> The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical.
There's a confusion here between "explained by physical laws" and "physical". The problem of qualia, I claim, shows that physics is not exhaustive when it comes to matter. Its methods are necessarily and entirely quantitative, which means anything that doesn't satisfy this presumption of quantifiability is either ignored, or given some frankly bad pseudo-reduction to the quantifiable (and even then, it relies on a tacit Cartesian sort of dualism to work, which is usually unacknowledged).
I make the initial distinction between "physical law" and "physical" because an Aristotle or an Aquinas would not deny that, say, dogs and cats and myriad animals are conscious (they would find the notion absurd), even as they hold that, of the animals, only human beings possess intellects, which, owing to their capacity for abstraction, must be immaterial. What does that mean? It means that just because physics cannot account for consciousness, either today or at all by virtue of its methods and scope, it does not follow that consciousness cannot be material. It may not be exclusively material perhaps, and perhaps consciousness, like "being", is analogical in meaning, and our use of the term suffers from a fallacy of univocity that it has only one meaning.
> my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.
While I reject mechanistic metaphysics, the notion that everything is "information" or "computation" is incoherent, or at the very least, stands in for something else, like idealism, which has its own set of problems. "Computation" comes from the Latin "computare", i.e., "com" ("with, together") and "putare" ("to reckon"). That is to say, computation is semiotic, so to speak. It is intentional, about something else. So it makes no sense to speak of computation as the ground of reality, because it is an operation that presupposes reality. Information suffers from analogous problems. You would only be passing the buck by appealing to them.
There's a confusion here between "explained by physical laws" and "physical". The problem of qualia, I claim, shows that physics is not exhaustive when it comes to matter. Its methods are necessarily and entirely quantitative, which means anything that doesn't satisfy this presumption of quantifiability is either ignored, or given some frankly bad pseudo-reduction to the quantifiable (and even then, it relies on a tacit Cartesian sort of dualism to work, which is usually unacknowledged).
I make the initial distinction between "physical law" and "physical" because an Aristotle or an Aquinas would not deny that, say, dogs and cats and myriad animals are conscious (they would find the notion absurd), even as they hold that, of the animals, only human beings possess intellects, which, owing to their capacity for abstraction, must be immaterial. What does that mean? It means that just because physics cannot account for consciousness, either today or at all by virtue of its methods and scope, it does not follow that consciousness cannot be material. It may not be exclusively material perhaps, and perhaps consciousness, like "being", is analogical in meaning, and our use of the term suffers from a fallacy of univocity that it has only one meaning.
> my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.
While I reject mechanistic metaphysics, the notion that everything is "information" or "computation" is incoherent, or at the very least, stands in for something else, like idealism, which has its own set of problems. "Computation" comes from the Latin "computare", i.e., "com" ("with, together") and "putare" ("to reckon"). That is to say, computation is semiotic, so to speak. It is intentional, about something else. So it makes no sense to speak of computation as the ground of reality, because it is an operation that presupposes reality. Information suffers from analogous problems. You would only be passing the buck by appealing to them.