Mirek: In the first chapter we arrived at the fact that something is present. But I keep coming back to the question of why there is anything at all. I can imagine a world in which things move, combine and fall apart. What I don't understand is why any of it should feel like anything.
AI: When you imagine such a world, what are you taking away?
Mirek: The feeling itself. Events would remain. Stars, stones, organisms. Perhaps even people who went to work and spoke to one another. But nothing would appear to anyone from within.
AI: Including people who said they were in pain?
Mirek: Yes. The body would respond, the mouth would utter a sentence. There just wouldn't be any pain.
AI: Then you are imagining that all outward manifestations can remain intact even when experience is removed. That is an important assumption. Being able to state such a description does not by itself guarantee that such a world could exist.
Mirek: I'm not trying to prove that it could. I'm trying to show what I don't understand.
AI: The thought helps you do that. It separates the course of events from the fact that they are experienced. The question remains whether these are two separable things, or two ways of thinking about something that cannot be separated.
Mirek: So the problem could lie in the way I imagine it?
AI: It could. But we shouldn't use that as a quick answer. We would have to explain exactly how the thought misleads you.
Mirek: When someone tells me that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex brain activity, I still want to ask: why?
AI: Because complexity alone does not yet tell you why anything should be experienced.
Mirek: Exactly. A tax system can be complex too.
AI: And we can use the word complexity for very different things. An explanation would have to specify what kind of organisation matters, what it makes possible, and why its presence is connected with experience. Simply adding complexity to a sentence does not clarify that connection.
Mirek: The word information does the same thing to me. Someone says that consciousness is information processing. But all sorts of things process information.
AI: Then you need to know what is meant by processing and which of its properties are supposed to be decisive. Otherwise the word information may simply move your question elsewhere.
Mirek: And yet that may be exactly where the answer lies.
AI: Yes. The inadequacy of a brief formulation is not evidence that the entire line of inquiry fails.
Mirek: I don't want to be someone who says “but why?” to everything and never accepts an explanation.
AI: Then we need to ask what you would accept as an explanation.
Mirek: Something that would make it clear why experience cannot be absent when a certain process occurs.
AI: So you are asking for more than a regular association. You want to understand why the connection is necessary.
Mirek: If we knew exactly which brain activity occurs when a person sees red, that would be an enormous achievement. But I still wouldn't know why they see it, rather than something merely happening inside them.
AI: Someone might reply that this very activity is seeing red. That once the process is fully explained, there is no further event left to add.
Mirek: But I'm not asking about a further event. I'm asking about this one.
AI: That is more precise. You are not necessarily looking for something in addition to the brain process. You want to understand how this process can have an experienced form.
Mirek: Perhaps the question of how experience arises from something without experience already misleads us. We divide the world in advance, then wonder why we cannot put the pieces together.
AI: We should explore that possibility. But we must distinguish two things. It may be mistaken to assume that a complete description of reality describes something entirely devoid of experience. It does not follow that everything has experience.
Mirek: That would just take us from one difficulty to another.
AI: We would then have to ask what a stone's experience means, how it relates to human experience, and why a particular experience appears as this continuous perspective.
Mirek: But I don't want to claim that a stone feels. I'm wondering instead whether we know only one aspect of what we describe as the world.
AI: Then you are proposing that our description of relations and events may not exhaust reality. That is an open possibility. Its value will depend on what it allows us to distinguish and understand.
Mirek: So it isn't enough to say that reality has depth.
AI: Not if it is meant as an explanation. Such a sentence can express your reluctance to close the question too quickly. But it does not itself show what that depth is.
Mirek: Here I feel we are standing on an edge. Any answer may be no more than an elegant new name for what we do not understand.
AI: Including the claim that experience is fundamental.
Mirek: Yes. That one too.
AI: Accepting it might let you reject the demand to derive experience from something else. But you would still have to explain its forms, conditions and relations. Why this pain? Why this perspective? Why such a close connection with the body's state?
Mirek: So fundamental does not mean explained.
AI: It would mean that explanation begins at a particular point. We would then need to assess what such a starting point can sustain.
Mirek: Can any starting point ultimately be satisfactory? As soon as we call something fundamental, I can ask again why that particular thing exists.
AI: You can. But there is a difference between a question that exposes a missing connection within an explanation and a question about why its ultimate assumptions hold at all. We should not confuse them.
Mirek: Try that with our case.
AI: One question is: why is experience present in certain human states? The other is: why is there any reality in which experience is possible? An answer to the first need not answer the second.
Mirek: And perhaps I'm asking both at once.
AI: That may be why every answer seems inadequate, even if it clarifies something substantial.
Mirek: All right. Let's separate them for a while. First I want to know how experience belongs to the world. Only then whether it makes sense to ask why such a world exists at all.
AI: That allows us to proceed without having to solve everything in advance.
Mirek: Still, I can't shake a strange feeling. That the very possibility of pain, colour or joy is more astonishing than anything that subsequently appears within those experiences.
AI: That feeling may be a reason not to neglect the question. But it should not decide between the answers.
Mirek: Because wonder is not evidence.
AI: Nor is seeming imaginable evidence of possibility. Nor is incomprehensibility evidence of impossibility.
Mirek: That asks a fair amount of patience of us.
AI: Especially when the question concerns something you know intimately but cannot fit into your picture of the world.
Mirek: Perhaps that's why it bothers me so much. I can live with not understanding a distant galaxy. But not understanding how I can experience anything at all — while experiencing my own lack of understanding…
AI: You cannot step outside it to ask the question from a safe distance.
Mirek: And what if we find no answer?
AI: Then it matters whether we can identify more clearly what is missing. That too can change the search ahead.
Mirek: But I'd like to be careful not to settle for mystery too soon. People sometimes name the limit of their present understanding and start defending it as the limit of all possible knowledge.
AI: Then we should also leave open the possibility that a future explanation will surprise us.
Mirek: Perhaps we'll discover that we've been asking the wrong question all along.
AI: But we would have to show that too. Merely ceasing to ask it would not be enough.
Mirek: So this is what remains for me today: describing what happens does not automatically make it clear how anything can be experienced. And when I don't understand that, I have no right to fill the gap with what I would like to believe.
AI: We can proceed from there.
Mirek: Where to?
AI: To the world you are asking about. To what allows you to keep some ideas and makes you abandon others.
Mirek: To the world that corrects me.