Caffeine looks like adenosine receptor. Blocks feeling of tiredness

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Conjuring up an objective physical world to make sense of observations would—at least in principle—be legitimate if it didn’t create an insoluble problem known as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (Chalmers 2003, Levine 1983). Indeed, one of physicalism’s key tenets is that consciousness itself must be reducible to arrangements of objective physical elements. The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to conceive of how or why any particular structural or functional arrangement of physical elements would constitute or generate experience (Rosenberg 2004: 13-30, Strawson et al. 2006: 2-30). The qualities of experience are irreducible to the observable parameters of physical arrangements— whatever the arrangement is—in the sense that it is impossible to deduce those qualities—even in principle—from these parameters (Chalmers 2003). There is nothing about the momentum, mass, charge or spin of physical particles, or their relative positions and interactions with one another, in terms of which we could deduce the greenness of grass, the sweetness of honey, the warmth of love, or the bitterness of disappointment. As long as they t with the observed correlations between neural activity and reported experience, mappings between these two domains are entirely arbitrary: in principle, it is as (in)valid to state that spin up generates the feeling of coldness and spin down that of warmth as it is to say the exact opposite. There is nothing intrinsic about spin— or about any other parameter of physical elements or arrangements thereof—that would allow us to make the distinctio

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decomposition problem’: How does one cosmic consciousness apparently break up into myriad individual psyches, such as yours and mine? This, however, is actually not a fundamental problem, for “a disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness” (Black & Grant: 191) that can account for the appearance of decomposition is well known and understood today, under the label of “dissociation” (American Psychiatric Association 2013).