I've been asking for some time now, if the brain doesn't produce them (i.e. numbers), where are they? What material are they made out of? I've clearly pointed out that the brain, which is physical, can retain information, make judgements, etc. This includes numbers. — Philosophim

I've answered on a number of occasions, the subject is philosophy of mathematics, and you haven't responded, other than repeating your point. I've said that numbers and other mathematical concepts are abstractions, to which your reply has been 'what are they made from'? But it is absurd to claim that mathematical concepts are physical. They solely comprise relations of ideas. It's certainly true that the h. sapien brain is uniquely equipped to discern these relations, but that no way proves that they are the product of hominid neurophysiology. At best it shows that the brain has evolved in such a way that it has attained the ability to understand such things. We can grasp them through the faculty of reason (which is not, incidentally, simply a better way of making stuff :brow: )

I acknowledge this a contested subject. There is no settled answer, but one of the schools of thought is mathematical or platonic realism which says that 'there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, and practices'. From that article:

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.

So, a platonist answer is that numbers are not to empirical objects, but are objects of reason. In other words, they don't exist as temporal objects, but they are real for anyone who can count. That is the source of the expression that such things as basic arithmetic are 'true in all possible worlds'. So the argument 'they only exist in brains', and 'were there nobody to recognise these facts, they would not be real', doesn't cut it. Number and logical principles are the constituents of reason, they are what we rely on to even start any kind of science, including brain science. We don't see them in the neural data, instead, we call on them to analyse and understand the data that we see. They are internal to thought.

The demand to prove 'what numbers are made of' and 'where they exist' only illustrates the failure to understand this point, not an argument against it.

You have failed to do so, and are instead doing me a favor by not calling me a name. How noble and strong you are! — Philosophim

You will notice that I edited out that remark a long time before your reply appeared, but as you've brought it up, the description I had in mind was 'scientism'. And I'm not the least concerned with your 'tongue lashing', only the tedium of having to deal with it. Your entire ouvre rests of just one claim: science proves consciousness is the product of the brain and that all that is unknown is how. But that was just the subject of the bet:

Back to the bet between Koch and Chalmers: They agreed that, for Koch to win, the evidence for a neural signature of consciousness must be “clear.” That word “clear” doomed Koch.

//ps - you quoted the IEP article on the hard problem, perhaps you could give an indication of where you map in the 'responses' section. I think it might be here.

Note that what you describe as science doesn't seem to include the study of processes, including processes underlying human consciousness. Study of processes might be worth considering. — wonderer1

Indeed, it is processes that lead to consciousness. Although I’ve heard someone say otherwise, I think consciousness, itself, is also a process. However, the Hard Problem is figuring out how the former lead to the latter. So far, we don’t have any clue.

Let’s take vision as an example. Here’s the very beginning of the process, as described by Michael Behe in Darwin‘s Black Box. (Anybody can say what they want about Behe’s conclusions, but he knows the science.)

When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a single human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP.) — Behe

That, combined with a ridiculous number of other steps, each made up of an equally ridiculous number of events, describes how we perceive a certain range of frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can add other events and steps, and get a description of how we differentiate different frequencies within that range.

Add more, and we will see physical reactions to all of that - the description of events that leads to the process of our responding to what we perceive. Still more describes how patterns of what we perceive are stored in our brains. THEN, we can see how those patterns that are stored become part of the chain of events that lead to future reactions to new perceptions.

All of that is physical events and processes, and, overall, that describes our behavior.

The Hard Problem exists because none of that suggests that there is subjective experience present. We don't see physical events and processes in our brains in addition to the physical events and processes that explain our perceptions/responses/behavior that might explain consciousness. So what explains it? Something extra is going on, so it seems reasonable to expect something extra is causing it. We have made machines that can do quite a bit that we can do, including distinguishing colors. But we don't suspect they have the subjective experience of red and blue on top of the ability to distinguish the frequencies we call red from those we call blue. Why don't they? Their physical events and processes are not the same as ours, but they are still just physical. Why does purely physical and nothing extra cause subjective experience in one case, but not the other?

-Is the medium the key? What is it about biological that explains it that doesn't work with electronic?
-Is it the number of feedback loops, or types of feedback loops? How many, and how does the specific number cause the jump to subjectivity?
-Something else? What?

However, the Hard Problem is figuring out how the former lead to the latter. So far, we don’t have any clue. — Patterner

I'd modestly suggest that some of us have more of a clue than others, and given that it is a hard problem, it makes sense to look at it in terms shades of gray or degrees of cluelessness. :wink:

Just for the record, that isn't the standard way of stating the problem, and it isn't David Chalmers' way (he coined the phrase). You can listen to Chalmers describe it here: He defines the problem as "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences in the mind." — J

Correct. I'm noting it in a way that avoids the standard confusion of, "So we don't know if the brain causes consciousness? Its the subjective point that needs focusing on for most people. Because we cannot currently objectively know what a subjective experience is like, this makes it incredibly hard to say, "This is the subjective experience the brain has, and this is the objective physical brain mapping that causes it."

Consciousness, as a behavior, is capable of being mapped to the brain and is the "easy problem". We can monitor your brain, vitals, and behavior and say, "Objectively, they're in pain". But can we objectively say, "And this is their subjective experience of pain"? No. That's the hard problem.

