Whatever you're going on about, it has nothing to do with the hard problem. — frank

What exactly do you think the so-called "hard problem" is asking for?

I approach the "first-person nature of experience" from the perspective of the difference between "inner and outer". If we allow the fundamental empirical principle that some things are experienced to come from inside oneself, and others from outside oneself, we can understand that the third-person perspective cannot give us any observation of the inside. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean inside and outside the body, no? My experience of anything internal to the body is not accessible to others. to be sure, so there is no possibility of identifying common objects of "inner" experience, as we would do with "external" objects. Is that what you mean?

That said, my experience of "external" objects is not accessible to others either; there is just the possibility of identifying, via reportage, common features between the experiences of different people.

The hard problem is just more masturbation.
— neonspectraltoast

That's one way to get rid of a "hard" problem. — Janus

:rofl:

That's a novel interpretation of Witt, isn't it? I think he was pointing out that when we propose to know transcendent facts, we're positing a vantage point that we don't have. — frank

Or better, one that cannot be had at all, which makes the difference.

Analytic philosophers like to say that that which must be passed over in silence is really nothing at all, and the entire mistake lies with language going where it has no business, because there is no business to be had. The Tractatus does not agree. I don't want to labor the point, because I am well aware this book does not exhaust his thinking, but then, if the question is about the "hard problem of consciousness" one has to go where the issue is met, and what makes consciousness a hard problem is its encounter with, call it, the "other side" of language. I talk about my cat, but the talk about cats, their size, dispositions, and all of that ignores something that underlies all of this: its existence. Witt calls this mystical, not nothing. And he holds the same regard for ethics and aesthetics and their "value" dimension. Russell called him a mystic not because he was just disagreeing, but because Wittgenstein actually called himself this, implicitly.

Consider, if you will, the one abiding thought that dominates my thinking: The world is phenomena. Once this is simply acknowledged, axiomatically so, then things fall into place. The brain is no longer the birth of phenomena, phenomena issue forth from phenomena, and what phenomena are is an open concept. Conscious open brain surgery shows a connection between brain and experiences, thoughts, emotions, memories, but does not show generative causality. Indeed, and this is an extraordinary point: If the brain were the generative source of experience, every occasion of witnessing a brain would be itself brain generated. This is the paradox of physicalism. What is being considered here, in your claim about gravity and its phenomenal universality (keeping in mind that gravity is not, of course, used in phenomenology's lexicon. But the attempt to bridge phenomenology with knowledge claims about the world of objects that are "out there" and "not me" is permitted {is it not?} to lend and borrow vocabularies with science. An interesting point to consider) is a "third perspective". Recall how Wittgenstein argued that we cannot discuss what logic is, for logic would be presupposed in the discussing. You would need some third perspective that would be removed from that which is being analyzed; but then, this itself would need the same, and so forth. This is the paradox of metaphysics, I guess you could call it, the endless positing of a knowledge perspective that itself, to be known, would require the same accounting as that which is being explained. An infinite regression.

But if you follow, in a qualified way, Husserl's basic claim that what we call appearances are really an ontology of intuition (though I don't recall he ever put it like this), whereby the givenness of the world IS the foundation we seek, the "third perspective" which is a stand alone, unassailable reality, then, while the "what is it?" remains indeterminate, for language just cannot "speak" this (see above), we can allow the scientific term "gravity" to be science's counterpart to the apparent need for an accounting of a transcendental ego in order to close the epistemic distance between objects and knowledge. — Constance

Rather than saying "the world is phenomena", I say "the world is noumena" and phenomena, via the agency of the brain, is a higher-order feedback loop i.e., a two-tiered construction.

The world as noumena entails the axiom plane, a parallel to the critical line of Riemann's zeta function.

Later for these things. Let me return to some basics of gravity_consciousness_language.

Note - cons = consciousness

The trick of cons might be that it's permanently inter-relational. I can't be fully reified.

Subjective mind with its sustainable personal POV is higher order feedback looping with vertical stacking. Let me elaborate.

Consider the world of the story in a printed novel. As we travel about with the book, does the world of the story travel about with us?

The world of the book examples insuperable context. Where is that world?

It’s not in the black ink marking the letters, nor in the words imaging the letters, nor in the white spaces of the pages contrasting the words-sentences-paragraphs-chapters of the novel, nor in the neural networks of the memory circuits and other cognitive circuits of the reader’s brain-mind, nor in the interplay of the reader’s life amidst the circumambient material universe, but rather in the vast micro-synchro-mesh of all of these things.

