The material universe doesn't care about us, but we do, and we are not separate from the universe.
Consciousness is the important thing, why it all matters, why bad things are really actually bad. Pain may be expressed, but as all other consciousness itself or qualia, the experience itself cannot be measured, but is very real.
What do you mean that consciousness cannot be measured? We can perceive it and talk about it, can't we? Chamlers says that the reason we talk about having qualia has nothing to do, causally, with our experience of qualia but I think we can dismiss that idea out of hand. So by asking people questions about their experiences and getting large enough sample sizes we have a means to conduct a quantitative and scientific investigation of consciousness.
Think about it like this: What actually is the color green?
sure, a wavelength of around 532nm coming into your eye causes it to happen, but thats just information. Then its processed in your brain and at some point recognized as green. Somewhere in this, you see green, but you seeing it cannot be measured. Maybe the activations of your neurons could be, and maybe that could even be fully reverse engineered to understand how the conclusion of seeing green is reached. And yet, the actual stuff in your conscious experience still isn't there, just a bunch of logic is.
Now maybe we could discover some dynamics of consciousness though. If we create conscious AI or some way to inject new logic into our brain that is directly witnessed, we could probe for what configurations produce what kind of consciousness. So at least we could understand the behavior of it. But the actual stuff of it is not measurable by anything but itself.
Very few things in science can be directly experienced. I can't see an electron with my eyes, I have to rely on the reports of machines and infer the electron. And even the reports of my eyes aren't, ultimately, direct experience. That our investigation of consciousness has to take place indirectly is in no way novelty for scientific inquiry.
This is different, its the opposite in fact. Experience is ONLY directly experienced is what I'm saying. It cannot be measured. Well, it can, but only from within itself
It can express this measurement in a representational form however, so we can study consciousness's behavior or the behavior of qualia.
You say consciousness can only be experienced indirectly and not indirectly. But I showed in my first post here how to experience it indirectly: just ask other people about their experiences and listen to what they tell you. Do that and you can start doing paradigmatic science on it, as the book I linked to lays out.
I think you may be begging the question when you assume that there must be "actual stuff" that is forever beyond physical explanation.
I suspect that one is more likely to understand "green" by realizing that it is a word (originally, a sound) that you have come to associate with memories of visual experiences. To say something is green is to do a comparison between an aspect of the experience of it, and aspects of some of those memories of prior experiences.
I don't assume that the stuff is forever beyond physical explaination, and like I said we can perform science on the behavior of it. But ultimately the scientific method will always conclude that its ultimately an illusion and that there is only the word green, or the recognition of 532nm light. A word doesn't even need be assigned to it, its witnessed either way.
I use color as an example because its very distant and theoretically could be many different ways (e.g. your experience of green may not be made of the same stuff my green is). However geometry seems far less arbitrary. Visualizing a square is more specific, the way the lines relate to space in the 2D plane if misrepresented will be wrong. I doubt we visualize such things with 100% accuracy, but we must visualize them to a certain common accuracy, and thats important, common. Basically, as far as experiencing the visual concept of a square, we all experience roughly the same object in our conscious experience. Thats where things can be studied a bit, because the behavior of consciousness given certain logic is likely absolute.
I think the difficult part of all this is that "experience" has been irreducible so far and extremely difficult to isolate as some kind of physical substance or variable. We can analyze the "actual stuff" in every dimension we know how, and still come no closer to explaining why it feels like something to experience green (borrowing from Thomas Nagel here). A starcraft-playing neural net can make a comparison between some of its earlier "memories" and what it's seeing now, but that says nothing about its Awareness.
Any more than it is begging the question to assume that there cannot be anything that is beyond physical explanation?
Yes, words are symbols. But when we're talking about consciousness, we're talking about the experience itself, not the association between the word and the experience. And we have no understanding of why or how the experience exists in us.
A willingness to search for physical explanations should not be mistaken for claiming that there is one simply because there must be one, which would be as fallacious as claiming that there isn't one simply because there can not be one. This is a distinct fallacy from the one of claiming that there isn't one because I can't imagine that there could be one, or that it can't be done because it hasn't been done so far.
As for having an opinion, on the other hand, that usually depends on which remarkable circumstance one thinks is less implausible.
Subjectively, I don't feel like I can distinguish shades of joy or anger with infinite precision. I can't properly express my feelings the same way I can't properly express exactly where between blue and green a certain turquoise I'm looking at is. But I know a scientific instrument can give a number for the later and I don't feel I have any basis for ruling out the idea that some future scientific instrument can quantify the former.
> They developed writing, as did we. But their writing soon began to no longer just mean what it said. For them, the writing was what it said and their words were what they meant. The flow of the language froze and they began to stack individual concepts one onto the other like stones. Their language lost its spirit. They were still very clever, but without spirit. They built the tower of their words higher and higher and converted everything magical, which they feared, into dead material, and filled it with new, spiritless life. But they completely control this undead material.
> Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience.
If I am following your line of argument, it would seem to apply to biology in general, which is not complete, yet which is effective at explaining lots of things, as well as able to assimilate new discoveries.
In a material universe there is no objective good or bad.
I'm willing to bet that there's a sadist out there who, if they had you under their control, could eventually convince you there is definite objective bad.
And yet for every one of these sadists, a Viktor Frankl pops up to say "“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
I'd pull a nihilist into my lifeboat. I wouldn't be happy about it, though. If I had to choose Viktor Frankl or a nihilist, I'd choose Viktor Frankl. I wouldn't be happy about that either.
Pain is objectively bad. Even if in a greater moral system pain is necessary to balance things and so is "good" in that sense, even then it would be a necessary evil. (keyword evil) If there were a way without it, that would be better.
Pain is just a way that animals experience strong motivation. People born without the ability to feel pain have serious problems, because they don't make enough effort to avoid damage.
Consciousness is the important thing, why it all matters, why bad things are really actually bad. Pain may be expressed, but as all other consciousness itself or qualia, the experience itself cannot be measured, but is very real.