I’m questioning how to synthesize these two perspectives into a unified understanding of the world. Each perspective on its own leaves questions pointing to the other. To say that all that exists is our first-person experience leaves open questions about the regularity and predictability that we find in the seemingly objective world. Especially when it comes to the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. On the other hand, to say that all that exists is the material world of space, time, matter, and energy, leaves the question of where our first-person experience fits into this third-person model of the world. Reductionists would say, “but that’s all that we are!” And I would say that the furthest modern science can possibly go in its present paradigm is to give correlations between third-person objective neurological phenomena, and first-person subjective experience. Correlations, but no explanations, in the way that deeper principles such as F=ma and the inverse-square law of gravitation can explain elliptical orbits, or that biochemistry can explain all neurological phenomena in principle, even if not in practice. This is not because we don’t know everything about neuroscience. Even if we did, it is not within its scope to explain experience in terms of neurological phenomena. It only explains behavior in terms of neurological phenomena, even if that behavior is a person saying “I see a red rose.” The third-person to first-person leap that many people make here in assuming that “they must experience like I do” is a leap that lies outside the scope of science. This leap is perfectly fine to make for all practical purposes in getting through our lives, but it is a leap that is made here, and no where else in science. It is this gap that keeps first-person experience outside the present paradigm of science to explain, and it maintains this philosophical duality.
I believe that Hofstadter himself would not disagree with this. Or at least with what I am trying to say, as evidenced by the 4th to last section of the book, in the epilogue: “[The Hard Problem] seems just as far from having an answer today (or, for that matter, at any time in the future) as it was many centuries ago.”
On a final note, I suspect that this first-person/third-person gap is related to the measurement problem in quantum physics. Conceptually, I feel as if these are similar problems, and that progress in one may provide clues to the other. Pure speculation, of course.
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