Where is the world of our conscious experience?

Just as a material object perceived through the lens of relativity presses down upon the stretchy fabric of spacetime, creating a gravity well of curved space, likewise a sentient being presses down upon the stretchy fabric of physically real inter-relatedness.

Inter-relatedness perceived through the lens of gravity-based cons becomes the curved space around the presence of a sentient being. In everyday language we call this personality and the influence of personality. Picture the super-fine linen of inter-relatedness of the everyday world of material things and human society, for example.

A person like you, Constance, or a person like me, or any person, exhibits being (to use some language of Heidegger) as a gravity well pressing down upon the micro-synchro-mesh of (physically real) inter-relatedness, thus making your presence felt as a warpage of the physical inter-relatedness. This is a kind of fluid dynamics, but the flowing is of physical-gravitational cons, instead of water.

The trick to understanding how sentience connects to its physical substrate, in this case, gravity, might be understanding that sentience is permanently interstitial. An interstice is a gap of empty space separating two material things. As an example, superfine linen is a mesh of cotton fibers separated by empty spaces. Well, the linen is no less empty space than it is cotton fibers. Where is the empty space of the linen? It’s defined by the cotton fibers as the interstices. Importantly, the interstices only exist inter-relationally. Remove the cotton fibers, arranged precisely, and the interstices cease to exist.

In parallel, remove the gravity-based micro-synchro-mesh of sentience grounded in the physical, and POV, the self of sentience, vanishes.

This is why the radiant presence of sentience is wholly missed by reductive materialism.

This is what David Chalmers, in different words, refers to in his exposition of the hard problem. The hard problem is all about the extreme softness, or subtlety of the physical presence of sentience.

Let’s take a look at the soft physicality of sentience.

The feedback looping of a memory circuit contains subjective-mind, POV-of-the-self content. Its presence, however, is not simply in the electro-magnetic current flow of the feedback loop, the gravitationally-modulated physical medium of cons. It’s a feedback loop precisely because the first pass of the cognitive circuit is the noumenal part, the thing-in-itself of physical cons. Noumenal cons is the collective cons of the sentient universe. Once noumenal cons feeds back upon itself as a memory loop, the phenomenal part of physical cons propagates. Memory resides in the echo or interstices separating noumenal cons from phenomenal cons. The feedback process is the second pass wherein a sampling rate via comparison captures some (not all) of the noumenal part of cons as memory.

Phenomenal cons is rooted in memory, or the sampling rate of the second pass. Intuition = low sampling rate (gut reaction). Full cognition = high sampling rate (reflection).

The trick of understanding cons is that it is an echo of what has already happened in the noumenal part. Our cons experience of our existence is a memory.

Where is the world of existence? We must ask ourselves “Where is memory?”

Memory resides in the interstices of the modulations of higher-order cognition i.e., first pass_second pass EM current. It’s the ghostly memory within the mesh of inter-relatedness. It’s a cloud-like distribution of the modulations of interwoven empty spaces.

It’s the ghost misting within the feedback looping of memory.

No, I don't find the analogy with logic any more clear. Anything can be the subject of a discourse, including logic. At the same time, as you note, logic structures discourse. But I don't see a vicious circularity here, if that is what you are leading to. You cannot ground or justify logic with more logic - that much is clear. But you are talking about the very possibility of discoursing (logically) about logic, and I don't see a problem with that. — SophistiCat

And there is none. What you talk about is the very reason why we have the discipline called logic. the point I am making is that this field is question begging in the same way physics is question begging when it talks about, say, force. They talk about and use this term freely and make perfect sense, usually, but ask what a force is, and you will get blank stares; well, at first you will get explanatory attempts that contextualize the meaning, by when you get to "where the ideas run out" as Putnam put it, it has to be acknowledged that physics hasn't a clue as to the "true nature" of force. Go to something like Plato's Timaeus and you find some intriguing inroads, but mostly pretty useless.

Anyway, logic is what it is, and if you don't ask pesky foundational questions, then you will not encounter the issue. But regarding the hard problem of consciousness, this IS the hard part. Perhaps not the way Chalmers puts it, but so what. Explaining conscious philosophically takes you all the way down the rabbit hole, right to the language embeddedness of the term, and if you can't ground language, you can't ground logic in a non question begging way. Derrida argues that the whole lot of it is question begging, at the level of foundational discussion. Philosophy "ends" here, at language and its existential counterpart, existence.

