How does something entirely physical feel anything?

Question

Look, something entirely physical may be a rock or a nervouse system. If whatever it is consists entirely of atoms and nothing else, how does it feel love, loathing, admiration or anything else?

Answer 1

To the monist, there is no real opposition of physical to not-physical. Feeling/perception is participation, not a mechanical transfer, as in Cartesian dualism. The whole (I don't mind calling it "soul") mitigates and simultaneously is mitigated. Movement takes place within a larger teleological context, and that movement takes place within yet a larger context, and so on, without end because it is a like an infinite circle-sphere-ellipse.

As in your question, our presumptions about the structure of reality can undermine the learned utility of the different parts of language, resulting in thorny reading. To feel, to loathe, to admire - these are sophisticated infinitives that dualism takes for granted, as if they could exist in the same logistical manner as the anonymous objects at the assembly lines in Shenyang.

It certainly is not an unsolved mystery for those skeptics like myself who do not accept modern scientific method as the one and only authority. In sum, the physical thing and the perception of it may be the illusion; reality may be in the participation of each with each other. To me this is not doctrine, it is just a valid possibility.

Answer 2

If my computer can't feel then I might as well stop pounding on the keyboard. I think maybe everything has some awareness, because energy must have some awareness or it's got something. Have you ever wondered if electrical waves surge like ocean waves and blood in the veins surges? Some people think electricity has information in it. DNA does and it's just energy also. I guess all those science fiction stories about them making it illegal to be 'humanlike' were forseeing the future, the same as the stories with robots taking over the earth. I wonder how a robot would answer this question. I mean, I wonder how a human would.

Answer 3

Of course that all depends on your definition of feel...However I think I know what you most likely mean by it and if what I think it is is correct, the answer is: it can't!

The traditional understanding of the emotional terms such as feel, in the way in which most people use it, is actually a misunderstanding of what is possible; an anachronistic leftover from the times when philosophers believed in things like the immaterial soul, essence, or elan vitae.

Emotions are actually evolutionarily developed shortcuts in the physical information processing capability of our material brains. They were hard-wired into the structure of our brains by evolution, due to increased efficiency in tasks related to our survival.

Our consciousness, which is an internal perceptive ability, interprets these information-processing shortcuts as though they had a "feel". This is why human beings are of the opinion that they have these emotions. From the first person, internal, "thought-full" perspective, it certainly "feels" as though we have feelings, but scientifically: it looks as though all we have is hard-wired, physical, built-in shortcuts in our purely material brain.

My answer can be summed up as: something purely physical can't "Feel" anything (in the sense you use the word), but it can think it does!

Answer 4

The existence and nature of consciousness is perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery of all. If you're new to the field, look up "mind body problem" or "qualia". No-one understands the relationship between the physical and the mental (though the most common analogy these days is to a computer's hardware and software); similarly, no-one knows how or why we have subjective experiences (called "qualia")....

Answer 5

My brain is a physical thing.

Answer 6

Where does music and art fit into this

Answer 7

I don't know... but my couch loves to snuggle.