Neuro thinkery

I have a lot bubbling around in my head on the subject of neuroscience. I am well aware that I'm not really an expert on the field yet, but no one really understands what is going on in the brain very well so I don't feel too bad writing about my mostly uninformed thoughts on the matter.

When I think about the current state of the field of neuroscience, I usually try to put myself in the shoes of a Pre-Darwinian biologist. Back then, there were simply a mess of animals with a mess of characteristics that seemed to have some semblance of an order (usually assumed to be divine) but that order wasn't very clear. Some things were easily measured, such as nose length, number of legs, skeletal structure, and overall size, while other key aspects of animals, particularly their DNA, were completely immeasurable.

Now how does that compare to neuroscience? Well the thing is that neuroscience is attempting to explain something that just makes absolutely no sense from the perspective of any of the other hard sciences. While a physicist can explain how particles move and behave to no end, he never has to ask himself how the particles feel about their movements. A biochemist never has to ask about how a paramecium feels about its internal chemical reactions. Yet once you enter your own head, you are without a doubt capable of feeling things. That is to say that you subjectively experience the world, or to put it another way, you have qualia. The question is how in the freaking hell qualia arise. It's the thing that everyone would absolutely love to explain, yet no one expects to be able to do it. After all, all of our tools for the task are completely useless. If we borrow from physics, there is nothing there that explains subjectivity. Physics, as far as I can tell, explicitly denies subjective experiences of quantum particles on up, as it should. After all, when your theories make accurate predictions out to something like 40 decimal places, why would you bother adding subjectivity into the mix?

The trouble is that everyone who reads this is currently undeniably in the process of having a subjective experience, and that evidence right there says that something big is missing from our current knowledge of the universe. Sitting in my comfy apartment, it completely looks like modern physics chemistry and biology have absolutely no way to explain how a creature can have anything like a subjective experience. So how does that compare to the Pre-Darwinian biologist? To anyone before Darwin, the ridiculous diversity and order to the life on Earth appeared completely inexplicable using then-modern physics. There was no process that could possibly create both a cat and a dog, let alone a tree and a flying squirrel. Many smart people assumed that there must be a gap between then known physics and this crazy diversity. And the order! Resources are decomposed, others are generated by bacteria, still others are nutritious seemingly designed for human consumption. Yet all of it can be explained by noting three things: things reproduce, the copies are not always identical, and the ones that survive to reproduce again will proliferate more than those that don't.

So this raises the question, is the problem of qualia a physics-breaking problem, or is it one like the diversity and order seen by the Pre-Darwinian biologist. I personally don't see how a set of neurons like the ones I model could possibly have a subjective experience, which makes me intuitively believe that the problem is physics-breaking. However, in an attempt to avoid a failure of imagination I actively try to ignore my intuition in this case.

tl;dr: Physics, chemistry and modern biology don't appear to explain qualia at all. Maybe there's some nuance like evolution that bridges the gap, or maybe we need an entire paradigm shift.

[I should note that I read Edelman and Tononi's A Universe of Consciousness five years ago or so, and I probably lifted some ideas from that book unintentionally]