Well, then you do deny the premise, and that's that. You cannot make an argument against a contrary position without first taking it on its own terms. If you deny the position outright, or, as you admit, don't even understand it, then there is no argument to be made. — SophistiCat

The contrary position here appears at the most basic level of analysis, and this would be the interpretative foundation provided by a phenomenological pov. All things are in play, but one has to find the context of play. Wittgenstein very seriously (he was pathologically serious) said that ethics, being, aesthetics, logic are mystical., but he refused to elaborate because as he saw, language has no business doing this. He was wrong and right: Wrong because there is a LOT one can say, and right because obviously, one cannot speak what lies outside the totality of language possibilities. He, by inference, believed what I believe, that the world IS metaphysics. My cat and my morning coffee.

Naturalised neurological theories are semantically deficient for tacking the hard problem, due to the fact their theoretical concepts are only publicly defined up to third person predication, which restricts their applicability to the description of psychological predicates in relation to the mythical third-person subject.

For example, my perceptual judgement that this apple in front of me is "green" isn't part of any public neurological theory of colour perception. Rather, my perceptual judgements constitute my personal semantic foundation for interpreting public neurological theories of colour perception.

A scientist who fails to acknowledge that a-perspectivalized naturalised science has a 'hard problem' conflates their private interpretations of science with the public theories of science. These aren't the same thing. For instance, Einstein's understanding of General Relativity isn't part of the theory of General relativity; The theory of relativity isn't defined in terms of Einstein's thoughts and observations and the theory doesn't even define observation terms. So Einstein would not be at liberty to use the public definition of Relativity to explain the existence of his frame of reference. Rather, he is at liberty to apply the public definition of relativity to his frame of reference as he sees fit.

Why don't you give it a try then? Make the concept less slippery, if you can. — Olivier5

There are several definitions of consciousness I'm happy with. None of them result in a 'hard problem'. It's those definitions I'm trying to pin down.

I consider it perfectly normal to lack a precise definition for a philosophical concept. — Olivier5

Indeed, but its not simultaneously considered a failing of some empirical science to not then account for this vague philosophical concept in its models. We don't consider physics to have failed because it can't capture the sense of 'nearby'. There's no 'hard problem' of maths because it can't do 'quite a bit' multiplied by 'loads'.

It's just a name for something we know exists, namely whatever it is in us by virtue of which we can have experiences. — bert1

Do we know there's something by virtue of which we have experiences? Can't we just have them, does some additional factor need to 'allow' it?

unless you want to deny that we have experiences, which you might. — bert1

I wouldn't want to deny we have experiences, but this doesn't touch on the 'hard problem'. The hard problem has, as a foundational axiom, the notion that the things we talk about - experiences, awareness,... - ought to be causally connected to the objects of empirical sciences. That it's in some way odd that there's no direct connection. I reject that premise. It seems to me that we can talk of all sorts of things from consciousness, to god, to pixie dust... We all know what each other is talking about to some extent in each case (enough to get by) but it doesn't require any of those objects to correlate with something empirical science might reify.

Like 'Orange'. It's definitely a colour, and it's constrained in some ways by the actions of photons (objects of empirical science), but nothing in empirical science could ever say where orange ends and red begins, not because of some deficiency on empirical science, but because 'orange' just isn't that kind of a thing.

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?

Because folk bring their baggage with them. — Banno

Rather, because it's about the very baggage they bring into the analysis: their capacity of analysis is the object of the analysis. The reflexiveness of the problem is what makes it so wicked.

I have an understanding of the hard problem.

I just didn't know how to answer your question.

I thought I set out my best understanding of the hard problem in my opening post. But you're saying you're not convinced I understand. And your rephrasing of my position was just confusing to me -- that's what I meant.

I wouldn't want to deny we have experiences, but this doesn't touch on the 'hard problem'. The hard problem has, as a foundational axiom, the notion that the things we talk about - experiences, awareness,... - ought to be causally connected to the objects of empirical sciences. That it's in some way odd that there's no direct connection. I reject that premise. It seems to me that we can talk of all sorts of things from consciousness, to god, to pixie dust... We all know what each other is talking about to some extent in each case (enough to get by) but it doesn't require any of those objects to correlate with something empirical science might reify. — Isaac

Gods and pixie dust don't exist, so no account is necessary. But you agree that we have experiences, and therefore some scientific accounting for them is necessary, to have a complete understanding of the world. If a pixie were to materialize in front of you, you would have to account for it somehow, either as a supernatural manifestation, a hologram, etc. But you can't close your eyes and pretend it's not there, or just say "well, that happened.", and still fully understand the world.

