Noesis-space

I don't know whether this kind of framework already exists, but here I go. It seems to me that there (at least) three categories of states of ignorance of explanations of phenomena, distinct from the usual "known-knowns, known-unknowns, unknown-knowns and unknown-unknowns". The first one is the most self explanatory: I, as an individual, might not know what the answer is. I could probably just look it up on Google. Example: why does it rain? How far is it from here to Sydney? When was the first James Bond film released? The second one is, we, as a civilization, don't know the answer, but it seems within the range of resolvability. We known the answer will be relatively mundane: it may surprise us, but it won't radically change how we model how the universe works. It'll be an exact figure, or a yes or a no, or an explanatory model that fits with previous models. Maybe it's just a hard problem, or we haven't invested enough resources into figuring...

So, I, like, love geography. For a long time, I've had this urge to understand or know as much as possible about the surface of the Earth, especially those land bits. I’ve spent countless hours poring over my world map and scrolling through Google Earth, zooming in on the Verkhoyansk Range in northeastern Russia, tiny subantarctic islands and oases in the Australian outback. An aspect of this knowing as much of the Earth as possible is that it doesn't so much matter to me how important, in human terms, the area is. As in, I don't care much what the population density is. To me, a Germany sized portion of the Earth's surface is a prima facie as appealing to this urge I have to understand , whether that area actually is Germany or some remote region of the Sahara desert. Having said that, I do find more diverse geographical feature dense areas more interesting, i.e. India, with its towering mountains, tropical jungles, desert, deltas and huge cities, is more ...

This is something that's been on my mind for several years, although I've had trouble pinning it down as a concept and communicating it, but here's a shot. All of this is of course completely speculative, and there's no way (that I know of) to settle it so far, this is simply complete speculation within philosophy of mind . Some background: I see the hard problem of consciousness as perhaps a qualitatively different kind of problem, one that doesn't positively benefit from analogies to “élan vital” or some other mysterious answer to a mysterious question. I am a hopeful physicalist , and I am very open to the possibility that future humans, and especially a digital superintelligence , would be able to unravel the mystery of the hard problem, but I remain unsure. If I were to bet on one thing not yielding to systematic attempts to understand and fully explain it, it would be qualia. I'd like to think that eventually the mysterians will be refuted, and...