The confusion of levels of description — Wolfgang

Right, anything goes when we attempt to solve a hard problem that doesn't exist. :cool:

Vitalism used to be a solution to a "hard problem" based on the assumption that inorganic and organic compounds are fundamentally different, yet related somehow. But how can they be related yet fundamentally different? Hence the vitalist suggestion that organic compounds must contain some non-physical element. Later the synthesis of urea showed that the different compounds are not fundamentally different.

Now I don't think we're anywhere near a synthesis of consciousness from unconscious compounds, but if seems fairly clear that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. Moreover, conscious states such as visual experiences have a hierarchical structure in the sense that the experience is not solely a biological phenomenon. It is also causally constrained by the behavior of light, and influenced by the observer's psychology, sociology, language and culture. All of these can be described, but none of them is a complete description of the experience. However, the lack of a single complete description is hardly a problem.

The world is independent of a map as well so this does not really get at what it means to be objective vs subjective. — Harry Hindu

Consider cities and landscapes and most of the environments that people live in. Large parts of our lived world depend on the maps and drawings after which they were built. Those are parts of the actual world, and it is in this sense that the world depends on maps for being such a world. Without maps it would be a different world.

..as if humans have this special quality of the world being independent from us. — Harry Hindu

I can't make sense of that.

Earth is the only planet that we know to have human life. In this sense, is the Earth subjective in that Earth is the only planet to have human life? ...
..you seem to be trying to make a special case for human consciousness in that it is the only thing that has uniqueness. — Harry Hindu

That's not what I say. Many humans and other animals are conscious. Consider the events in your physiology when you are having the conscious awareness of a tickle. Others may have similar events, but not those that exist in your physiology. The tickle exists whenever you feel it, and when you no longer feel it, then it doesn't exist anymore. This mode of existing is radically different from the way the world exists or the map.

And the fact that it turned out inorganic and organic compounds are not fundamentally different is not evidence that the same answer will apply to the HPoC. — Patterner

Right, conscious states are different from unconscious states, but are they fundamentally different?

A series of biochemical reactions release the energy in nutrients, and ion channels generate electrical signals that pulsate across cell membranes, connect synapses, and fire through neural networks etc. Even if we'd be able to map the entire brain process that is constitutive for, say, a visual experience, it does not include what is seen, e.g. a bird. It makes no sense to look for a neurological version of a bird in the brain when the object of the experience is flying in the sky.

Also, what it feels like to have that visual experience is not necessarily a part of the visual experience. Neurons release dopamine, for instance, which may cause an overlapping or separate experience, but the cause for the release of dopamine can be fixed by expectations, or social pressure to feel a certain way when seeing the bird. The cause of the feeling is then only partly to be found in biochemistry and partly in psychology or sociology or culture. Hence a seeming inability to explain what it feels like in terms of biochemistry.

The problem isn't the lack of a complete description. Rather, it's how we can even talk about all this without importing (as you do) the term "observer". — J

Ok, please explain to me why we can't talk about all this without using the word 'observer'?

Sure, we can describe a subjective experience, but how do we explain its existence, or why it exists in the way it does and not in another? That's the hard problem. — J

For example, a feeling of being drunk (its existence and why it exists the way it does) is uncontroversially explained by the effects that alcohol has on our cognitive functions. One might add descriptions of situations, ambience and memories of previous experiences, expectations etc. to further articulate what it feels like.

In order to make that into a hard problem of consciousness (afaik), we'd have to define the feeling as something that is detached from being drunk, as something that accompanies it. By detaching the feeling from the drunken state, while assuming that the two must still be related somehow, we seem to create the very problem that we are pretending to solve. But the feeling is not necessarily related to the experience. It might be a function of interest of the body to receive awards, e.g. dopamine released by neurons at work whenever the experience satisfies or disappoints. Just a speculation.

If we could build a working brain our of inorganic parts that was functionally equivalent to a working organic brain, wouldn't the non-biological brain be conscious? — RogueAI

I read recently about an artificial model of the brain of a fruit fly. It is supposedly a complete model, but I don't know if or how it works.

If we can manufacture artificial fruit flies, then it seems at least possible to manufacture larger or more complex organisms. But it might be improbable considering the overwhelming complexity of organisms. To simulate a collection of selected functions seems much easier, but a simulation of being conscious is not conscious.

...the hard problem of consciousness is...the paradox it creates when thinking of consciousness as an object in the world. — Skalidris

...the hard problem of consciousness will always remain for those who try to visualise consciousness as an object. — Skalidris

when we ask ourselves “why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?”, we trigger a self referential explanation that has no other outcome than being circular — Skalidris

...consciousness cannot be viewed solely as an object since it has to be there for the perception of objects. — Skalidris

It’s equally true that consciousness cannot be viewed solely as a subject since objects must be acknowledged in order to establish consciousness.

I see no obvious reason why consciousness cannot perceive itself as an object.

Objects are established by descriptions of what they are and what they do apart from opinions and acts of imagination.

There is a well-known counter-example to your claim:

Consciousness can only be viewed as consciousness (cannot be broken down into something else since it is always there as a whole in our reasoning). — Skalidris

This example is the Measurement Problem.