There is absolutely a need for one to explain the other, if there was no need there would be no hard problem. — hypericin

Chalmers doesn't think that science, in it's present state, is capable of addressing the hard problem. He thinks it will probably take some sort of paradigm shift.

The hard problem of consciousness is hard because it tries to unify 2 incompatible things: objective measurement and subjective experience.

One method of observation is agreed on by everyone because it can be replicated and is consistent.

The other method of observation by its very nature is not replicable (individualism/personhood/"selfness").

Trying to uncover what consciousness arises out of is like trying to "precisely measure (objectify) what makes the measuring device imprecise (subjective)".

At some point the precision definition for conscious experience/awareness fails, and the vague, generalised and more intuitive intricacies of feelings, emotions, beliefs etc takeover (the subject).

Part of the difficulty with the problem is an inability of subjects to unanimously defined what their collective subjectivity fundamentally is.

We will not, however, find the solution to the hard problem in our inefficiencies.

I do not understand "normative sense-making goals", but I'm not very interested in what it might mean. — GrahamJ

You should be if you want to understand feelings and the dissolution of the hard problem.

Yes, that's right. The 'feeling of pain' is not a reified object. It's a folk notion. It exists in that sense (like the category 'horses' exists), but there's no physical manifestation of it. — Isaac

When you say "the feeling of pain is not a reified object", it sounds like you're denying that people really have pains. The feeling of pain is not merely a learned concept, because pain hurts. Animals without linguistic concepts can be in pain, and we can sympathise with those in pain. Pains exist in the world, are real and are therefore 'reified', as much as horses are. The physical manifestations of pain are found in the behaviours of people and other animals.

Then how could we ever learn to use the word?
— Luke

By trying it out and it's having a useful and predictable effect. — Isaac

That might be the case if you had to learn language without anybody's help. A more common scenario is that, when first learning the language, others see you in pain (i.e. see your physical manifestations of pain) and teach you the meaning of the word when you experience it. "Oh did you hurt yourself?" "Where does it hurt?" "Do you have a tummy ache?" "Is your knee sore?" "Is it painful?"

As Wittgenstein suggests: "How does a human being learn the meaning of names of sensations? For example, of the word “pain”. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, natural, expressions of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour.
“So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying?” — On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it." (PI 244)

Yes. I find it philosophically interesting too. What I'm arguing against here is there being any kind of 'problem' with the fact that neuroscience (dealing with physically instantiated entities) cannot give a one-to-one correspondence account connecting these entities to the folk notions 'pain' and 'consciousness' (as well as 'feeling', 'it's like...', 'aware', etc).

It's not a problem because it's neither the task, nor expected of science to explain all such folk notions in terms of physically instantiated objects and their interactions.

Basically, because (2) is at least possible, there's no 'hard problem' of consciousness because neuroscience's failure to account for it in terms of one-to-one correspondence with physically instantiated objects may be simply because there is no such correspondence to be found. — Isaac

Assuming there isn't a one-to-one correspondence - and it seems likely there isn't - I don't see that the problem of subjective experience therefore disappears. Neither do I consider subjective experience to be merely a "folk notion" - again, pain hurts. Therefore, it seems to me that the lack of one-to-one correspondence only makes neuroscience's task of explaining subjective experience more difficult (assuming that it is a task for neuroscience, rather than some other branch of science).

Actually, Locke was one of the first philosophers (one of them, not the first one) to speak about consciousness, and he does so, several times in the essay, with quite interesting results.

As for the rest of your argument, this is terminological. The whole idea of the "hard problem" was introduced by David Chalmers, a philosopher, not a scientist. Yet scientists seem to find the idea useful, so they borrowed it. That's perfectly fine and healthy.

That quote I gave from Locke barely needs modification, it pretty much considers the hard problem, and says we can't understand how this is possible (how matter could think), but if nature ("God"), chooses so, then so be it, we must concede to matter the property of thought (consciousness), but it remains inconceivable to us.

