The philosophically hard problem about phenomenal consciousness asks what exactly is it besides all of that functional stuff that gives us the subjective, first-person experience of all of that happening, and if you built a machine to do all of the same functionality, would it lack that subjective-first person experience, or would it have one just like us, and if so where does that come from and why?

The contemporary panpsychist answer is that there isn't anything special that gives us subjective first-person experience, there just is a subjective first-person experience to everything — Pfhorrest

It's a pseudo-materialist solution, in my view. It says there must be some extra, magical ingredient in everything which is 'consciousness' in some latent or implicit form, which then manifests in living beings in particular.

The reason I say it's pseudo-materialist is because it purports to understand that element as a attribute of matter. But at the same time, it has no possible answer as to what this 'stuff' is or how it can be observed or brought into the ambit of empirical analysis. So it becomes another of the 'promissory notes of materialism', something which we are assured 'science will one day come to understand'. It's actually more a way of trying to preserve the monistic ontology of materialism - that only matter exists - by insisting that matter itself is conscious - which I think is a total fudge. (I actually had Philip Goff turn up on this very forum in response to my earlier criticism of one of his essays.)

With respect to the subjective unity of consciousness, this is a well-known and ancient philosophical problem. Kant certainly discussed it at great length in various works. But let's just step back and ask the question again - what is being discussed here? Chalmers, and others, have put it (awkwardly, in my opinion) as the 'what-it-is-like' to be something. But I think a much less roundabout way of putting it is, that what is being discussed is simply being. It is 'the nature of being' that is the hard problem.

Here is a pivotal conception in Kant concerning what he describes as 'transcendental apperception':

[1] All experience is the succession of a variety of contents (an idea taken from David Hume).
[2] To be experienced at all, the successive data must be combined or held together in a unity for consciousness.
[3] Unity of experience therefore implies a unity of self.
[4] The unity of self is as much an object of experience as anything is. *
[5] Therefore, experience both of the self and its objects rests on acts of synthesis that, because they are the conditions of any experience, are not themselves experienced.
[6] These prior syntheses are made possible by the categories. Categories allow us to synthesize the self and the objects.

Source
(* I question number four, as I don't believe the self is an object of experience.)

This is related to the concept of the transcendental ego.

Transcendental ego, the self that is necessary in order for there to be a unified empirical self-consciousness. For Kant, it synthesizes sensations according to the categories of the understanding. Nothing can be known of this self*, because it is a condition, not an object, of knowledge. For Husserl, pure consciousness, for which everything that exists is an object, is the ground for the foundation and constitution of all meaning. 2

* cf Brihadaranyaka Upaniṣad 'It is the unknown knower, the unseen seer'.

You might object 'where can this 'transcendental ego' be found? And I think there's a hint in the examination of the so-called 'neural binding problem', in particular the problem of the 'subjective unity of experience'. This refers to the capacity of the brain to synthesise all manner of perceptual stimuli into a coherent unity - the 'subjective unity of experience' - which is, at least, strongly suggestive of the 'transcendental ego'. But science is unable to determine the neural mechanism which is associated with this act of 'synthesis':

In his paper on this issue, Jerome S. Feldman says that:

There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Closely related problems include change- (Simons and Rensink 2005) and inattentional-blindness (Mack 2003), and the subjective unity of perception arising from activity in many separate brain areas (Fries 2009; Engel and Singer 2001).

...There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the NBP really is a scientific mystery at this time.

In the introduction to this paper, Feldman states outright:

Traditionally, the Neural Binding problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996).

So, as I said in my first post, the reason the hard problem is hard, is really very simple: that being can never be made an object of scientific analysis, in the manner that this is currently understood. This is why, for example, 'eliminative materialism' exists, because it explicitly recognises this; but instead of saying 'oh well, then, scientific method has its limits', they then insist that being itself is an illusion. (Whereas, my view is: get over it, and move along.)

Systems philosophy, from what I can tell, appears to be speaking only of access consciousness, the subject of the so-called "easy" problem of consciousness. There is no question in philosophy of mind about the possibility of that to be emergent in that sense. We're talking about the hard problem of consciousness, and thus, phenomenal consciousness. Claiming that phenomenal consciousness emerges from wholly un-phenomenally-conscious parts is a completely different thing.

Temperature, for example, emerges from simpler mechanical motion, in a way that makes perfect sense. We can explain what it is about the simple mechanical motion of the constituent particles of a macroscopic object that we are considering in aggregate when we talk about the property of "temperature". Temperature is in that sense reducible to mechanical motion. My body has a temperature. Each my my organs has a temperature. So do each of their cells. And their organelles. At some point we get to talking about individual molecules and then it doesn't make so much sense to talk about temperature, but we can still talk about the kinetic energy of those molecules, which is what temperature is an aggregate measurement of. And then we can talk about energy more generally when we get down past the level of molecules, and so on. There's something that has precursors to "temperature" all the way down, such that if you modeled just those precursors in a simulation, you would end up modeling temperature for free along the way, just in way finer detail that you need to if temperature is all you're concerned with.

Phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand -- the topic of the hard problem of consciousness, the subject of this thread -- is by definition something independent of properties like that. Phenomenal consciousness is what a philosophical zombie is supposed to lack that a real human has, where a philosophical zombie is by definition identical to the real human in every physical way. One could say that there is no such thing as that, that nothing has it, not even humans, and so dismiss the problem completely, but that's not to give an answer to the "hard problem of consciousness", it's just to dismiss it as a non-problem. If one wants to say instead that real humans do have phenomenal consciousness, but that something like a rock doesn't, then you're going to have to explain where along the way this property that is defined to be something wholly irreducible to the properties that humans and rocks have in common "emerged", and how. If you disassemble a bunch of rocks and then reassemble their atoms into cells and assemble those into tissues and assemble those into a human body, where along the way did this new phenomenal consciousness property spring into existence, and from what? There's no doubt that you can in principle show where the access consciousness sprung into being, because that's just a more-or-less mechanical function of neurons (though actually showing the details of that in practice is a much harder problem, but a problem for neuroscientists, not philosophers). But when and where and why did this wholly new thing start happening? That's the spooky magic (@180 Proof) that emergentism about phenomenal consciousness claims happens.

The third alternative, besides nothing having phenomenal consciousness or anything like it, and it suddenly springing into existence out of whole cloth from things that had nothing like it, is that everything has something like it, which is what panpsychism is. A real human brain has it. A chimp brain has a different kind of it. A rat brain has an even more different kind of it. A slime mold has something even more different, and a tree likewise. Even rocks, and electrons, and quantum fields, have precursors of it. This is almost tantamount to dismissing the problem just like eliminativism does, except rather than denying that anything has this first-person phenomenal experience, it just says that everything has that and there's nothing remarkable about merely that -- it's the first-person phenomenal experiences of being the complex access-conscious things that we are that is remarkable. And that complex functionality is describable in ordinary mechanical terms, and can emerge from simpler mechanical systems uncontroversially. But that's not the "hard problem of consciousness" we're talking about any more, that's the "easy" problem instead.

That’s not the Hard Problem of Consciousness at all. That’s just the fact-value distinction. — Pfhorrest

But I think there's a connection between the 'fact-value' distinction, and the 'hard problem', as follows.

The fact-value dichotomy grew out of Hume's observation of 'is and ought'. I won't repeat the famous passage, I assume you're familiar with it. But it is at least an analogy for the larger issue of quantification and measurement, on the one hand, and the importance and role of 'qualia', on the other. 'Qualia' means precisely 'a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.' And the hard problem is that 'what it is to be experienced' cannot be objectively or quantifiably described. So the hard problem is actually central to the fact-value distinction.

So, I brought up the fact that in Platonist philosophy, mathematics was important but not of the highest importance. That was accorded to the knowledge of the good, and so on. Whereas, as you say, *anything* can be described in terms of geometric algebra and equations. But the whole point of the hard problem is that, even though such a description appears to be comprehensive, there's something fundamental it doesn't include or describe. And I don't know if you're seeing that.

What exactly was it you were applauding in this post that is different from anything I've said that you've been arguing against since? I've just been rephrasing the same thoughts since then and for some reason it seems you heartily agreed the first time and have disagreed ever since.

To answer your latest question, panpsychism is not supposed to be a "conjecture about the world of facts", the likes of which should be testable; most philosophical claims are not the kinds of things meant to be testable, they're ways of thinking that are more or less useful as part of the framework within which we think about the kinds of things that are testable. But as for an argument for it, I'll just try rephrasing the same thing I've been saying over and over again, in more detail:

There are three exhaustive possibilities when it comes to what things have any first-person experience at all, where that having of a first-person experience at all is what is meant by "phenomenal consciousness", which is the topic of the "hard problem of consciousness". Either:

-Nothing at all has it, not even humans; or
-Some things don't have it, but other things do (and if there is ultimately only one kind of stuff, which doesn't have it in its simplest form, then somehow that stuff can be built into things that somehow do have it); or
-Everything has it.

The first of those three options ends up telling people that no, they really don't have any first-person experience at all, which is prima facie absurd. I think thought experiments like Mary's Room also show the significance of first-person experience apart from third-person experience, though I don't think that that disproves physicalism like it claims to.

The second option raises this big thorny problem of figuring out exactly where in the process first-person experience comes into being, and whether things like philosophical zombies could be possible, something that is exactly like a human being except that it lacks this having of a first-person experience, since on this (second option) account it's possible for some things to not have it while other things do.

The third option dissolves that big thorny problem of the second option, without falling into the absurdity of the first option. Since (as you've elsewhere agreed) philosophy is all about dissolving illusory problems, that makes this third option the best philosophical answer to the "hard problem of consciousness".