It gives us a clear example of consciousness observing itself as an object in accord with what an object is and what an object does:

Schödinger's Cat

A thought experiment called Schrödinger's cat illustrates the measurement problem. A mechanism is arranged to kill a cat if a quantum event, such as the decay of a radioactive atom, occurs. The mechanism and the cat are enclosed in a chamber so the fate of the cat is unknown until the chamber is opened. Prior to observation, according to quantum mechanics, the atom is in a quantum superposition, a linear combination of decayed and intact states.

Any future evolution of the wave function is based on the state the system was discovered to be in when the measurement was made, meaning that the measurement "did something" to the system that is not obviously a consequence of Schrödinger evolution.
--Wikipedia

What is consciousness? In our context here, it is a measurement system. This is a fact about consciousness, thus establishing its identity as an object.

What does consciousness do? In our context here, it changes the state of superposition into the state of (well-defined) position.

Ok, Husserl might not seem to be a dualist, but the assumption that consciousness is immaterial in the sense that it never appears as an object in a world of objects, implies an epistemological dualism, and the hard problem reappears. For if consciousness is immaterial, then it seems we have no way of knowing what it's like to be another observer, or how immaterial experiences arise in a material world.

A similar problem arises for indirect realists because of their assumption that we never see objects directly, only by way of seeing our own sense-data (or mental images) first.

For idealists for whom everything is consciousness, the hard problem does not arise from a metaphysical or epistemological wedge. Likewise, it doesn't arise for direct realists under the assumption that we see objects directly: e.g. what it feels like is what the object appears like. — jkop

Other minds do appear as objects in the world. Consciousness is a process. Consciousness models other minds as objects, as in other people's brains and bodies. The brain is not a physical, material object. It is a mental representation of other's minds.

The solution to your "indirect" realism problem is by understanding that effects carry information about their causes. You can get at the nature of other objects via the effect of your mind, just as you can get at the identity of a criminal by the effects they leave at the crime scene, or get at the age of the tree by how it grows throughout the year and the number of tree rings it has.

You can also get at your own state means of your mind. Your mind not only tells you about your environment, but also about the amount of light in your environment, and your own mental and body states. As I mentioned before, your mind is a relationship between you and your environment.

If Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness does not exist, then there is no difference between a living human body suffering and a computer built to imitate all happenings and behaviours of suffering. As there is nobody suffering inside a computer, no matter how complex it is, the same way we have no evidence that somebody is suffering inside a body showing alarm signs of suffering.
Nobody would say that we should protect computers from violence; why should we protect humans from violence, if nobody is suffering inside a suffering body? A suffering human body can be interpreted just like the frog’s legs in Galvani’s experiment. We act against violence on animals; would anybody act against violence on dead animals whose body is still able to show reactions?

Now, this seems like a blakmail, or a Catch 22 situation: if you say that something like the “I”, the subject, the self, does not exist, then you are indirectly supporting violence, even if you say explicitly that you are against violence and you will always do everything possible to act against violence. On the other hand, if you say that somebody is suffering inside a suffering body, then you are saying that we need to agree that something, that science is absolutely unable to prove, exists and, as a consequence, needs to be explored, studied, cultivated, discussed. The problem is that, for these discussions, studies and explorations, we won’t have any evidence, any objective material to work on, so that the whole matter is highly exposed to a lot of discretion; I mean: everybody will be able to say anything about it and we will have no serious material to work on. This can explain also the hard, never ending, debates about abortion.

I think that philosophy needs to face this challenge: what, better than philosophy, can be able to face it? At the moment, I think the only way to manage this question is a permanent research, discussion, study, that most probably must never be considered closed. I mean, I think the solution is exactly not stopping discussions, while, on the opposite side, the root of the problem is not violence, but when we close, or look for closing, discussions.

If you break a random common rock you find, you don't much care. If you break a living person's arm, you do. The reason being that the arm is not just an object but a part of a living person. What makes the difference? Well, clearly consciousness. Some sort of first person perspective that the person possessing the arm has. Some sort of feeling of what it's like to be that person (ouch!!!).

Cause and effect seem to be not just part of logic but part of the material universe. That is to say, a leads to b leads to c. This may be something we input on it (Hume), but that is not the main point I'd like to focus on. The main point is, in the development of the universe, cause and effect creates all sorts of events- world's exploding, atoms breaking apart, chemicals combining and recombining, explosions, compactions, collisions, you name it. However, applied to an entity with a first person perspective and you have "ouch!" "fear!" "excitement!" and so on. Nature doesn't care what object is being ripped apart and recombined. However, the fact that some of those objects have a first person aspect runs up against this general agnostic trend of universal laws and unfolding.

The nexus between an object being bombarded by effects of the universe and and an object being bombarded by effects that matters is consciousness. That is why the hard problem becomes ever so much more than just a hard question. It is the dividing line between an event and an experience.

And experiencing is where all the problems (literally) are generated from. The universe has no problem with heads being ripped off. The universe (that is to say, all the laws that unfold in the universe) are just following the laws. Gravitation is gravitating, EM is electromagnetizing, the strong force is strong forcing, and the weak force is breaking atoms apart. Mass is massing, etc. A rock breaking apart or a head being ripped apart from its body is of no consequence. It is just events eventing. The problems (literally) start with experiences, and mattering. I am not being literary. There are no problems before consciousness.

A p-zombie's head getting ripped off, would only matter in as far as there is an experience of a head getting ripped off. If there is none, it is like a rock being broken, nothing more or less. Rather, it is cultural and habit to care for something that looks like it feels something. It is not actually happening though in the sense of an internal feeling to that p-zombie though.

