Gustavo Ramires

Note: This is a very rough draft of a theory. Any comments or corrections are welcome. I will try to give credit to useful observations. To discover the nature of sentience and ethics, we can actually use scientific principles even though they are sometimes considered metaphysical. The great insight though is that consciousness is part of reality. It is a real phenomenon. So I believe it turns out we can study this phenomenon, and assemble essentially complete theories of what it 'is'. What do I mean by a theory of consciousness (later a theory of ethics, or 'what we must do')? A theory of physics may, for example, predict the position of particles at a later time given certain initial conditions. A theory of consciousness can answer a number of questions: - Given a mind (e.g. a human brain), and its initial state, when we give it a certain input, for example corresponding to the physiological (neural) response to smelling a sweet, what taste does the mind/person feel? (is it really sweet or is this person different and smells what is commonly known as salty?) This is a purely subjective phenomenon, but it is emergent from information and communication in the brain. In general, we are able to given neural activity describe the internal feelings experienced by the person using common sense words, because we have a theory of neural activity, and a theory of how different feelings manifest neurally in relationship to associated well-enough defined words and concepts (for example emotions, feelings, sensations). - We understand all qualia and what qualia 'is', that is, we can tell if a certain object with say certain electrical activity manifests qualia (i.e. if it is sentient) or not, for any system. How can we do that? The basic principle really is observation of what people say, including with some caveats personal observations. The second principle is that if there is a singular reality, and if things are a certain way and not another, then it may be (hypo