Why consciousness, meaning, and value won’t behave
If dualism and Galilean objectivity were merely historical positions, their consequences would have faded with time. Instead, they persist — not as explicit doctrines, but as inherited orientations embedded in contemporary science.
The result is a familiar landscape of “hard problems”: consciousness, qualia, meaning, normativity, value. These are often treated as stubborn mysteries, resistant to explanation despite unprecedented technical sophistication.
Relationally construed, they are something else entirely.
They are artefacts of inherited cuts.
1. The Persistence of the Hard Problems
Modern science does not deny consciousness, meaning, or value. It studies them intensely.
But it studies them as anomalies.
Consciousness is something the brain “produces,” yet cannot account for.
Qualia are acknowledged, then immediately bracketed.
Meaning is reduced to information processing.
Normativity is externalised as social convention or evolutionary residue.
Each appears as a problem because it refuses to stay in its assigned place.
2. Anomalies by Construction
Within the inherited framework, this resistance is inevitable.
If reality is defined as what is independent of perspective, then:
experience becomes secondary,
significance becomes subjective,
value becomes external.
Consciousness is thus not mysterious because it is strange, but because it is structurally mislocated.
It has been exiled from ontology and then demanded to explain itself.
3. Representational Loops
This mislocation produces a characteristic pattern of explanation.
Mind is treated as a representational system:
the world is encoded,
symbols are manipulated,
outputs are generated.
When meaning fails to appear, the solution is more representation:
richer internal models,
deeper architectures,
finer-grained information.
AI, cognitive science, and neuroscience repeatedly circle this loop.
4. Why Value Won’t Reduce
Normativity and value pose a parallel difficulty.
From within a Galilean ontology:
facts belong to the world,
values belong elsewhere.
But norms are not optional overlays. They organise action, interpretation, and coordination. They are woven into the very possibility of meaningful behaviour.
Treated as external, they return as puzzles:
How can facts generate obligations?
How can causes produce reasons?
Again, the difficulty is not natural.
It is inherited.
5. Debts Incurred by Over-Separation
The key claim can now be stated plainly:
These are not mysteries of nature; they are debts incurred by over-separation.
By partitioning mind from world, fact from value, description from meaning, science secured extraordinary power in closed domains.
What could not be accommodated was not integrated. It was deferred.
The debt comes due wherever relation matters.
6. A Parallel from Mathematics
The pattern is directly analogous to the one diagnosed in mathematical physics.
In that domain:
infinities signal over-openness,
singularities signal over-closure,
paradoxes signal mislocated formal authority.
They are not revelations of cosmic absurdity.
They are indicators that a modelling orientation has outrun its domain of validity.
So too here.
Consciousness, meaning, and value are not recalcitrant features of reality. They are signals that ontology has been misplaced.
7. Why the Problems Persist
The persistence of these problems is not due to lack of effort.
It is due to the cost of revising the underlying cuts.
To reintroduce relation would require:
abandoning the view from nowhere,
treating perspective as constitutive,
recognising construal as ontologically significant.
These moves threaten inherited ideals of objectivity.
So the problems are retained — managed, deferred, rebranded — rather than resolved.
8. Looking Ahead
If these problems are debts, the question becomes how they might be repaid.
In the final post, we will outline what it means to re-inscribe relation: to dissolve dualism without collapse, to recover meaning without mysticism, and to practise science without exiling its own conditions of possibility.
The task is not to solve the hard problems.
It is to recognise why they appeared.
No comments:
Post a Comment