An excellent essay. — Paine

Thank you. I look forward to your further comments.

I agree with this too. — RogueAI

I am glad we are of like mind.

Although a heap of building materials is not self organizing, matter might be. If so then to have sufficient knowledge of the parts is know the ways in which they can form higher orders of organization, including organisms that are conscious. — Fooloso4

I see some problems here. First, matter is not self-organizing. It is organized by laws of nature, which are logically distinct from the matter whose time-development they control. Those laws are immaterial, for it is a category error to ask what they are made of. Second, knowing what matter can become is insufficient to say what it will or does become. The matter that composed the primordial soup could become a brain, but that does not mean that it will, any more than a pile of building materials will become a Swiss Chalet. Finally, even if we could predict which atoms of the primordial soup will come to compose my brain, that does not reduce consciousness to a physical basis. As I note in the article, physics has no intentional effects, and consciousness is the actualization of intelligibility -- which is an intentional operation.

it is quite another to argue that there has always been wholes such as human beings. — Fooloso4

I do not argue or believe that.

Declaring the failure of reductionism seems premature. Explanations of why "you can't get there from here" are common and occur before it becomes clear how to get there from here. — Fooloso4

I did not just "declare" the failure of reductionism. I showed why it must fail -- first in biology, where physicists (I am one) ignore the very data that biologists (such as my brother) study, and second in the intentional realm, where we do the same thing. If you think I am wrong, it would be helpful to say why my arguments fail. I am not proposing that you accept my views on faith.

Also, I how long do we need to wait before it is not "premature" to say reductionism fails? Materialists have been around for about 2500 years and have yet to devise a viable theory of mind.

It's too early to claim that the "Standard Model" fails. — Banno

Then you should be able to use it to outline how consciousness can be both causally impotent, and reported by those who experience it. Didn't the causal efficacy of Jupiter's moons play an essential role in Galileo's reports of them?

"The rock is hard" is not an identity. It's not "Rock = hard". Nor "Rock ≡ Hard". — Banno

I suggest you reread the text. "The copula, <is>, betokens identity – not between subject and predicate, but of their common source. Indeed, ‘a is b’ is unjustified if a is not identically an object which elicits <b>."

If I've understood the article aright, the mooted failure of the "Standard Model" supposedly can only be remedied by a return to Aristotelian concepts of the mind. — Banno

I would not dare say "only." There may well be other approaches, but I have yet to find one in ancient or modern authors, and I have read many of all persuasions. I only say that it can be so remedied.

2. Realize that subjective experience from the first person perspective cannot be scientifically investigated — Wolfgang

Why would you say that? Can't we type-replicate introspective reports to reach general conclusions, as we type-replicate any other kind of observation?

Consciousness is a property of the individual, more precisely, of the brain. — Wolfgang

Consciousness is not physical in the sense that the objects studied by physics are. It cannot be defined using concepts such as mass, energy, momentum, charge, and extension. While we can say that thought depends on the brain, that does not mean that it is a property of the brain. Thought also depends on adequate blood flow and respiration, but it is not a property of the heart or lungs. So, dependence of y on x does not make y a property of x.

Biologically, consciousness can be described as the orientation performance of a (central nervous) living being. — Wolfgang

That would be what I call "medical consciousness." It is not what my article is about. I am discussing the subjective awareness -- that which makes the merely intelligible actually understood.

So whoever tries to explain consciousness physically commits a category error. ... Conclusion: the hard problem of consciousness is a chimera! — Wolfgang

We agree.

Chalmers accepts consciousness as fundamental and universal. — Fooloso4

That is not my position.

First of the content of a metaphysical belief(accuracy) about the nature of the world does not really play any role in our survival.
Accuracy is needed when we experiencing the world around us (not its underlying ontology), for spatial navigation and temporal navigation, to avoid obstacles or predators, identify patterns, find resources or mates,decode social cues and behavior and in general to avoid suffering and increase our percentage of survival.
We are the decedents of those organisms who were able to experience the world in the best possible way. — Nickolasgaspar