Let's first assume that the hard problem of consciousness is not the lack of scientific knowledge in that domain but the paradox it creates when thinking of consciousness as an object in the world. Any materialistic theories about it is followed by this question "why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?". And any materialistic attempt to answer that question also ends up being followed by the same question, creating a circularity that seems impossible to escape.

To me, this type of reasoning implies impossible premises. And to show that, let's first start with possible premises. We know that:

1) One indispensable element for the perception of objects is consciousness.
2) Time flows in one direction.

The logical conclusion from this is that consciousness cannot be viewed solely as an object since it has to be there for the perception of objects. Consciousness can only be viewed as consciousness (cannot be broken down into something else since it is always there as a whole in our reasoning).

However, when we ask ourselves “why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?”, we trigger a self referential explanation that has no other outcome than being circular because it circles back to incorrect premises that contradict the rest of the reasoning.

It can do so by contradicting the first premise: imagining that we can be “detached” from consciousness, that we can study it from an outside point of view without having to use it in the explanation (which we do, the moment we have thoughts about it…). In other words, it’s like trying to understand what the logical connector “and” means without using it in the explanation. Which is literally impossible since we reason by connecting things, and this connection is just another word, or a more complex version of “and”. "And" cannot be broken down into smaller concepts, just like consciousness (as in the feeling of it) can't.

Going against the second premise is a bit stretched. It seems that people sometimes either forget that something cannot exist prior to its conception, or can reason with a distorted vision of time, leading them to enter a reasoning of how something was created as if it did not already exist and was not used throughout the reasoning. As if things could exist and not exist at the same time.
It's kind of like the liar paradox “this sentence is false” that implies the attribution of a truth value before the sentence is created, which creates some kind of weird time distortion where future and past events get mixed up and circle back to each other because they are contradictive.
"This sentence" refers to a future reference which is "this sentence is false". So it's attributing a truth value to itself that is not constructed yet. And the analysis after the creation contradicts the analysis based on events that did not happen yet so it's continuously changed

The only "solution" that doesn’t imply impossible premises is to consider this premise:

3) Other “beings” could visualise objects without “consciousness”

Which would imply that they would be able to view our “consciousness” as an “object”, without the self reference to consciousness. Although there is nothing that guarantees that their vision of “objects” is similar to ours.

In this light, it is possible to see that consciousness could be completely material and a sort of “illusion”, although we cannot make sense of the idea and that the hard problem of consciousness will always remain for those who try to visualise consciousness as an object. So there is no actual "solution".

It seems like it's only a problem because impossible premises are used. With "possible" premises, it just seems like consciousness (as in the subjective experience) is a building block of our mind that we cannot reason without.

As I understand it, the hard problem of consciosuness claims that there exist subjective mental experiences (qualia) that can't be explained in physical terms, — TheMadFool

It would be better states as 'no objective description is the same as a subjective experience.'

As often with this problem, your attempt to 'explain it away' only demonstrates that you don't understand it. Google Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness and have a geezer at the original.

The more interesting question for me, is why so many people seem so committed to dismissing the hard problem. What's the issue with admitting something we don't know yet?

And I think it's:

1. The baggage. Many seem to feel that admitting we don't understand a fundamental aspect of consciousness is (re-)opening the door to souls, spirits and other nonsense.

2. The difficulty groking the problem in the first place. Since subjective experience is the window through which we naturally and effortlessly examine everything, many people have difficulty examining the window itself. And that includes me. Just like most people, I had to have a "penny drop" moment, where I realized that pain, color, smells etc are phenomena that occur in the brain, not in the outside world (or the body, in the case of pain), in a way we don't yet understand.
Many people arguing against the hard problem either have never had the penny drop moment, or didn't have it prior to strongly taking a position and are now committed.

Because the Hard Problem hasn't been solved. Ergo, the book you linked doesn't solve it. — RogueAI

Who judges whether it's been solved or not? You? Chalmers?...

I don't think neuroscience is going to solve the hard problem. The idea that you can mix non-conscious stuff around in a certain way and add some electricity to it and get consciousness from it is magical thinking. — RogueAI

Why? Without having studied the properties and functions of all non-conscious stuff, how are you in a position to say what it can and cannot produce?

Since we know consciousness exists — RogueAI

We do?

we should doubt the non-conscious stuff exists. We have no evidence that it does anyway. Why assume it exists? — RogueAI

If non-conscious stuff doesn't exist then how can you conceive of a problem with it's producing consciousness? How have you aquired some rules regarding what this non-conscious stuff can and cannot do if it doesn't even exist?

Well I just said, I disagree with the notion that we should give up on a physical model of consciousness. There is no guarantee in this universe of solving any problem in any given time, and we're making faster progress now than ever.

We haven't made any progress on the Hard Problem. For the questionsHow are we conscious and Why are we conscious, science has nothing to say but conjecture. It's panpscyhism or computation or integrated information theory or quantum computations in brain microtubules. The fact that there's not even a framework for an answer to the Hard Problem is evidence of the fact that no progress has been made on it. I expect that lack of progress to continue. I think it's fundamentally incoherent to think that non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness, and that's why you're seeing such frustration on the part of materialists when it comes to consciousness, and why there's a temptation to handwave it all away, like the behavioralists did and people like Dennet still do.

