Mysteries of Visual Experience
arXiv Preprint Archive April 28, 2016 via arXiv
Summary
Science, despite its achievements, faces fundamental limitations, including the intractable mind-body problem and other deep puzzles like quantum phenomena. These unsolved problems are either remote from everyday experience or difficult to define sharply.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Neuroscience q-bio.nc Brain science Neural science Artificial intelligence cs.ai Machine learning |
| Key finding | Science has inherent limitations, exemplified by the intractable mind-body problem and other deep puzzles that are either remote from everyday experience or hard to define sharply. |
Abstract
Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable and currently mysterious. This is one of many deep problems that are universally agreed to be beyond the current purview of Science, including quantum phenomena, etc. But all of these famous unsolved problems are either remote from everyday experience (entanglement, dark matter) or are hard to even define sharply (phenomenology, consciousness, etc.). An updated summary of this work has been published as: Feldman, J. (2022). Computation, perception, and mind. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, E48. doi:10.1017/S0140525X21001886 A more readable, open access, version is: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cs78450