You have conflated easier problems with the Hard Problem. Easier problems deal with mechanisms for brain function. This can be tested and is amenable to empirical verification. The Hard Problem is how it is that there is a point of view. The problem is that people who try to handwave the question by purporting the easier problems as the solution, aren't getting it. They are ALREADY assuming the consequent without explaining it. It is the Homunculus Fallacy. Simply listing off physical processes doesn't get at things like subjective qualia or imagination. What IS that thing that mind-thing that I am doing when I am imagining a blue cube being rotated in my mind? What is THAT. You can say it is "such-and-such neural networks" and that it developed because of "such-and-such evolutionary reasons", but that is not answering the question. How is it that there is this rotating of the blue cube that is happening with the firing of the neurons. It is superimposed, and forced into the picture but without explanation, only correlation with various obvious empirical stuff that isn't getting any closer to the answer to the question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

I was just wondering if someone has some kind of arguments to help answer that question because I've been thinking about it but haven't got far. — TheMadMan

Yes it's interesting. I think it's a genuine hard problem for pure idealists. In fact it's much easier to see the hard problem when you try to derive the physical from the non-physical. I have thought a bit about non-vague concepts and how they relate to fundamental properties. A number of philosophers perceive that the concept of consciousness is not vague (but that is not intuitive to many). The idea is that there is no intermediate step between x being conscious and x not being conscious. It's easier to see in the case of spatiality. I'm not a mathematician, but intuitively it's hard to conceive of space emerging from non-space: adding millions of 0inch lengths doesn't get you a length. There seems to be no intermediate step in-between non-spatiality and spatiality. I don't know if vagueness is essential to emergence or not, but they do seem to go together naturally. And conversely, there does seem to be a relationship between what is fundamental and what is not vague. Just conceptually, it seems easy and natural to think that both spatiality and consciousness are fundamental properties, and one could not emerge from the other. Neither admit of degree and complexity that would allow for borderline cases.

EDIT: I don't think I've explained that well.

Sound familiar? For me it sounds like relativity. — Benj96

Of course it sounds like relativity. Your premise is an equation derived from relativity, so your conclusion will be relativistic as well. To get a different conclusion you'd need to start with a different premise concerning the relationship of matter to energy. The problem is that "energy" is a concept which is manipulated to conform to how we understand the movement of mass. So you'd have to relate matter to something other than energy, like relate matter directly to time and space. But that would leave something out, "substance". So it's like attempting to take the substance out of matter, which is the essential aspect of matter anyway. Therefore it's a misguided attempt in the first place.

Thought and memory can then be rectified with one another relativistically. And so the hard problem dissolves.
But it means space and time relationships must change for this to happen. — Benj96

Actually, the fact that the relationships must be altered indicates that these cannot be related relativistically.

It's a singular "substance" that has the capacity to phase transition between stability (memory) and instability (active thought, imagination, creativity). — Benj96

This exemplifies the problem. "Substance" is itself stability. So treating substance as if it could loose it's stability is to take the substance out of substance. So if way say that there is something else, which transitions from stability (substantial) to instability (non-substantial), then we have to account for the occurrence of stability. We would need to analyze what "stability" implies, and determine what type of thing could pass from being stable to being unstable, and see if this is even a coherent concept.

In line with the title of the thread, we could call this the hard problem of mass.

Speaking of the hard problem, a letter was published in Sept 2023, signed by 100 notable scientific researchers, to the effect that the currently-popular ‘theory of consciousness’, IIT (Integrated Information Theory) is pseudoscience. It’s caused a furore,

Earlier this week, a letter signed by over 100 researchers, including several philosophers, was published online, calling a popular theory of consciousness, integrated information theory (IIT), “pseudoscience.”

Others, including some who themselves have criticized IIT, have called the letter “so bad” and “unsupported by good reasoning.

On both sides of the dispute are concerns about the reception of ideas beyond those researching them. The authors of the letter are concerned about the damaging effects that taking IIT seriously might have on certain clinical and ethical issues, while the critics of the letter are concerned about the damaging effects that accusations of pseudoscience might have on the whole field of consciousness studies.

The letter, published at PsyArXiv, is a response to publicity about IIT following the recent resolution of a bet made in 1998 between David Chalmers and Christof Koch. The bet was over whether, within the next 25 years, someone would discover a specific signature of consciousness in the brain, with Koch betting yes and Chalmers betting no. Chalmers was recently declared the winner of the bet, based on recent testing of two theories of consciousness, global network workspace theory (GNWT) and IIT.

The letter’s primary authors are a group of scientists, but the signatories include several philosophers, including Peter Carruthers, Patricia Churchland, Sam Cumming, Felipe De Brigard, Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish, Adina Roskies, Barry Smith, and others.

