Wondering is fine, if that’s all we’re doing, we should keep that in mind. Before we had the tools to study atoms empirically, it would be silly to choose one model and dig heels in and base other beliefs on it. If someone in the Middle Ages tells you they’ve just come up with a new way of building bridges that’s based on a certain model of the atom, you should probably pass that guy up. Even if he happened to stumble upon approximately the right idea, his understanding would be crude and unrefined.
Maybe there is some whole field of science yet to be discovered around consciousness, but even if so, such ideas do not provide a solid foundation to build other ideas on top of. Picturing things as a structure, those ideas belong at the top where they are not load bearing and can be safely tinkered with.
Wondering is fine, if that’s all we’re doing, we should keep that in mind. Before we had the tools to study atoms empirically, it would be silly to choose one model and dig heels in and base other beliefs on it. If someone in the Middle Ages tells you they’ve just come up with a new way of building bridges that’s based on a certain model of the atom, you should probably pass that guy up. Even if he happened to stumble upon approximately the right idea, his understanding would be crude and unrefined.
Maybe there is some whole field of science yet to be discovered around consciousness, but even if so, such ideas do not provide a solid foundation to build other ideas on top of. Picturing things as a structure, those ideas belong at the top where they are not load bearing and can be safely tinkered with.