But that only means that there isn't anything wholly new popping into being from whole cloth at any stage of development between quantum fields and human beings. What's going on in human beings is built out things that are going on in the stuff human beings are made out of. New, more complex forms of the same general kind of stuff can still arise, weakly emergent, from simpler forms of that same general kind of stuff. I think that the mere having of a first-person experience at all, "phenomenal consciousness", is completely trivial, and trying to figure out where it starts and ends is a useless quagmire. What matters is the functionality of a thing, which can be seen both in the third person through its behavior, and in the first person (by the thing itself) in its experience. That functionality, and with it features of both the behavior and the experience of the thing, can emerge (weakly) from simpler functionality of things the thing is made of, but at no point does there start or stop being any first-person experience at all, the quality of that experience just changes, enhances or diminishes, just like the mechanical behavior of the thing does.

In another post recently I wrote this really nice little summary of my whole view on this topic that I'll copy and paste here:

I think there are only physical things, and that physical things consist only of their empirical properties, which are actually just functional dispositions to interact with observers (who are just other physical things) in particular ways. A subject's phenomenal experience of an object is the same event as that object's behavior upon the subject, and the web of such events is what reality is made out of, with the nodes in that web being the objects of reality, each defined by its function in that web of interactions, how it observably behaves in response to what it experiences, in other words what it does in response to what is done to it.

In an extremely trivial and useless sense everything thus "has a mind" inasmuch as everything is subject to the behavior of other things and so has an experience of them ("phenomenal consciousness", the topic of the "hard problem"), but "minds" in a more useful and robust sense are particular types of complex self-interacting objects, and therefore as subjects have an experience that is heavily of themselves as much as it is of the rest of the world ("access consciousness", the topic of the "easy problem").

an eye that can see is conscious of light.

That is crazy in so many ways, beautiful! — Zelebg

But it's only true for eyes that are the organs of conscious beings.

will reformulate such a speculative chimera into explanatory conjecture that can be modeled computationally and, at least in principle, tested (e.g. IIT). — 180 Proof

You might have missed the scientific paper I mentioned above, which mentions the 'hard problem' in particular connection to what is called the 'neural binding problem'. The paper is here, from which I quote:

We will now address the deepest and most interesting variant of the NBP, the phenomenal unity of perception. There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). ....

Traditionally, the NBP concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.

There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the NBP really is a scientific mystery at this time.

Bolds added. So here we have "scientist acknowledges 'scientific mystery'". Maybe you could explain to him that he ought to be doing his job better. :wink:

Emergence is only one proposed solution to the hard problem. — Pfhorrest

Sure. The formulation of the hard problem does not strictly assume emergence, I was being a bit glib. But I think it springs from naturally emergentist assumptions. Namely that the universe started out unconscious, and then, as a result of non-conscious stuff doing things, consciousness arises. And explaining how this happens is hard in the strong sense Chalmers meant it. Eliminativism and panpsychism (and objections based on language and misapplications of concepts etc) sidestep the problem. The only people who have to tackle the hardness of the hard problem are emergentists it seems to me, as they are the ones who have to build this conceptual bridge between the non-experiential and the experiential.

Obviously there is no consensus agreement on a solution to the so called “hard problem of consciousness”. In fact there is little agreement even on a definition of “consciousness”, “mind”, “experience” or “qualia”. There is also no agreement on which sorts of structures (organisms or systems) possesses any of the above forms of qualia. The exception being “ourselves” our “inner lives” and thus we have first hand knowledge that such a form of experience as consciousness is present in the universe.

Just to clarify, I think consciousness is form of integrated unified experience. I think experience is universal. Mind (a less unified and integrated form of experience) is widespread in nature and “consciousness” is a fairly rare form of mind and experience. I thus fall into the category of panexperientialism or a form of Whiteheadian process philosophy which some classify as a variety of panpsychism.


I think the “problem of consciousness” is a philosophical problem not a scientific problem. The problem arises precisely because we think we should be able to detect and explain “consciousness” using the scientific method. This stems from the dominant materialistic, mechanistic view of nature. In the materialist mechanistic view most of nature is inert, unfeeling, non experiential and psychically inert. From this point of view experience, mind, consciousness, qualia are rare in nature and confined to humans and at most a few higher animals. In the materialist view our scientific, empirical descriptions are complete and accurate descriptions of all aspects of the phenomena which they seek to describe and explain. This strikes me as false for even the most basic of scientific phenomena such as quantum events, entanglement, non locality, and superposition. There are aspects to even these most basic natural phenomena which elude us.
Thus I do not think any purely empirical, mathematical or scientific explanation which is entirely complete and absolute for experience, mind, consciousness or qualia is possible.

This is not a position against the continuing advances of neuroscience, This is not a position against the utility of science in gaining useful and meaningful knowledge of reality. It is a position against the position that science will completely and satisfactorily explain all of nature including our experience.

