Just had my mind blown

This entry is a complete reaction to something I just read. I haven't cooled down yet, I'm running on all cylinders. So if it's a little intense, or scatterbrained, or bizarre I apologize. Bare with me, my head just exploded and I'd like to express how that happened.

So I picked up "The Conscious Mind" by David Chalmers after months of not reading it because I was stuck, or not in the mood or whatever excuse, I haven't really read anything in a while to be honest. Nothing real sit down, more like just short poems and things or chapters from the Tao Te Ching. Little did I know I was on the verge of stumbling upon an insane hypothesis.

The premise of the book is that consciousness (the qualities of experiencing things, the idea that experience does happen) is a very real thing. That it is in fact the one thing we can be most sure about in our lives, because it is the most immediate. Very Descartes, yes I know.

Anyway, the chapter I was reading he was discussing the problem that consciousness may be epiphenomenal. In other words, it is effected by the physical world but is in fact irrelevant to the real world itself. So Chalmers was explaining several ways that consciousness could be more than just a strange occurrence tacked onto the real world.

The argument he found most compelling was this: physics describes every thing in terms of it's extrinsic qualities. For example mass exists only in relation to energy and other mass. Distinctions between different types of elements are made purely in their relation to other elements, and how energy effects it. So what if there is an intrinsic quality to mass? What if that intrinsic quality is the proto-type for conscious experience and mass and energy and they are all related by that primordial beginning quality.

If you think about there's really no explanation or knowledge of what mass is. I mean, it does seem impossible that there would be all these relationships between things without any actual things to have relationships to, right?

Well it's certainly a thought, there is a lot that could be discussed on this. I just needed to get this out, and sit and think about it for a little while before I go back to reading more, or something else or thinking about something else. Just needed a bit of stewing time. It certainly fascinates the hell out of me.