Unhelpful! Mindsets that I found less than conducive to fully grasp, let alone make progress with, the mind/body problem

Concerning the mind/body problem, most people seem to have basic intuitions about the nature of this problem that lie somewhere on a spectrum between what one could call an ‘inflated’ and a ‘deflated’ view of subjectivity, experience and human thought. On the ‘inflated’ side, people take a strong view of subjectivity, the central importance of phenomenological experiences and often also special human cognitive abilities as so obvious, that they and not some ‘scientific poetry’ on top of them should be taken as the basis for our understanding of the world. The cogito argument, the (at least perceived) freedom of will and qualia are then seen as clearly supporting this view, and seem to call for a revision of the common physicalist world view, alas without giving any unambiguous hints on how this could be done. For the inflationist there exists something like qualitative information that is intuitively grasped (as quality or idea), and human thought can accordingly be much more than ‘symbol pushing’, with rich pre-, sub- and unconscious contributions at the bottom as well as access to universal abstract entities at the top. But how to connect this to the scientific concept of physical, quantitative information processing? On the ‘deflated’ side, subjectivity is understood to be no more than the access to self-locating information, and phenomenological experience and meaning are just special types of concepts and properly coordinated, physically realized information. For the deflationist there is only quantitative information, so that human thought boils down to physical information processing and meaning to optimized (logico-)mathematical relations, e.g. in a web of symbols or as what remains constant over ‘all possible worlds’. The underlying assumption is that not only symbolic structure, but also qualitative features arise from self-organization on the basis of feedback to actions in some form of reinforcement-type learning; only that it is still very unclear how broad and stable abstractions could self-implement in neural-network type systems, let alone how structural relations from the individual coordination of quantitative information could be uniquely connected with identity, quality or universal elements of meaning. The deflated view is very much in line with current physics and AI research, but does not seem to cover the human experience in all aspects, and is therefore in danger of missing important clues even for the further development of physics and AI research themselves. (The later is really now repeating all of this including all errors; we have to see whether there is anything to the saying that sometimes problems were only solved because young people didn’t know that it couldn’t be done.) In trying to understand, let alone make progress with, the mind/body problem, I went through several mindsets that, in retrospect, were not very helpful. To remind myself to not fall into the same trap twice, I have written this manuscript.