Now from my philosophical position (process philosophy and panexperientialism), mind and consciousness is not something unexpected for it has not “popped into existence” from inert mindless non experiential matter, for that would truly be a miracle. Instead “occasions of experience” are the fundamental units of nature and we should not talk of “particles” but of “events”

As for Descartes, it was the splitting of nature into two distinct but separate substances (dualism) that began the whole mind body problem (which gives rise to the hard problem of consciousness) in the first place. We are part of nature, our experience is part of nature. We cannot, we should not attempt to explain it away as a purely physical materialist empirical phenomena. Whitehead argues strongly against this “artificial bifurcation of nature” into “nature of awareness and nature as the cause of awareness” the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of chairs and the feel of velvet” these are all part of nature, of reality “ you cannot pick and choose and call quarks real and consciousness an illusion.

). For James, experience is the sole criterion of reality; we live in “a world of pure experience.

The hard problem of consciousness is hard because it's an illusory problem so there is no solution, only dissolution. The mere having of a first-person experience isn't some special phenomenon that occurs only in humans and so needs an explanation, it's just a basic feature of existence. What's interesting about humans is the particulars of our experience, which correlate with our behavior, both being a product of our function, which is the subject of the "easy" problem of consciousness, which is actually much harder than the so-called "hard" problem; though the hardness is not philosophical but rather scientific.

The hard problem of consciousness is hard because it's an illusory problem so there is no solution, only dissolution. The mere having of a first-person experience isn't some special phenomenon that occurs only in humans and so needs an explanation, it's just a basic feature of existence. What's interesting about humans is the particulars of our experience, which correlate with our behavior, both being a product of our function, which is the subject of the "easy" problem of consciousness, which is actually much harder than the so-called "hard" problem; though the hardness is not philosophical but rather scientific. — Pfhorrest

:clap: :cool:

The hard problem is hard because it assumes emergence.
— bert1

Why is emergence a problem? Emergence is a well known property of complex physical systems. — Pantagruel

It is. But it needs to be considered on a case by case basis. Most stories about emergence are perfectly plausible. But some bugger the mind. For example, its a headfuck to try and figure out how spatial stuff could emerge from non-spatial stuff. If you have a bunch of things that don't take up any space at all, what are they supposed to do to each other such that they end up with something that takes up space? Maybe it's possible, but you need a fuck of a good storyteller to make this convincing. Similarly with consciousness - I want the story of how non-conscious stuff interacting can end up with conscious stuff. Maybe it's possible. Some take a piecemeal approach, and divide up the concept of consciousness into several parts, and then set about attempting to move from one to the next. I haven't heard anything convincing at all so far. It's not enough to say 'hey, fluidity emerges from interactions of hydrogen and oxygen without a problem, therefore I can say anything emerges from anything without a problem.' No, you have to tell a convincing story.

And there are structural problems that work against the emergentist. One big one is that things are either conscious or not. Consciousness seems to be a non-vague concept. That is, if something is conscious at all, it is conscious. And if it isn't, it isn't conscious at all. There are no states that are indeterminate as to whether they are conscious or not. Are there? Maybe that's wrong. But if it's right, that presents a problem for emergence. Emergent properties typically emerge gradually in systems whose defining properties are vague. Fitting in a sudden switch from non-conscious to conscious in such systems is difficult and arbitrary. Such stories are unlikely to be convincing. But if you have such a story to present, please do so.

We had a long debate on Hoffman a couple of years back. I concluded his resemblance to 'idealist philosophy' is superficial, his program is fundamentally neo-darwinian and not really connected with philosophy.

As I see it descriptive (factual) and prescriptive (evaluative) opinions are just different attitudes toward the same kinds of states of affairs, where those states of affairs can be phrased in terms of math as we’ve discussed either way, and the different attitudes can likewise be phrased mathematically as a function of the “program” that is the mind — Pfhorrest

That description is suggestive of Descartes' notion of 'the new science' which was created on the basis of his discovery of algebraic geometry. It's basic to modern scientific method - that any subject matter can be understood through this kind of universal mathematical analysis. But it omits something of fundamental importance - and that's what the 'hard problem' is seeking to articulate.

This was also anticipated in Thomas Nagel's essay What is it like to be a Bat and this theme is central to many of his later writings.

Chalmer's main antagonist, Daniel Dennett, cannot acknowledge that there is a 'hard problem'. And why not? Well, to me it seems obvious, but Dennett has been writing and publishing for 50 years and is a tenured academic, so it's plainly not obvious to everyone.

There's a stock quote, however, which is relevant to just this issue:

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

This too is a facet of the hard problem of consciousness, in my opinion.

From your description in that other thread, that is exactly the same thing that I am talking about under the more traditional name of panpsychism. It says nothing at all about the "emergence" of things with "cognitive descriptions [...] appropriate for the internal/introspective perspective" (phenomenal consciousness) from things without one, which is the meaning of "emergence" used in philosophy of mind, in the sense that distinguishes it from panpsychism.

(@180 Proof I was typing this paragraph as you replied and it appropriately addresses your response as well). There is absolutely no contention whatsoever that the function of cognition, the likes of which even a philosophical zombie is supposed to have, can emerge from aggregates of other, simpler functions. That is not the thing that is at question here, there is no doubt about it, and that's why it's called the "easy problem".

