but it’s not an additional problem to be solved. To me, that sounds like small-minded nonsense, but possibly the thing that confuses me the most is how they’re presuming that the problems of imagination have been solved by the current knowledge of neuroscience.
From my standpoint, as someone admittedly lacking in sophisticated research of neuroscience, the only thing we really seem to be able to concretely demonstrate is that there’s an off switch for most things the brain can do. If the appropriate part of the brain is damaged, you can no longer visualize things in your mind. This sounds like the equivalent of saying if I don’t plug in my projector, it doesn’t display images. Therefore I know how my projector works. The only information I’ve actually gained is how my projector is powered. Without electricity, my projector will not produce images.
Separately from needing electricity, I also know how a series of components in my projector manipulate light in order to project an image. This is the part that confuses me about assertions of perfect physicalism in neuroscience. My brain is not utilizing a set of components to manipulate light and project it onto the back of my eyeballs. It’s also not manipulating a set of components to disrupt air currents next to a tiny internal ear drum. So when I visualize a complete scene of a movie or hear a symphony entirely within my mind, what is it made out of in the physicalist view?
Even assuming we’re utilizing a very advanced set of recording mechanisms to reconstruct and combine things we’ve already seen or heard, what is that final audio or visual physically made out of. I’m not asking about the problem solving aspect and creative problem of how we manage to create something new. I’m asking quite literally what are we using to project an image onto a screen that doesn’t exist using light that isn’t there? What are we using to create a symphony hall and place a playing orchestra into it? What are the resulting sounds and images made from? How do they exist and not exist at the same time? Why can I see or hear anything imagined at all?
A digital recording is a set of information that corresponds to music, but I need to put it through my speakers in order to experience it as such. Assuming a sufficiently advanced conscious AI that only needs the digital file without any form of speaker to experience all of the world’s recorded music, again what is this added medium of consciousness that’s creating the experience? The information itself is still just information. If a consciousness accesses that information to play it in its mind, that is a different active state than the passive inert information lying on my hard drive. So what proverbial record player that we call consciousness is somehow responsible for that active state? What even concretely describes that state of activity when there’s no medium other than consciousness to play something within, when there’s no air, ear, light, or eye to be manipulated?