The letter writers take issue with the reported status of IIT as a leading theory of consciousness:

The experiments seem very skillfully executed by a large group of trainees across different labs. However, by design the studies only tested some idiosyncratic predictions made by certain theorists, which are not really logically related to the core ideas of IIT, as one of the authors himself also acknowledges. The findings therefore do not support the claims that the theory itself was actually meaningfully tested, or that it holds a ‘dominant’, ‘well-established’, or ‘leading’ status.

More here.

My take: ‘theories of consciousness’ can’t conform with modern scientific practice, which begins with the assumption of the separation of knower and known. Phenomenology, of course, sees through this, but then, it was never the target of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ argument.

To my mind "the hard problem of consciousness" is only "hard" for (Cartesian) philosophers because their aporia is actually still only an underdetermined scientific problem. — 180 Proof

Could you elaborate that further? You seem to be saying that consciouness one day will be fully explained by science. Is that correct?

I'm still on this information-consciousness relation.
Our brain specific information has complete access to our consciousness and vice versa.
So if you don't understand this of course understanding consciousness is going to be hard.

How can you propose information is everywhere when it's just a projection of your mind. Of course it's going to be a hard problem because you have set up the problem wrong.

I don't quite understand the reasoning that leads to saying that an inanimate object, like a rock, can have consciousness or some degree of it. — JuanZu

The reasoning is this... Physical properties do not explain how a clump of matter can have things like subjective experience and self-awareness. We can see how physical properties, like mass and charge, build atoms. We can see how atoms build molecules. We can see how molecules build physical objects. We can see how physical objects interact, giving us physical processes, like flight and metabolism. We can deconstruct flight and metabolism, down further and further, until we get to physical properties like mass and charge.

Starting with physical properties, we can build up and up until we have things like perceptions; signals of damage to the skin traveling to the brain, and signals traveling from the brain to the muscles, moving the part of the body being damaged away from the cause; patterns stored in the brain; on and on. But we don't arrive at the subjective experience of those things. And we can't go in the other direction, either.
Subjective experience of things and events is not the same thing as those things and events. So we don't get to say we are breaking consciousness down to impulses traveling along nerves when we break muscle movement down to impulses traveling along nerves. They are different things, so one explanation doesn't satisfy both.

The problem is we do not have an explanation for consciousness. To repeat a lot of a post I made a few months ago, neurophysiologist Christopher Koch, the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and someone's who believes consciousness can be explained in physical terms, paid off his bet to Chalmers, because, if it is, they haven't figured out how.

Brian Greene wrote:

We have yet to articulate a robust scientific explanation of conscious experience. We lack a conclusive account of how consciousness manifests a private world of sights and sounds and sensations. We cannot yet respond, or at least not with full force, to assertions that consciousness stands outside conventional science. The gap is unlikely to be filled anytime soon. Most everyone who has thought about thinking realizes that cracking consciousness, explaining our inner worlds in purely scientific terms, poses one of our most formidable challenges.

and

And within that mathematical description, affirmed by decades of data from particle colliders and powerful telescopes, there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate. How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless, emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? Particles can have mass, electric charge, and a handful of other similar features (nuclear charges, which are more exotic versions of electric charge), but all these qualities seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience. How then does a whirl of particles inside a head—which is all that a brain is—create impressions, sensations, and feelings?

So serious scientific minds that are dedicated to the idea that it is explainable in physical terms say we cannot do so. While that is not evidence that it is not explainable in physical terms, it is certainly not evidence that it is. The Hard Problem is hard, and unsolved, according to the experts on opposite sides of the fence.

In addition, what's going on physically doesn't suggest consciousness. As Chalmers says:

Why should there be conscious experience at all? It is central to a subjective viewpoint, but from an objective viewpoint it is utterly unexpected. Taking the objective view, we can tell a story about how fields, waves, and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold interact in subtle ways, leading to the development of complex systems such as brains. In principle, there is no deep philosophical mystery in the fact that these systems can process information in complex ways, react to stimuli with sophisticated behavior, and even exhibit such complex capacities as learning, memory, and language. All this is impressive, but it is not metaphysically baffling. In contrast, the existence of conscious experience seems to be a new feature from this viewpoint. It is not something that one would have predicted from the other features alone.

