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Why Aren't We Special?

It's unclear why and how neurons firing in the brain produces subjective experience. This is the hard problem of consciousness. Why should there be something that it's like to, say, feel pain or see the color red?

My opinion is that the subjectivity of consciousness is attributable to physical differences in neuroanatomy and to the closed nature of neural processes. Our synapses only fire in our own brains, and our interpretations of our experiences can only come from us, even if something outside us influences them.

I suspect that neurotransmission produces subjective experience as a matter of course. That's one of the things our brains are adapted to do.  Consciousness, in my opinion, is the ability to think about the extremely complex webs of associations that our minds naturally create. Qualia make these webs stronger.

Furthermore, I submit that interpretation, sensory integration, and high-level cognitive processes are all dependent on neurotransmission. There's no independent nonphysical process by which they can occur. Neither our subjective experience nor our interpretations of such can happen nonphysically.

To understand this better, I think it helps to look at what processes must be stopped or impeded in the brain in order to disrupt consciousness. Whatever processes those are won't be nonphysical.  Nonliving brains, for example, aren't conscious, and living is the result of physical processes.  Therefore, consciousness must be related to physical processes, even if they're only those processes that must be ongoing for a brain to be considered alive.

So, I'm a physicalist, and I think our uncertainty about the provenance of consciousness is actually a disguise for our disappointment that neuroscience doesn't show humans to be special.

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