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Has there ever been a viable alternative to the phsycialist model of the universe?
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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Assuming that the universe actually exists outside ourselves and that our perceptions can be explained by some set of rules (that we call "physics") seem like necessary axioms to get anywhere in science. You could reject those assumptions, but then I don't see much of a compelling reason to accept anything beyond solipsism if you don't believe in reality.
That said, I'm not sure that physics will ever be able to provide a good, complete explanation of qualia.
What about biology? What if one day a neurologist finds the brain part that creates the illusion you're not just a brain?
Consider this: I seem to be just a collection of cells interacting in a complicated way. I know that I have subjective experience. We've observed that ant colonies, companies, countries, etc. have complex behavior beyond what any individual alone can do; do they also have subjective experience independent of their constituent individuals the way that I seem to have subjective experience independent of any individual cell in my body?
I think there probably is an answer to that question, but I don't know if it's possible to answer from the limited perspective of a human in the universe.
I would love it if there does turn out to be a good explanation I'm just not clever enough to come up with, by the way -- it would be fascinating! -- but I don't think biology alone is going to answer how subjective experience is derived from physical materials interacting. A complete theory of qualia should be able to answer whether an ant colony, a country, or a computer program (which could be simulated by other computer programs arbitrarily deeply) have their own subjective experiences in addition to why I perceive red the way that I do, and why it's not the way I perceive blue.
Yeah, but that's the thing. How do we know that? There's no evidence, nobody can tell you how there's more to red or blue than the words, even if everyone agrees on it. Aside from occurring in "normal" people, it doesn't seem any different from the next psychological fixed belief. Even if you're a Platonist or similar and don't need evidence, a concept defined by what it's not is challenging to justify.
You mention emergence here as well, but I'm not sure that's either required or implied by qualia. In many cases it can actually be modeled mathematically, as well, while qualia hasn't been touched.
I meant that as essentially a variant of the cogito; I can determine for myself (only) that I have subjective experience because I experience it. (Presumably you can do the same for yourself -- provided that you're not a bot, p-zombie, or such; I'm not a solipsist.) I think we agree that it's not currently possible to convince others of the existence of our own subjective experiences since we cannot directly share subjective experience, and no one has come up with a convincing workaround -- and we might not ever come up with such a thing.
What I mean is that accepting what seems to be correct, more or less, from current understanding of science, we seem to be composed of interacting cells and yet have subjective experience. If someone does, somehow, come up with a good explanation for why we have subjective experience, that explanation ought to be able to allow you to determine, at least in principle, whether any kind of matter interacting does or doesn't have subjective experience -- whether that's another person, or a piece of software running on a computer, or something even weirder like an entire country operating collectively through the behavior of its constituent citizens.
Sorry, maybe I was unclear at the start there.
The point was that it seems unlikely qualia will appear in physics, but an explanation in terms of neurology isn't as far-fetched.
Hmm. Have you heard of consciousness studies? It's becoming more and more of a serious field, and it's basically what you're describing.
I'm not familiar with it, but I do recognize a number of the names (like Chalmers and Dennett) from your link. The Hard Problem of Consciousness came up during one of my classes in undergrad, among other topics, and I also spent probably too much time thinking about thinking back in my school days.
I don't know what branch of science a theory of qualia would ultimately belong to -- if one can ever be created -- but what I mean by "physics" should be taken in the XKCD 435 sense of "biology is just applied chemistry / which is just applied physics" rather than the sense of "physics as taught in the classroom".
Qualia is a chink in the armor of physicalist theories; I don't know that that means you necessarily need something non-physical, per se -- and I strongly doubt any of the currently practiced religions would be helpful in getting an answer to why red is red -- but it does suggest that there may be something big we're missing; maybe information processing is really fundamental to the universe in a way we're not expecting, or something. I have no idea how you'd come up with a coherent theory of information processing that explains qualia though. Perhaps phenomenon like non-spectral colors and synesthesia may give us some hints, if it is possible...?
The lack of ability to directly engage with another's subjective experience ultimately may be like an event horizon limiting our ability to understand the universe. There may well be a good answer to what's going on in other minds or beyond the event horizon, but it may simply be permanently unknowable to us. (I'm not saying we should give up yet though!)
By the way, I've just realized that what I'm trying to say may make more sense if you know that I accept the "Systems Reply" to Searle's Chinese Room, and see the brain itself as a sort of Chinese Room (replacing the man and his books with the cells of a brain -- which individually do not know Chinese even though a properly functioning brain can know Chinese). Some of the implications of accepting that view are, admittedly, a bit strange -- like accepting the idea of swarm intelligences composed of independent agents (like an ant colony, a corporation, etc.); if people can have subjective experience (and experience qualia) then it may be possible for those other kinds of systems to have subjective experience and have some alien form of qualia too -- as weird as that may be.
TIL it's called the "systems reply". Looks like there's a few named replies I never came across.
Of course it can. We are biological machines. Not every machine is perfect copy of another. Differences in the organs that perceive the world will lead to subjective experiences. There's no "mystery".
Does an LLM have subjective experience? The characters in The Sims -- or the game itself? A thermostat? An ant colony, collectively -- separate from its individual ants? The entire country of, say, Honduras, collectively? A corporation? A database? Bacteria? A human skin cell? A tumor, independent of its host? A traffic jam? Grains of sand in an hour glass? A tree? A flea? A dog?
Why is my perception of the color red the way that it is? You can swap the red and blue components of an image around and things are just as recognizable, but the experience of it is noticeably different... Why does red look like red instead of red and blue being the other way around in my subjective experience? Is your experience of red the same as mine, or are red and blue swapped for you relative to my perception of them? We know from people with color blindness that not everyone experiences the color red the same way, but how can you probe whether the perception of the color wheel is rotated by, say, 90 degrees in hue between two people with otherwise compatible perception of color?
Why don't I experience heat on my skin the same way that I experience vision? Or touch, for that matter? People with synesthesia can have radically different subjective experience; perhaps we'll uncover some answers from probing that -- since people can talk to us -- but how can we ever probe the similarities and differences in the experience that bats and dolphins may have of echolocation? If bats and dolphins could talk to each other, would their differences in the experience of echolocation be like red-green color blindness, or like vision and touch?
There probably are answers to all those questions, but given that subjective experience can only be experienced by the subject, how would you test for it? Even if there are answers, I'm not sure if it's possible for us to know them from our point of view in the universe.
You are asking questions that seem unanswerable. In order to know whether something is having an experience, you'd have to first define what an experience is. Is it possible to define something that fundamental like that from the perspective of a biological machine for everything including non biological machines and everything in between? It's much easier to define particles than such fuzzy things.
Once you define them, you will have to conceive experiments to test whether those definitions are wrong.
You are different from other beings. You are an amalgamation of mutations of your parents, your environment, your upbringing, your place in time and space, the contents of body, and everything else. There is no need to invoke something extra-physicalist to explain that.
Yes! That is my point. I'm not sure that explaining qualia properly is possible from our limited vantage point in the universe -- even though I think there probably are actually answers to the questions I'm asking.
I content that the questions I quoted in my first part of the response are logically not answerable. It's not a matter of being unanswerable by physicalism.
There are other questions you posed in the second part that are answerable and they are answerable I the realm of physicalism without adding any other realms.