That is, consciousness is surprising. If all we knew about were the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems, there would be no compelling reason to postulate the existence of conscious experience. — The Conscious Mind

and

You could explain all the behavior, all the structure, all the function you like, in the vicinity of consciousness.  The things I do, the things I say, the amazing dynamics of the human brain. And it will still leave this further open question: Why is all that accompanied by first person, subjective experience of the mind in the world? — https://youtu.be/PI-cESvGlKc?si=AzE5wvKURbif6rcE

The hard problem of consciousness is largely misunderstood by many people. Its not that mechanics lead to consciousness. We know that. Its uncontroversial except to soul people.

The truly hard problem of consciousness is that we can never objectively test what it is like to be conscious from the subjects view point. Think of it like this, "What is it like to be a rock?" We understand the atomic make up and composition of the rock. But what it is it like to BE the rock AS the rock?

This is unknowable. Same as it is for anyone else but you to know what it is like to be you. We could reproduce your atomic makeup down to the T, but we could never objectively monitor what it is like for the subject itself to feel what it is feeling. We can measure your brain states and after testing say, "When the subject's brain state is X, we have learned this is when the subject feels happy." But we don't know what its like for that subject to be happy. We could learn the mechanics of your brain and body and predict everything you were going to think and say seconds before you thought or said it. But we can never know what its like to be the person with that brain, thinking or saying those thoughts.

As such, its unsolvable. Its simply a limitation of our ability to know. Only if we could erase our self-consciousness, place our self into another consciousness, then retain the memories of that consciousness when we reverted to our own, could we claim to know what its like to be another consciousness. So far, that's impossible.

My understanding of the hard problem of consciousness is that it is a problem for a physicalist. Why is it a problem? Because the physicalist has not forwarded a physical account of why any physical system is conscious. Even if, as you suggest, some waveform of energy is responsible for consciousness, a natural question arises: why does that energy produce consciousness, while some other energy does not produce consciousness?

All the physicalist needs to do is point to the physiology and say: “that’s why”. The answer covers every question from “why is it alive” to “why is it hungry”. The answers are inherently and necessarily physical because the adjective “conscious” describes the physical system itself and nothing besides.

It appears to me that the problem for the dualist is much more fundamental: distinguishing between “consciousness” on the one hand, and biology on the other. What is the difference?

The point of the hard problem is to demonstrate the limits of what we can know about consciousness and sentience in others besides their behavior. — Philosophim

That's an interesting issue, but it's not the hard problem.

Right, that's the problem. It's a kind of reductio ad absurdum, because we know that SH can't be all those things, since he doesn't exist in the material world in the same way that you or I do. So that would seem to suggest that consciousness, if it's a physical process, can create phenomena that aren't physical. This is part of what makes the hard problem so hard.

I like that.

Personally I think the hard problem occurs only when we speak about the abstract. For instance, the hard problem asks how physiology (the concrete) gives rise to "conscious experience" (the abstract). Here the description "conscious" is lifted from the concrete and placed upon some abstract entity or substance, which we are then forced to think about. But how can "experience" be conscious? How can any abstraction be conscious? Further thinking proves this adjective is inapplicable and inexplicable to that noun, yet I'm supposed to wonder how such a phenomenon can be explained.

Chalmers often says that "conscious experience" "arises", as if it was the morning sun. He asks why these concrete things and concrete functions are "accompanied by experience", as if one walked in the door holding hands with the other. But concrete entities are never accompanied by, nor give rise to, abstract entites. So once the dualist switch occurs thinking is naturally muddled.

Physiology applies to an organism and the way it functions. Consciousness applies to what? — NOS4A2

I have no idea what you're asking here.

Dualists claim that humans are a collection of physical and non-physical (mental) stuff. The term "biology" is used to refer to the physical stuff and the term "consciousness" is used to refer to the non-physical (mental) stuff. To say that a human is conscious is to say that it has this non-physical (mental) stuff.

Whereas materialists claim that humans are a collection of physical stuff alone and that the term "consciousness" refers to some subsection of that physical stuff. To say that a human is conscious is to say that it has this subsection of that physical stuff.

There is no hard problem if the term "conscious" describes the concrete. — NOS4A2

Yes, if. But either way, there undoubtedly seems to me a hard problem, hence the existence of substantial contemporary philosophical literature on the nature of consciousness and of substance and property dualism. So either it is the case that consciousness is a physical thing, but significantly more complex than every other physical thing in the universe, or it isn't a physical thing.