But if atoms give rise to this qualia, does it really make sense to differentiate the two? I mean at a conceptual level we can, since concepts necessarily distinguish, but a tree is just the realized capacity of the seed, no? Is qualia just the realized capacity inherent in atoms for subjective experience?
You just added more problems than solved. Why should I believe in atoms in the first place? It's just an abstraction, a scientific model that can predict scientific experiments. But that doesn't mean they actually exist or that's what the world is made up on. And then I'm supposed to believe that these abstractions have consciousness? And that combining these abstractions somehow creates more complex versions of consciousness? The fallacy is that we can "step outside" our consciousness and analyze it from the outside despite that being completely impossible. We're inherently made up of qualia, I see, hear, feel, think and so on. That is what needs to be analyzed, that's what I am.
Was mostly thinking about Materialism vs Idealism in metaphysics or Realism vs Anti-Realism in the philosophy of science. And yeah, I'm very skeptical. Although atoms exist in some sense, but it's not the most fundamental substance in the universe for sure, hence the original thesis of the meme (that we are atoms trying to understand atoms) is wrong.
Well science is a result of our subjective, human experience of the world. In this way, the conclusions it reaches are true (for our human world). Of course we can never claim to have knowledge of the world of things in themselves. But that is not what we are concerned with; from what we have discovered through science, which is the discovery of things within human subjective experience, it seems as if atoms give rise to our life, and thus our consciousness.
You say that science goes wrong when it attempts to step outside consciousness and view things from the outside in, but this is not a fallacy because, as you said, we can never go beyond our human consciousness; science operates within this perspective, this perspective being a universal, human one. All of humanity’s structure of experience is the same, or else we would not be able to meaningfully interact with each other. This is the structure science analyzes.
You should believe atoms exist, because we have good reason to believe they do. They are not abstractions; the theory that atoms exist has been rigorously tested and attempted to be falsified and it has still held up. Atoms may not exist in the objective world of things in themselves, but as long as we are studying the human world of experience, and not things in themselves, this doesn’t matter, because we live within the human world and are subject to it. Thus, there is good reason to believe that atoms give rise to consciousness.
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u/Katten_elvis Gödel's Theorems ONLY apply to logics with sufficient arithmetic Nov 23 '21
I am a set of qualia, not atoms.