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  3. The notion that inanimate objects are subject to their own experience may sound absurd; and it is. However, the reason to dismis

The notion that inanimate objects are subject to their own experience may sound absurd; and it is. However, the reason to dismis

admin2019-08-27  59
问题    The notion that inanimate objects are subject to their own experience may sound absurd; and it is. However, the reason to dismiss it is not intuition — conditioned as the latter is by unexamined cultural assumptions — but simple logic. 【T1】You see, the movement from "consciousness is the intrinsic nature of the physical world" to "subatomic particles are conscious" relies on a flawed logical bridge: it attributes to that which experiences a structure discernible only in the experience itself.
   The concept of subatomic particles is motivated by experiments whose outcomes are accessible to us only in the form of conscious perception. 【T2】Even when delicate instrumentation is used, the output of this instrumentation is only available to us as perception. Those experiments show that the images on the screen of perception can be divided up into ever-smaller elements, until we reach a limit. At this limit, we find the smallest discernible constituents of the images, which are thus akin to pixels. As such, subatomic particles are the "pixels" of experience, not necessarily of the experience. The latter does not follow from the former.
   【T3】Therefore, that living bodies are made of subatomic particles does not necessarily say anything about the structure of the experiencer: a body is itself an image on the screen of perception and so will necessarily be "pixelated" insofar as it is perceived. Such pixelation reflects the idiosyncrasies of the screen of perception, not necessarily the structure of the subject itself. As an analogy, the pixelated image of a person on a television screen reflects the idiosyncrasies of the television screen; it does not mean that the person herself is made up of pixels.
   I thus submit that consciousness is indeed the intrinsic nature of the physical world, but subatomic particles and other inanimate objects are not conscious subjects. 【T4】After all, as Freya Matthews pointed out, the boundaries of inanimate objects are merely nominal — where does the river stop and the ocean begin? Whereas those of conscious subjects are unambiguously determined by, for instance, the range of the subjects’ internal perceptions. So inanimate objects cannot be conscious subjects.
   With inanimate objects excluded, only living organisms and the inanimate universe as a whole can be conscious subjects. This way, as a living nervous system is the extrinsic appearance of an organism’s inner experiences, so the inanimate universe as a whole is the extrinsic appearance of universal inner experiences. Circumstantially, the inanimate universe at its largest scales has indeed been found to structurally resemble a nervous system. 【T5】Under this view, there is nothing it feels like to be a spoon or a stone, for the same reason that there is nothing it feels like to be — at least as far as you can assess through introspection — one of your neurons in and of itself. There is only something it feels like to be your nervous system as a whole — that is, you. Analogously, there is only something it feels like to be the inanimate universe as a whole.
【T4】
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答案正如弗雷亚-马修斯所指出的那样，无生命物体的界限毕竟只是象征性的——河流停止在何处，海洋发源于哪里?然而，诸如受试者内在感知的范围等明确地决定了那些有意识的主体。
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