What is at question in the "hard problem", to use Pantagruel's terms again, is whether nothing has an "internal perspective" (eliminativism), whether some things have no "internal perspective" but if you combine those things right suddenly something does have an "internal perspective" (emergentism), or whether everything has an "internal perspective", that varies along with the function of the thing (panpsychism). I hold to the last position.

On a panpsychist account the specific kind of internal perspective that humans have "emerges" along with our evolving functionality just like the "external perspective" of our behavior does (because the experience and the behavior are just two sides of the same functional coin), but the mere having of an "internal perspective" at all is something that was always there at the fundamental level, and didn't suddenly pop into existence when things with no "internal perspective" were combined just right. @180 Proof you seemed to be applauding this when I said it earlier; to quote myself where you bolded me: "The mere having of a first-person experience isn't some special phenomenon that occurs only in humans and so needs an explanation, it's just a basic feature of existence."

From your wikilink to Emergence, look at the section on Strong and weak emergence, especially the Viability of strong emergence subsection, which includes a quote saying of strong emergence that "it is uncomfortably like magic". There is no contention at all over weak emergence of functional properties like access consciousness; that is, again, why that is the "easy problem". It's the strong emergence of phenomenal consciousness that is a contentious position regarding the "hard problem".

↪180 Proof What exactly was it you were applauding in this post that is different from anything I've said that you've been arguing against since? I've just been rephrasing the same thoughts since then and for some reason it seems you heartily agreed the first time and have disagreed ever since. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, I misread your "basic feature of existence" to mean something like an inherently potential emergent property rather than a fundamental property like charge or mass. Mostly, I agree with you that the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is an illusion, but apparently for different reasons than yours.

There are three exhaustive possibilities when it comes to what things have any first-person experience at all, where that having of a first-person experience at all is what is meant by "phenomenal consciousness", which is the topic of the "hard problem of consciousness". Either:

-Nothing at all has it, not even humans; or

-Some things don't have it, but other things do (and if there is ultimately only one kind of stuff, which doesn't have it in its simplest form, then somehow that stuff can be built into things that somehow do have it); or

-Everything has it. — Pfhorrest

But baseline, or ordinary, "first person experience" occurs only in the absence of

• neurological disorders (like anosognosias, blindsight, cotard delusion, derealization order,  asomatognosia, etc)

• neuropathologies (like paranoid schizophrenia, etc)

• neuro-degenerative complexes (like Alzheimer's Syndrome, etc)

• psychoactive intoxication (like DMT, etc)

• neurotoxins used for anaesthesia ...

• etcetera.

which is evidence contrary to the claim that "first person experience" is a fundamental property like charge or mass (as I point out here re: 2.61). There is no "it" to have or not have, so the first possibilty "Nothing at all has it, not even humans" is less nonsensical - a more plausibly apt description - than the others.

The third option dissolves that big thorny problem of the second option, without falling into the absurdity of the first option. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, I've already pointed out that "panpsychism" (3rd option) is a solution to a pseudo-problem e.g. "supervenience" or "epiphenomenalism" or "p-zombies" (2nd option). There's nothing "absurd" about humans being mistaken about what seems like "first person experience" that's, in fact, merely an illusionary artifact (i.e. a verb mistaken as a noun) of an ecology-situated, strange looping, reflexive information processing system. Further elaboration I've referred to here.

It (1st option) only seems "absurd" with respect to a substantive (noun) rather than dynamic-processional (verb) conception of "first person experience" (i.e. consciousness) insofar as the latter is like 'legs not walking' whereas the former is like 'walking without legs'. There's nothing "absurd" about either an irreflexive information processing system or an offline (i.e. sleep-mode) reflexive information processing system; what's absurd is to reify online reflexive information processing into a hammer and thereby interpreting all other systems as reflexive information nails.

Everything we know in science dealing with the natural phenomena, every law, discovery, explanation... everything is about some kind of motion, — Zelebg

More to the point, it's about something which is objective. Whether it's the 'ghostly neutrino' or the black hole at the center of the galaxy or about a function of the body or whatever subject you chose, science is concerned with objective measurement and observation.

The simple reason the problem of consciousness is 'hard' is that the observing mind is never an object, by definition. This is a succinct way of expressing the idea at the centre of Chalmer's original paper.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

And that subjective reality is precisely what can never be made an object - at least, not without completely changing the perspective from which it is being examined.

The hard problem only exists for naturalists, because they consider the concepts they use to describe the world to be semantically divorced from sense.

For phenomenological traditions, there only exists the 'easy' problem of explaining the unity of intentionality. For there is no gap within their concepts for the hard problem.

So if a scientist takes up the challenge of addressing the "hard problem", you'd see that as misguided? — frank

No. "The hard problem ... ", like e.g. æther, is an empty concept (i.e. pseudo-problem, based on the dissolved 'MBP'); any competent scientist will reformulate such a speculative chimera into an explanatory conjecture that can be modeled computationally and, at least in principle, tested (e.g. IIT) or discard it and move on to a more productive line of inquiry and research.

