You can't reduce away the magic

Yes! Here it is! Something so routine – the daily walk – and, of a sudden I catch it, I grasp hold of it, I live it, I document it. This is it... The magickal moment. Don't let it fade! Relish it with every sense. The warmth of the sun's rays on my skin. The scents of a late-spring evening. The blackbirds' banter. The familiar sights, familiar over lifetimes. Life on Earth.

Take a look around... Between Grabina, Grobice and Adamów Rososki, the sun getting lower in the sky.

This is the joy. Cement it in my memory. To the end of this life and into the next ones. Nostalgia for the present. 

The moment passes. "Magical moment/the spell it is breaking". I walk away and look back from the distance. At the bottom of the hill I turn around to look back. One of the XII Canonical Prospects. 

Below: a few seconds later, I turn and catch this young male roe deer between two orchards. I still have the long lens on the camera; we stare at one another momentarily, the deer turns and darts off to the right.

I track down the source of the scent to this flower, which back home Google Lens identifies as Philadelphus coronarius (sweet mock orange or jaśminowiec wonny). Wikipedia describes it as being "valued for its profuse sweetly scented white blossom in early summer". The air is full of this perfume. It is beautiful. Imbue qualia with meaning.

Heading home, my phone notifies me of a number of YouTube podcasts that might interest me. One grabs my attention: Sabine Hossenfelder talking about qualia! This I must listen to! Ms Hossenfelder (1.7m subscribers), is, along with Neil Degrasse Tyson and Sean Carroll, a great science populariser, with a talent to explain complex concepts. All three, however, share one major flaw – they are materialist-reductionists, for whom the slightest whiff of the spiritual is anathema.

I listened to her podcast – twice; I'd recommend it.

She says: “the 'hard problem of consciousness' is the idea that even if you understand  all the physical processes in the brain,  you still haven’t explained why experience  feels the way it does. This philosophical view made qualia seem almost mystical, cut off from scientific investigation. I’ve always thought this is bullshit. You can measure what’s going on in the brain." 

You can indeed. But you can't equate neuronal activity to consciousness. So what that you can match the neural correlates of brains of people seeing the colour red? I'd compare that to those scientists who, in 1952, after Urey and Miller famously turned inorganic compounds into organic compounds, claimed that science has just discovered how life began. And therefore there's no need for any metaphysical explanation for abiogenesis (the leap from non-life to life). It's one thing to create organic compounds out of primordial soup by passing high voltages through it, it's quite another to create the simplest single-celled organism that will feed and breed. It's one thing to say "roughly the same thing is going on in human brains when they see red" and another to say "we can reduce complex emotional responses, feelings, memories and qualia down to electrical currents passing through the brain". 

To my surprise, the overwhelming majority of the comments under the video gives Ms Hossenfelder a right good kicking on this one. The magic of what it is to experience life cannot be reduced away by physicalism.

This time three years ago:
Blues and greens of early June

This time six years ago:
This land is my land
[when I bought the orchard adjacent to my dzialka]

This time nine years ago:
Preening stork

This time 12 years ago:
Preserving meadowland – UK and Poland 

This time 13 years ago:

Poland's transport infrastructure progress

This time 14 years ago:
Cara al Sol - a short story

This time 15 years ago:
Pumping out the floodwater

This time 16 years ago:
To Góra Kalwaria and beyond

This time 17 years ago:
Developments in Warsaw's exurbs