Everything I’ve described from my surgical experience is grounded in the physical realm and doesn’t require anything beyond that. My intent in offering the example was not to argue against its physical nature, but to show how firsthand experience can foster a deeper, more meaningful understanding. When subjective experience is paired with objective knowledge, it results in a more comprehensive scientific understanding than either alone.
It can be fully explained by physical factors. My point wasn’t to suggest it’s beyond the physical domain, but rather to emphasize that by combining subjective experience with objective knowledge, we achieve a more complete and insightful outcome.
I mentioned a particular nerve only to illustrate the difference between subjective experience and objective knowledge—not to state that this specific nerve was actually involved. Again, you’re interpreting the point too literally.
It may “clarify [your] position” (though I have my doubts). But it most emphatically does not answer my questions.
Firstly your “subjective exploration” appears to be meant to “shed light on these inner experiences” simply by experiencing those experiences. This would appear to be a vacuous claim.
Secondly, this structureless exploration would appear to provide no guardrails whatsoever against the insights that this may provide from being tainted with “preconceptions, biases, etc, etc”.
Finally, there is absolutely no reason to assume that these idiosyncratic and unreliable insights are in way compatible with, and thus capable of being integrated with, science.
I’m afraid @LRT that, like pretty much everything you’ve said about “subjective exploration”, this is nothing but bald, baseless, unsubstantiated assertion. Your narrative does not establish any “critical role” – merely that you had some form of temporary, anesthetic-induced ‘mis-sensation’.
What defines life?
How did it originate?
Does it have a purpose?
Can life arise from non-living matter?
Is life inevitable given the right conditions?
How does consciousness arise from biological process?
etc.
Right. The example was your surgical experience, but the “looking for something more” bit is not.
But is an axiom of a system of reasoning the same as an axiom about the world? I believe the latter is what he’s talking about. Are these axioms truths about the world? What does “equal” even mean in the real world? Is it saying anything to say that an orange is equal to itself? Similarly, what would it mean to say that an orange both is and isn’t an orange? What would that have to do with the real world?
Same with an axiom of faith. If it’s an axiom, there can be no way to know whether it’s true. If there were such a way, it wouldn’t be an axiom. And if there’s no way to know if it’s true, how can it be a reliable foundation for knowledge of the world?
It makes a few good points. Most importantly, that the label shouldn’t be binary; there’s a continuum, and various journals may have different features associated with the label to various degrees. And some of the comments on peer review are valid, though I disagree with many of them. What would be a better choice than labeling MDPI as “predatory” would be saying that many (most) of its journals publish an inordinate number of crappy papers. While you can’t rely on the quality of many publishers, including Springer Nature, this is again a continuum, and MDPI is on the low end.
How would understanding consciousness help illuminate any of these questions? I suppose that, for certain values of “understanding”, it would illuminate the last one. But what about the others?