| So if we have to do something like this with
consciousness, bring something else fundamental into our
theory, then what we want is a theory of how it is that
that fundamental component and the underlying physical
processes are related. We don't want it to be a mess of
correlations, we want it to be this simple, fundamental
theory, a basic set of fundamental laws. Physicists
sometimes say they want a set of laws that are so simple
that they're part of the fundamental furniture of the
universe, they're so simple you can write them on the
front of a T-shirt, and, in a sense, that's the goal of a
fundamental theory of consciousness too. We want a bunch
of what I call psychophysical principles because they're
principles that connect physical processing with the
psychological or the mental. These psychophysical
principles should ultimately be as fundamental, as simple
as the kind of principles we find in fundamental physics.
Because I think it may well be that those principles
themselves are part of the fundamental furniture of the
world. Then the question is "What are those principles?" That's of course the question for which nobody yet has an answer - that's the research program, in a sense, on the hard problem as I conceive it - to try and find the simple underlying principles connecting physical processing to consciousness, such that when you apply those laws in familiar cases like ours, to my brain for example, you predict that you're going to get the kind of conscious experience that I have, and if I apply it to a system like you it will give the kind of conscious experience that you have, and so on. |