2023-05-25
35 分钟Hello, everyone.
I'm Stephen west.
This is philosophize this patreon.com philosophizethis.
It's how the show keeps going.
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So we talked about some general discussions surrounding consciousness last time.
Let's talk about some actual theories.
Now, if you were born into today's day and age, statistically, the most likely thing you're probably going to be when it comes to your thoughts about consciousness is is some version of a physicalist or a materialist, meaning that you believe that consciousness is probably reducible to material or physical properties of the brain.
Usually that would mean that you're a pretty big fan of science, too.
Usually that would mean that you're probably gonna be the kind of person that says stuff like, I think one day we're probably gonna find that there were some internal mechanisms that are going on in the brain that if only we study them enough, let's be real.
Were probably going to be able to know everything about consciousness one day.
And if you said something like that, nobody in their right mind would be mad at you for it.
They may disagree with you, but they'd understand the world you're coming from.
I mean, picture being born into the middle ages somewhere in western Europe and not being a christian.
At some level, we're all byproducts of the cultures and time periods that we come from, and science is just how we get things done these days.
When you got a problem, science is what you throw at it to figure it out.
And if we have a problem when it comes to consciousness, why would that be any different?
But there's something else we always do these days on account of the fact that we love science so much, and that is that when we're doing science, we love to construct theoretical models that help us understand reality.
As a scientist, at least whenever I hear from the scientists that are in my life as a scientist, you try to construct a model that's simple enough to explain the problem that you're trying to deal with.
You try to be parsimonious, no more simple than it needs to be, no more complicated than it needs to be.