I also disagree about choosing a philosophy by elimination. There's always the possibility that there is another framing that we haven't thought of yet."

Possibly, but from where we're at epistemically, it really comes down to "is there stuff outside the mind, is everything mind/thought, or is it some combination of stuff outside the mind and mental stuff?" In other words, physicalism, dualism, or idealism seem to be exhaustive. I don't think we're going to be discovering another "ism" to add to those three.

I am firmly anti-dualism and I find a usefulness for Chalmers’ distinction.

However I do think the answer to the “hard problem” proper is trivial, and all the actual hard work is in answering the “easy problem”. And that the substantive question of why we have the specific kind of first-person experience that we have, rather than the trivial question of why we have any first-person experience at all, is bound up in the “easy problem” as well, because experience and behavior are inseparably linked.

However I do think the answer to the “hard problem” proper is trivial, and all the actual hard work is in answering the “easy problem”. And that the substantive question of why we have the specific kind of first-person experience that we have, rather than the trivial question of why we have any first-person experience at all, is bound up in the “easy problem” as well, because experience and behavior are inseparably linked. — Pfhorrest

Just had to agree with Pfhorrest on this one.

However I do think the answer to the “hard problem” proper is trivial, and all the actual hard work is in answering the “easy problem”. And that the substantive question of why we have the specific kind of first-person experience that we have, rather than the trivial question of why we have any first-person experience at all, is bound up in the “easy problem” as well, because experience and behavior are inseparably linked. — Pfhorrest

:nod:

What you describe, even if you are referring to the ancient Greeks, can also be found in the Cambridge Neo-Platonists, specifically Ralph Cudworth, who Chomsky thinks is more interesting than Kant. — Manuel

Why thankyou! I hadn't thought of that connection, but it's a flattering comparison. (I've tried reading up on Cudworth but there doesn't seem to be a decent compendium of edited writings and the original text is very hard to follow.)

"It is said that we can have no conception how sensation or thought can arise from matter, they being things so very different from it, and bearing no sort of resemblance to anything like figure or motion ; which is all that can result from any modification of matter, or any operation upon it.…this is an argument which derives all its force from our ignorance." (quoting Joseph Priestley) — Manuel

I believe that would be a reaction to Liebniz' remark:

It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that which depends on it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions, And, supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought, therefore, in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine. — Liebniz

I don't put the explanatory gap down to ignorance, in the sense of 'lack of information', but because of a difference in kind between the properties of matter and the capabilities of reason. And indeed the first-person nature of consciousness generally (which brings us back to the 'hard problem'). That is what Liebniz means by 'simple substance' (where 'substance' means 'ousia', 'being'.)

I just don't see why you'd say that corporeal senses are physical in a way that mind is not. — Manuel

I think this distinction recognised in both ancient and medieval philosophy. The senses are physical in that they receive physical signals from physical objects. Any sentient being, including animals, will sense objects by these means, whether by sight, smell, touch or hearing (and leaving aside the vast range of sensory ability). That process I take to be physical. All of the elements of that process can be studied through physiology, biology, cognitive science and so on.

But in addition to physical sensing, there is, in the human, also the process of apperception, interpretation and judgement. Rational thought comprises that synthesis (in the Kantian sense) of both the sensory and intellectual elements. You also find a similar formulation in Aquinas. That is the intellectual process, taking place in the mind. It is that process which is not amenable to physical reduction, for many reasons; hence 'dualism' of, not of mind and matter, but matter and form (hylomorphism).

Numbers, it would seem, are abstract objects, yet our intellects operate with them all the time. How does a physical brain interact with an abstract entity? A similar problem could be raised for concepts in general; they are abstract, general entities, not physical particulars, yet they are the meat and drink of thinking. For a dualist about intellect there does not appear to be the same problem. The immaterial intellect is precisely the sort of thing that can grasp abstract objects, such as numbers and universals – in the Aristotelian context, the immaterial intellect is the home of forms. — SEP, Dualism, 4.6 The Aristotelian Argument in Modern Form (d)

That last sentence illustrates the point.

These types of ideas, of recognizing that things like BEDS or MOUNTAINS, are mental constructions and thus do not reside in the mind-independent world, is something that is awe-inducing. — Manuel

Good thought. But consider this idea: Einstein said 'I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man.' I also believe the theorem is there to be discovered by any rational intelligence. But the key point is, such a principle can only be recognised by a rational intelligence. So even though it's not dependent on your mind or mine - not 'mind dependent' in that sense- it is nonetheless an idea, so 'mind-dependent' in another sense, namely that only a rational mind can perceive it. So it's not as if with no humans about, the universe ceases to exist, but that any conception we have of 'existence' is 'constructed' around such principles. So the mind is bringing something to experience and reality is not apart from or outside of that. Very tricky idea, I know. I do understand I'm throwing a lot of ideas at you and really appreciate your responses. Thank you.

‘Qualitative assimilation, phenomenal experience and Being’ (QAPEB) is a paper that was published in Biosemiotics journal at the end of 2018 (it can be accessed and downloaded free). Its publication was the culmination of 32 years work. It addresses ideas relate to subjectivity, objectivity, and the hard problem.

The first thing to say about it is that it claims to bridge the objective–subjective divide. The objective–subjective divide is the problem of how to explain why an objective world has subjectivity at all: why is it that an objective world has 'given rise' to agents that possess a subjective view of the objective world?

