Does consciousness emerge magically out of sufficiently complex matter, or does it pre-exist and encapsulate the real world?
I find it funny that the word magically is appropriate here because science has literally no idea about where consciousness, the basis of our entire experience of life, comes from.
Without our mind’s ability to take in stimuli through our sense organs, and then interpret that information in the context of previous experience, the “real world” doesn’t exist.
We have no idea of what is out there independent of our mind’s interpretation.
The real world as we experience it, which is the only real world that we will ever know, depends entirely on the stories our minds make up.
The real real world is meaningless without us… that’s if it exists at all.
One thought on “The hard problem”