Evidence? — 180 Proof

Here is Jerome S. Feldman's homepage. If you could pick a scientist to refer to regarding the subject of this thread, then he would be a leading contender.

You said:

any competent scientist will reformulate such a speculative chimera into explanatory conjecture — 180 Proof

BUT, here we have, not only a competent, but exemplary scientist, who specialises in the very kind of science that addresses 'the hard problem of consciousness', from a scientific perspective. And this very scientist says that, and again I quote,

There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function.

and also that

What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene

whilst commenting on 'the subjective unity of experience'.

Which is dismissed by you as follows:

Scientists, like most of us on these forums, traffic from time to time in pseudo-philosophical speculation. — 180 Proof

There genuinely, really is 'a hard problem of consciousness', but it's almost beyond doubt that you don't actually comprehend what it is.

The hard problem is hard because it assumes emergence. — bert1

Why is emergence a problem? Emergence is a well known property of complex physical systems.

However, if you are not aware of the ubiquity and versatility of Information in the real world, none of this will make sense to you — Gnomon

That's not the reason it doesn't make sense to me.

On mathematical Platonism:

Man, I dunno. I reject the opening statement in the SEP article, out of hand. Mathematical objects only really exist if we objectify them, so I don’t see how they can be independent of our language, thoughts or practices. — Mww

I have some passages from Frege where he says that mathematical primitives - integers I presume - 'exist independently from anyone's understanding of them', in the same sense that planets do - 'grasped by the mind in the way a pencil is grasped by the hand'. I presume the same applies to e.g. Pythagoras' theorem, the law the excluded middle, f=ma and many other such principles.

Reason is able to discern these principles, but then, as reason is independent, it can also invent similar kinds of ideas - for example algorithms or artificial mathematical systems or synthetic chemicals.

But when natural principles are discerned or discovered, then we're seeing something about nature, not simply projecting human ideas onto nature.

Besides humans are not really outside of, or apart from, nature. (This insight originates with non-dualism). This notion we nowadays have that nature is dumb stuff governed by physical laws, and the mind is internal to the hominid brain, is grounded in the sense of 'otherness' that is one of the distinctive characteristics of modernity. Our experience of reality is a single whole, with inner and outer aspects, but both 'inner' and 'outer' are still representations or constructs (vorstellung). Reason doesn't inhere in either pole but pertains to the structure of the understanding itself. (I am very impressed by this passage on Augustine on Intelligible Objects.)

In pre-modernity there was an instinctive sense of relatedness to the cosmos - that the mind was an expression of an order which both created it and allowed it to understand the world. Whereas now 'understanding' is seen merely as adaptation and is devoid of any purpose save that of survival and instrumental utility.

To relate all this back to the hard problem of consciousness - for the materialists, such as Dennett (and those here), there is no 'hard problem' because they have so thoroughly internalized the modern outlook that they've lost all sense of what is problematical about it.

That’s not the Hard Problem of Consciousness at all. That’s just the fact-value distinction. The Hard Problem isn’t about evaluation, and a mathematicist description of the world being independent of any evaluation of the world just means that evaluation is a different topic, one we’re just not talking about yet: it’s not saying there is nothing to say about it, it’s just refraining from saying anything about it, leaving you free to figure that all out separately.

I very roughly agree with all that.

I'm saying the concept is incoherent, and therefore as a counterfactual premise it renders the "hard problem" argument invalid. — 180 Proof

So if a scientist takes up the challenge of addressing the "hard problem", you'd see that as misguided?

The nature of the reality of number, is completely different than the nature of the reality of material objects, because the former can only be grasped by reason. It's the exact problem with a lot of modern philosophy, which fails to differentiate the sensory and the intelligible. — Wayfarer

Mathematicism like Tegmark's does differentiate the sensory from the (merely) intelligible ("merely" because we can also reason about the things we also have sensory experience of). The sensory, i.e. the concrete, the physical, is the stuff that's part of the same structure that we are, with which we are in communication if you will. There is other stuff that is not part of that same structure, that is not concretely real, but is of the same ontological nature as the stuff we are a part of; we're simply not a part of that stuff.

We don't have complete immediate access to the entirety of the structure of which we are a part, we only have access to the parts here, now, in the actual world -- including our memories of other times and places and so on, our imagination of possible futures and other possible worlds, etc -- and so to have any kind of a useful picture of even the concrete world, we have to reason upon and abstract away from the most concrete bit of reality we that have direct access to, because those most concrete bits, e.g. individual "pixels" of vision and so on, are uselessly specific.

Particular rocks and trees are slightly abstract objects, abstracted away from patterns of sensory experiences. The categories of "rock" and "tree" are abstracted from patterns of those particulars. Universals like "green" and "round" are abstracted away from them further still. Mathematical objects like numbers and sets even further still. And then from those distant abstractions we construct bigger more complex abstract objects that we take to be the universe as a whole. Whichever such abstract construction is a perfectly accurate map 1:1 of the entirety of the concrete universe, that just is the true concrete universe: whatever the correct theory of everything says the universe is, that's what the universe is, because that's what it means for that to be the correct theory of everything.