The second thing the paper does, is provide a viable answer to the hard problem of explaining the phenomenal qualitative nature of conscious experience.

QAPEB solves these two problems by explaining how and why three distinct ontological categories have emerged and evolved. Each of these categories is tackled in separate sections and inform the title of the paper.

Section 1 explains how it is that a world of physical properties became a world of qualitative properties.
Section 2 is concerned with how it is that the world became differentiated in individual creatures in a qualitative, spatial and temporal way, and in doing so, characterises subjective conscious experience.
Section 3 explains the emergence of the realisation of self-reference and of the self-identification of ‘being-in-the-world’.

Each of these ontologically distinct levels can be thought of as characterising the objective physical world in a particular kind of meaningful way (hence being published in a journal of biosemiotics), where 'meaningful' refers to such things as qualities, space, time and belief. One of the key claims in the paper is that meaning is generated when there is some kind justification of value. Certain physical mechanisms satisfy this requirement and facilitate the generation of meaning during their interactive engagement with the environment.
What we find in each level is a different kind of physical activity that creates a different category of meaning about the world. This is why we get differentiated ontological categories and an explanation of subjectivity in objective terms.

While science has brought a pletora of evidence to the table that thoughts and consciousness corrospond to physical (electromagnetic) processes, the idea of "a hard problem of consciousness" has produced nothing except "Uh... I don't know. We got a problem."

MRI (magnetic resonance imagining) has given us major breakthroughs in this regard. We can extract all kinds of mental information with brain-reading already - from imagined visuals and sound, to the patterns and objects of our thought, our current focus and intention and even our emotional state. Everything that the hard problem of consciousness claims, that mental activity can not be reduced to physicality, has essentially be disproven.

The distinction between stuffs and relations is the root of the problem , and is what is driving the Hard Problem. — Joshs

Actually, I would say that the root of the hard problem of consciousness/qualia is an ontology that focuses on relations inspired by the success of mathematics in science. All mathematics can be reduced to structures built on the set membership relation, which is a composition relation between a part and a whole, where the whole is a set/collection/combination of parts. But when people look at the scientifically successful mathematical equations they may wonder: "Where do they include stuffs like redness or pain? How do such stuffs fit into the equations and why would such stuffs even exist?" But when we realize that the equations describe composition relations between stuffs then it becomes clear that the existence of stuffs is not only natural but also necessary for the existence of any relations.

That is the problem. Where is the physical evidence for consciousness?
What does ‘consciousness’ do? This is in light of understanding that it is perfectly [sic] for a philosophical zombie to exist (without disrupting our understanding of nature). — I like sushi

I've already stated my response to your questions above. Here they are again.

One of the pillars of the objective assessment of subjectivity is self-reference & self-referentiality.

If cognitive science has ascended to the level of analyzing the second-order feedback looping that substrates a self regarding first-order baseline feedback looping, then self-referentiality is now in the crosshairs of scientific objectivism. — ucarr

Subjectivity can not be ‘given’ to another as someone else cannot be someone different. — I like sushi

We're on the same page here, as I've also said something similar,

What about the consciousness that comprises the inner, emotional life of the experiencing self?

Can that consciousness be objectified without it turning its observer-receiver into a clone of itself? — ucarr

Piecing together the intersubjectivity does allow us to shed some light — I like sushi

Our fellow member Joshs is pushing hard along this line of attack upon The Hard Problem.

My personal view is that it is more likely a problem of definitions and/or category errors. — I like sushi

Yes. The intersubjectivity of the subjective/objective divide sounds to me like a gnarly paradox. However, ascension to a 4D selfhood might enable the effecting of some type of Vulcan mind meld (don't laugh too loudly!)

This is an interesting way of looking at things.

If Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness does not exist, then there is no difference between a living human body suffering and a computer built to imitate all happenings and behaviours of suffering. — Angelo Cannata

Saying that the hard problem doesn't exist isn't the same as saying consciousness, in the sense that suffering is an aspect of consciousness, doesn't exist.

On a separate note, there is a case to be made that a computer built to imitate human conscious behavior seamlessly and completely is conscious. Not sure where I come down on that. This brings us into the land of P-zombies, which drives me crazy.

if you say that something like the “I”, the subject, the self, does not exist, — Angelo Cannata

I think I understand what eastern philosophies mean when they say that the self is an illusion. It's a useful way of looking at things. There are times when I can even experience things that way. On the other hand, most of the time it's me sitting here typing. Doing things the good old fashioned Amurican, western way. As the Beatles sang - "All I can hear, I me mine, I me mine, I me mine. Even those tears, I me mine, I me mine, I me mine."

then you are saying that we need to agree that something, that science is absolutely unable to prove, exists and, as a consequence, needs to be explored, studied, cultivated, discussed. — Angelo Cannata

Science doesn't prove things exist, it shows they can be measured in a rigorous, repeatable way. If we call that "existence," which is not unreasonable, then the self exists as much as gravity, electrons, and popcorn.

The problem is that, for these discussions, studies and explorations, we won’t have any evidence, any objective material to work on, so that the whole matter is highly exposed to a lot of discretion; I mean: everybody will be able to say anything about it and we will have no serious material to work on. — Angelo Cannata

Of course we have evidence. I can report my personal experience of my self - suffering, thinking, awareness, happiness - everything that people experience. I can get similar reports from lots of different people. I can't use my eyes to see a self directly, but that's true of many things - electrons, x-rays, gravity... Maybe you don't think the evidence for selfhood is very good. I disagree.

