I've always been a little troubled by the fact that I exist. Sometimes when I think about it too much I actually feel a bit of surprise when I realize again that, in fact, I am here.

These are some notes on various philosophical issues that I've thought about over many years. These thoughts are influenced greatly by some of the books I've listed below, especially work by Searle, Kim, and Hofstadter.

Consciousness

The hard problem? We are used to thinking of ourselves, that is, our mind, soul, humunculous, ourselves, etc., as having the qualities of experiencing the world ("qualia") in a way that lower life forms and, say, rocks, don't; rational thought, in the sense that we can direct our thoughts as we see fit; inner states like emotions; some form of direct control over our limbs, etc. As a physicalist, I hate to sound like an eliminativist since denying the problem isn't very helpful. But, indeed, I think we have just one of these things, qualia (the what-it's-like to experience the world). As for thought, emotion, and motor control, these I eliminate from the hard problem; they are all unconsciously controlled in non-interesting biological circuitry. What makes them so real is that we passively experience these things, like other qualia, and (mistakenly) associate them with our very selves as if we have some sort of higher-level control over them. We experience them as qualia just as we experience external sensations like sound and pain, but these qualia are much less discrete and are harder to pin down. Rational thought, for instance, is the experience of a succession of symbolic brain states passing through.

How do qualia arise in the first place? (Yeah, like I'll actually solve this one.) I suspect it has to do with what Hofstadter calls a 'strange loop'. Our brains have (sort of symbolic) states associated with concepts. Some of the states are for the people we've met throughout our lives. We have such concepts because we can organize our metal model of the world well by making the abstraction that each body is a person, in some sense, with internal states (emotions, knowledge, etc.). Another concept we have is the concept of ourself, i.e. the same type of person-concept that we have for others, but for ourself, and in much greater detail. Now for qualia: Besides having sensory perceptions simply, we have symbolic states representing perceptions. We've modeled the world such that "people" symbols have "experience" symbols, and our symbolic states representing perceptions fit into that category. But these perception states aren't just anyone's experiences, they are the experiences of our "myself" concept. All of this together would seem to be the building blocks for qualia, though I'm not sure how to complete the picture. (Another state we have is for other people's mental thought processes, a hypothesis that simplifies our model of the world even if we can't observe those thoughts ourselves. And we model the world such that 'people' control their 'thoughts' in some abrbitrary sense. We also have symbolic states for our own thoughts (i.e. the state of being in a brain state that represents thought P), and for thought itself (i.e. the state of making transitions between different conceptual brain states). By analogy, we infer that our "myself" symbolic state controls our "own thoughts" symbolic state. And so now we've convinced ourselves that we control our thoughts, even though that's probably less than completely true.)

Then comes the question, why am I in my body. Hofstadter actually has a nice answer for this, and although he doesn't put it in these words: it's the fishbowl problem. "Why," the goldfish asks, "am I in a bowl?" The answer is that were the bowl not there, neither would be the water, or the fish. That is, it couldn't have been any other way. Analogously, why does pi = 3.14159... and not some other number? If it had another value, the universe would be so radically different that you and I wouldn't be around to ask the question. Back to the original question. I'm in my own body because it couldn't have been any other way. I couldn't be asking the question, with all of the personal perspectives and experiences that go into it, if I weren't who I actually am, in my own body. It couldn't have been any other way.

Some wide open questions: How is it that we have (or think we have) a unified existence (that is, I am just one conscious being) out of the network of neurons in our brain with no obvious centralization? Why are some brain states consciously experiencable (emotions, thought) while others are not (whether a particular neuron, say neuron number X, is currently firing)?

Existence

In all likelihood, our universe is just a computer simulation in a bigger universe. To the extent there is something like a god, it's just the simulation operators in our parent universe. (Why? If all universes are so, and we have an infinite regress, then we can get around the question of why a universe in isolation should have any business existing at all. It's a tree falling in the forest kind of thing. On the other hand, each parent universe would seemingly have to be even more complex than its sub-universes in order to simulate them, and so the probability of us being in such a low-tech universe as we are in is, well, zero, and that's not helpful.)