But that's still an abstract object, just like all the other abstract objects that aren't perfect 1:1 maps of the concrete universe. So if that's "real", if anything besides things like "pixels of vision" are real at all, then all abstract objects are real in the same sense as that one; but that one is special to us, because it's the one we're a part of, and so more concretely real, able to be observed, not just imagined.

besides, he still maintains a physicalist view of brain/mind. — Wayfarer

As he should. Mental stuff in one sense (access consciousness / easy problem) is reducible to physical stuff. But physical stuff is reducible to mental stuff in several other senses (phenomenal consciousness / hard problem, mathematicism inasmuch as information is considered "mental"). There isn't a clear divide between "mind" and "matter".

I want to understand how the way the eye works and how that corresponds to the sound of a breeze through the leaves of a tree.

You might have missed the scientific paper I mentioned above, which mentions the 'hard problem' in particular connection to what is called the 'neural binding problem'. The paper is here, from which I quote: — Wayfarer

The problem with great minds such as yours and others I have come across on this forum is that their cleverness prevents them from seeing the whole picture. You are like great scientists examining every stone and leaf but still haven't figured out that the world is round.

With my simple mind I stick to the basics but have over the years been able to figure out the large picture even though the details remain obscure to me. With child-like awe I observe the world.

↪Wayfarer I want to understand how the way the eye works and how that corresponds to the sound of a breeze through the leaves of a tree.

You might have missed the scientific paper I mentioned above, which mentions the 'hard problem' in particular connection to what is called the 'neural binding problem'. The paper is here, from which I quote:
— Wayfarer

The problem with great minds such as yours and others I have come across on this forum is that their cleverness prevents them from seeing the whole picture. You are like great scientists examining every stone and leaf but still haven't figured out that the world is round.

With my simple mind I stick to the basics but have over the years been able to figure out the large picture even though the details remain obscure to me. With child-like awe I observe the world.

mathematical primitives - integers I presume - 'exist independently from anyone's understanding of them', (...) I presume the same applies to e.g. Pythagoras' theorem, the law the excluded middle, f=ma and many other such principles. — Wayfarer

While I agree Nature has its dynamic procedures independent of our understanding, it is we that legislate the principles for them, as you say....

Reason is able to discern these principles — Wayfarer

.......given some relevant observation, the sole purpose of which is to make those dynamics understandable to us, hence accessible to our knowledge. Pythagoras’ Theorem being a perfect example: it is impossible to derive the relationship between the boundaries of a triangle merely from the fact a space is enclosed by three straight lines. And Galileo had absolutely no means to derive 32ft/sec/sec, a perfectly natural mathematical primitive existing independently of our understanding, from watching an object fall out of a tower window. That’s why it’s so much fun to listen as post-Kantian analytical philosophers try to annihilate the synthetic a priori adaptation of the human cognitive system. It just can’t be done without the guy attempting it immediately contradicting himself. Substituted for, maybe; refuted......not a chance.

Not sure why integers would be considered mathematical primitives. That a symbolic representation of a completed series presupposes “quantity”, sure, but that implies quantity is itself a mathematical primitive. Maybe that’s what Frege was getting at. There’s no contradiction in the occurrence of a natural series of continuous spacetime events independent of our understanding, for its negation is quite absurd, so maybe that’s qualification for “primitive”.
————————

Besides humans are not really outside of, or apart from, nature. (This insight originates with non-dualism). — Wayfarer

Dunno if that originates with non-dualism, but the idea holds within some dualisms as well. Awful hard to justify being outside the very nature, re: Nature, we’re using to justify our own physical existence. Kinda funny, really. Nature gifts the ability to think, but doesn’t gift the ability to restrict thinking. In all her wonder, she left it to reason itself, to think without thinking too much, to think more than its qualifications admit. Sorta like giving a 5yo a chess set for his birthday: he stands as good a chance of learning the basics of the game as he does using the pieces to suit his imagination.
————————-

On Augustine:

Interesting. I can see it for the most part. From where I sit though, being a pseudo, or pre-modern, the possibility of the immutability of intelligible objects is irrelevant, if I have no means to know anything about them. Wisdom, e.g., may indeed be higher than reason and be the judge of reason, but for me, it doesn’t matter if that is the case. I am restricted by my very nature to employ reason to both discover and understand anything about wisdom, including whether or not I even have any. THAT it is may be given, but I want to know WHAT it is, how it manifests, what it does for me. This goes back to my “kinda funny” above: we had to think of wisdom as being immutable, otherwise we couldn’t claim that it is, because obviously no outside source told us it is, then made the attempt to show how it must be above the means we used to think it in the first place. Rational dog chasing its metaphysical tail.
————————-

Whereas now 'understanding' is seen merely as adaptation and is devoid of any purpose save that of survival and instrumental utility. — Wayfarer

Agreed. Understanding has become the red-headed step-child of the adoptive cognitive neuroscience. Which is fine, if you got a machine strapped to your head. But I don’t, and never will, so I need my understanding to do its damn job.....you know.....as the intelligible object it is.......in order to function in the world alongside my kind. As far as the hard problem goes, I’d say it is indeed hard, given from the excruciatingly simply reason we don’t know enough empirically about it sufficient to justify the speculative ground on which it is based.
—————————

so thoroughly internalized the modern outlook that they've lost all sense of what is problematical about it. — Wayfarer

What do you think entails the problematical? How would you characterize it?
(Addendum: did you mean Steve Talbot’s “love it or hate it”?)