Nobody would say that we should protect computers from violence; why should we protect humans from violence, if nobody is suffering inside a suffering body? A suffering human body can be interpreted just like the frog’s legs in Galvani’s experiment. — Angelo Cannata

Maybe, logically, we shouldn't care about other people's suffering for the reason you've given. Fact is, though, we do. For most of us empathy is part of our standard equipment. It's built in. For most of us, caring about other people is important. That's a value. Values are not generally rational or logical, not to say they are irrational or illogical. If this computer you're discussing can perfectly simulate suffering and perfectly simulate empathy, then we're really talking.

you can't follow a simple argument there's little point continuing. try reading what I've written rather than arguing against what you think I probably wrote. — Isaac

If I'm not understanding you correctly, maybe it would help if your "argument" was the least bit coherent.

On the one hand, we "have" experiences, yet whatever they are, they are a pale, ghostly thing, a not "an entity/event in need of explanation", it is a mere "felicitous word", that exists somewhere in it's "own world".

At times you have likened experience to fictional entities (gods, pixie dust, the ether), at other times human convention (the boundary between red and orange, the movement of chess pieces), at other times you declared the simple identity of experience and neural activity. Which is it? And all this without, as far as I can tell, the slightest shred of evidence or argument that experience is any of these, or even that it is possible for experience to be any of these. You just baldly insist on it.

Are you just waving around your (no doubt flawed) interpretation of the results of the Anomalous Monism argument as if they were self evident truths?

If there is an argument somewhere, it seems to be this "killer".

If we're not describing some.empirical object (or event) then it would be weird if some empirical objects matched up with it exactly. The 'hard problem' would emerge if there was a one-to-one correspondence. Then we'd have something odd to explain. That it doesn't is exactly what we'd expect. It's not even an easy problem, its not a problem at all. — Isaac

Which is garbage. If memory does not have a one-to-one correspondence with neural activity (as you have asserted), does that imply that there is no neural basis for memory? That memory too has no need for explanation, existing in its own shadowy world? No, it just means that the relationship between memory and neural activity is irreducibly complex. Do I need to waste time providing evidence of the neural basis of memory?

No, forgive me if I'm not willing to spend another iota of my precious time picking over your opinions on this matter. They are just not that interesting. As a far wiser man than me said,

I'm not looking to do a deep dive on what Isaac thinks because I'd probably bump my head on the bottom of the pool — frank

PS no one is attacking your precious neuroscience, so quit whining about it as if they were.

you've been saying for a few pages that the use of the word cannot give us any reified object, but now you say that there is always a feeling of pain associated with the felicitous use of the word? — Luke

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.

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

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

According to Wittgenstein, linguistic meaning is all 2), and 1) is his beetle in the box: not a something, but not a nothing either.

This is probably why you find 1) scientifically uninteresting, but I find it philosophically interesting. — Luke

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.

I think this is the "real" hard problem, actually. The problem is matter in general, not consciousness more narrowly considered.

First of all, baryonic matter makes up about 5% of the universe, whereas 27% is made of, so- called "dark matter" (which isn't even clear is "matter" at all), and then most of it is "dark energy", which we also don't know what it is.

Now, of the 5% of the matter we do know and love, we do not know its inner nature nor why it came to be (as opposed to anti-matter or something else), and why there is so little of it in the universe.

From all these very serious complications, one then can proceed to ask how consciousness may arise out of specific configurations of matter, or why matter works without direct contact, or how can quite insubstantial particles form living creatures, or colours or music, or almost anything else.

So yeah, matter is the hard problem. Consciousness is the specific configuration of matter we are best acquainted with out of everything there is, so it is (or should be) the least mysterious aspect of matter, while still admitting that it is, in a sense, mysterious.

Even here we are mostly on the same page. The hard problem is interesting, but I think there's a semantic problem which gets taken for granted : people don't know what they mean by 'consciousness' in a metaphysical context. — plaque flag

It's a hard problem in that we know that there are things that don't sense the sky as "blue" or sense at all and we know there are things that sense. Barring p-zombies and behaviorism, we think that needs something that explains it.

I don't think I am trying to make an especially deep metaphysical characterization of information, and it's certainly vague. It's closest to what you said before - differences that make a difference - or maybe just distinctions. Very vague, yes, but I think its just more being used as a kind of generic classificatory tool.

I think - in absence of any further possible way of explaining what phenomena exactly is or why - I am just saying that it is plausible to construe experiences as information. All I really know about my own experiences is that I am making or perceiving distinctions which are immediate to me.. which seems close to describing it in terms of information. Information seems to be one of the only property I can really ascribe to my experiences in a way that is articulable.

At the same time, the fact there seems to be a mapping or isomorphism to brain behavior suggests that if we can describe those brain interactions in terms of information or distinctions that brains can make about inputs, then phenomena seem to be what it is like to be those distinctions internally as it were. I do think though that the brains as we talk about them are still scientific constructs in our minds so I am not necessarily saying that there is an actual duality here between brains and phenomena. The duality is only in our models. This (lack of duality) can be naturally interpreted as panpsychism if one wants but personally this doesn't help me understand the world any further.

