Poul Anderson's sf has a cosmic background. Virtual particles emerge from vacuum. Galaxies and stars condense from hydrogen. An end-product of cosmic processes is consciousness with different perceptions and motivations in different intelligent species: human beings, Ythrians, Merseians etc.
The philosophical mind-body problem can be re-expressed as: how do some objective processes become subjective? We empirically observe causal relationships between earlier and later objective processes but not between objective and subjective processes. Subjective phenomena are unique and "internal," although not just in a physical sense, to each individual subject. Fiction writers have learned how to express different subjective points of view and also how to differentiate between subjective and objective accounts. When an omniscient narrator informs readers that a star went nova billions of years ago, there is no subjective perception of the stellar explosion. Poul Anderson, like many other authors, exercises careful control over narrative points of view.
Mental events - sensations, satisfactions, discomforts, desires, fears, thoughts etc - do not happen in a vacuum. What happens in a vacuum, apparently, is potential energy, virtual particles, quantum fluctuations etc. Energy and mass underwent many transformations before organismic sensitivity became bodily sensation, the first consciousness.
Our present mental states result from a long three-layered past.
2 comments:
All those characteristics are, however, a product of what you are physically.
Yes. I think, on the evidence, that the psychological/mental/conscious/"spiritual" emerges from the physical/material/unconscious etc.
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