How does ghost in the machine solve the problem? How do you explain subjective experience of the ghost? And whose ghost is it? Mine? Or is it some shape shifting lizard alien playing some game through my avatar? — Zelebg

Ghost-in-the-machine metaphysical problems are what happens when a plurality of different phenomenological senses are (mis)interpreted as a plurality of substances.

For example, I can directly imagine an object that I assert is 'red'. But here my private expressive use of 'red' does not assume nor appeal to external definitional criteria. Hence this use of 'red' has no necessary connection to the public use of the term 'optical red' which relates to physical experiments concerning the electromagnetic spectrum. This latter is use is representational and communicative rather than imaginative. This is all that needs to be said, phenomenologically speaking. There isn't a 'hard problem' to explain here, unless one conflates private expressives with public representations.

When consciousness, as a mysteriously emerging property in itself, morphs into subconscious, creates part of the unexplained hard problem. The daydreaming while driving example is one phenomenon. Two brains are acting as one to create the same or 'one' sense of awareness level. — 3017amen

Isn't this just a lot of rationalization to account for distracted driving? I'm having a hard time seeing this as exemplifying a cognitively significant phenomenon.

The hard problem is hard because it assumes emergence.

Emergence is only one proposed solution to the hard problem. Dualistic accounts address the same problem and have their own share of difficulties. The remaining option is panpsychism, which I advocate above.

I'm not saying that first-person experience is something like mass or charge, so if you think that's what I'm talking about when arguing against my position you're arguing against the wrong thing. I'm also 100% on board with the important thing about "mind" being the reflexive information-processing function you're talking about; but do you understand that that kind of reflexive functionality is, definitionally, "access consciousness", the topic of the "easy" problem of consciousness, and not at all what the "hard" problem of consciousness is talking about? I think you and I agree completely on that topic, and I'm not trying to talk about it at all here. I'm trying to talk about the thing philosophers call "phenomenal consciousness", which is a different thing. (See Ned Block, or Wikipedia on Types of Consciousness).

A philosophical zombie would be, by definition, something that has all of that reflexive information-processing functionality, but is missing "phenomenal consciousness". I'm saying that things like philosophical zombies can't exist, because you can't be missing that, because everything necesssarily has it; and saying that everything has it isn't imputing anything of any substance to the likes of rocks, but rather saying that this "phenomenal consciousness" is something so completely trivial that even rocks have it, and it doesn't usefully distinguish anything from anything else. To say, instead, that nothing has phenomenal consciousness, would be to say that we are all philosophical zombies. Obviously (to each of us) we are not (ourselves) philosophical zombies, which leaves either the possibility that there is something substantial to this "phenomenal consciousness" thing that distinguishes philosophical zombies from real humans, something that rocks don't have but humans do, which comes into being somewhere in the evolution from one to the other, but is (definitionally) not just a functional property like the reflexive information-processing stuff you're talking about (that's access consciousness, not phenomenal consciousness); or else that whatever it is that's supposed to distinguish humans from philosophical zombies is an absolutely trivial thing that doesn't distinguish anything from anything, so since humans (definitionally) have it, so does everything else.

ADDENDUM: Maybe this will be a more amendable way to phrase it. You take consciousness (I'm intentionally not specifying which kind here because you don't seem to be) to be all about this reflexive information-processing ability. I agree that the reflexivity and the more complex processing parts of that are the important parts of access consciousness, and that that complex functionality can weakly emerge from things that don't have it yet. But the "information-processing" part in general doesn't suddenly spring into being; everything all the way down is capable of processing information, at some level. The whole universe can be seen as informational signals passing around between things, and those things can be defined by their function in that network of signals, the way they output signals in response to the signals input into them. Information processing in general doesn't emerge from stuff with no information-processing ability; just more and more complex patterns of information processing emerge out of simpler forms of it. I take "phenomenal consciousness" to be equivalent to that fundamental information-processing ability that everything has, which in most cases is completely unremarkable; most signals are just passed along or rerouted or minimally transformed by the functions of the simplest of things, and it's only in the aggregate of a whole bunch of those simple particles interacting in really complicated ways that more complex functions emerge. But the basic role of taking information in ("experience") is as fundamental to everything in the universe as the role of sending information out ("behavior") is; they're two sides of the same coin.