One thing I am dropping from my view is that reality - in whatever way you want to metaphysically theorize about it - is not like a set of objects that just permanently exist at one scale and can be arranged in different ways like marbles in a box.

Theoretical physics, from what I have read, seems to characterize particles and forces at the most fundamental level in terms of symmetries and invariances that possibly emerge and dissolve depending on the situation (maybe a good example in physics is that it is thought that during the development of the universe you had symmetry breaking where new forces, particles and even mass emerged where they did not exist before).

So maybe symmetries / invariances are fundamental.

However, symmetries are actually very generic concepts which can be applied to anything at all.
Symmetries can therefore be applied to any scale from small things in physics to brains and beyond; they would essentially emerge out of each other.

Interesting example here of someone applying it to perception:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2021.681162/full

(Some examples of use in biology: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetry/special_issues/Making_Breaking_Symmetries_Mind_Life)

Another interesting example suggesting invariances as a way of unifying many different types of theories. (Note, he has chosen to express this in terms of the price equation from evolution, but the choice is more or less preference afaik)

https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/12/978

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2019.0351

And what is said in these articles applies to information in terms of relative entropy and fisher information, interestingly. A quote from second article:

"All of the ‘information’ results in the prior section arose directly from the canonical Price equation’s description of conserved total probability. No notion or interpretation of ‘information’ is necessary. In many disciplines, information expressions arise in the analysis of the specific disciplinary problems. This sometimes leads to the idea that information must be a primary general concept that gives form to and explains the particular results. Here, the Price equation explains why those information expressions arise so often. Those expressions are simply the fundamental descriptions of force and change within the context of a conserved total quantity. In this case, the conserved total quantity is total probability."

So maybe what I am getting at here is that, if theoretical physics symmetries are fundamental, maybe all types of symmetries that exist within the universe are fundamental entities of the universe, at whatever scale. Those kinds of symmetries or invariances might also be a good way of characterizing what we mean when we say brains can distinguish things (or have information), because these distinctions are clearly on scales above elementary particles and instead at the level of organization of these systems as wholes in terms of neuronal activity. Brain perception therefore involves higher order symmetries (perhaps like in the article on perception above) which are themselves superimposed on lower symmetries such as those at the microscopic physics scale. But clearly, the emergence of these symmetries on top of each other is something that can naturally pulled out of the mathematical descriptions of these things (in principle) and isn't somehow unexpected or strange.

Our perceptions, our phenomena are then just what its like to be these various higher order symmetries which are coalescing together I guess.

Now, I am not trying to solve the hard problem. I think experiences are irreducible. I don't think we can know anything about the world beyond our experiences (even if we were to say that everything in the universe is experiential - that doesn't give me any extra useful knowledge). When I am talking about symmetries, invariances, information, these are just tools for organizing my knowledge and conceptual schemes, knowledge which is enacted within my own experiences. So I am not trying to say that experiences are the math that is being used to describe symmetries and invariances or anything like that. Those are observer-dependent constructs we use to predict things. I don't think I can in principle even imagine whats going on in the actual outside world, but talk of symmetries and fundamental entities is just helping me create a coherent model of reality. Experience is irreducible and metaphysical ontology is deeply inaccessible imo.

But by saying experiences are what it's like internally to be some kind of symmetries, invariances, structure, information, distinction... whatever... I am just giving it a coherent connection to the rest of our physical models. I think this particular way makes the combination problem easier by making it easier for macro-experiences to just emerge. But again, I am not trying to give an explanation for particular phenomenal experiences. But if they are the internal what it's like of symmetries or information in reality as I just described, then I kind of lean toward the view that there is just a brute fact that experiences have this kind of vivid discernibility to them as a reflection of the distinguishable degrees of freedom of systems as a whole - I would actually just call that vivid discernibility information - even if some immediate, subjective kind.

Now part of the whole rollercoaster of all this is I am trying to give an account of the objective world which I believe is absolutely fundamentally inaccessible, but also explicitly acknowledging that I am using descriptions that are fundamentally observer dependent.

So I think paradoxes and natural limits to what I am trying to describe are a given.
I cannot explain experiences but I think I can still coherently map it to information. Experiences are all I have access to but also, scientific models in physics, biology, computer science, etc. give me by far the best way of giving a good explanation of my reality in so far that I am capable of doing so under my own limits as an organism.

Again, what I have said is completely compatible with panpsychism imo or even idealism in the sense of saying everything is just experiences but seems there are still many open questions if you do that under this perspective.

Note: My perspective on symmetries as fundamental is not dissimilar from structural realists like James Ladyman (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/) but I am not explicitly realist. Without realism, I think the need to explain phenomena with mathematical models becomes less acute; but at the same time, by not having a preferred scale for symmetries or invariances, then there is less combination problem issues. Symmetries and invariance may not be the only structural concepts but probably there is importance there. Structuralism seems to be just the latest generation of naturalist ideas and I'd say its probably not unfair to say it arose from the need to have looser conceptualizations of the natural world than physics, just as physicalism arose from the need for a looser conceptualization of the world than materials (thus superseding materialism). I'd say structural things in is about as poorly defined as physicalist ontology is. The vagueness of structure also makes me think that that notion has significant overlap with my notion of information which is just about distinctions. I also think the idea of invariances maybe overlaps with that too since invariance seems to entail the notion of regularity, patterns and perhaps how they are separable from other things and noise.

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?