The hard problem is certainly trying to come from the position of neutrality. — Bird-Up

Ancient Greeks, like Aristotle, never discussed consciousness. He talks about thought, but makes nothing of self-consciousness.
Kierkegaard said Christianity invented inwardness, or subjectivity. It strikes me that trying to explain consciousness is based on this error. — Jackson

Self-consciousness would simply be thoughts of the self.

The question is what are thoughts composed of, or what forms do they take? What makes a thing a thought as opposed to not a thought?

The hard problem is asking why do the thoughts of others take the form of the visual of their brain/neural activity, while our own thoughts take the form of sounds, feelings, colors, shapes depth, etc. All descriptions of mental activity from a third-person scientific perspective are actually first-person visual subjective descriptions of other's mental activity. You never experience your own mental activity the way you experience others' mental activity.

The hard problem, if nothing else, is about highlighting a notion that is unexpected. We wouldn't be discussing it if the experience of consciousness was a boring and unnotable subject.

All forms of life respond to sensory information. A plant may reach around a corner when it senses sunlight. But the plant is unlikely to be conscious. An insect may scurry away when it senses you walking towards it. Is it feeling fear? Maybe not, but it is a better candidate for consciousness than the plant. What about the dog looking up at your face and wagging its tail? Seems like a plausible case of consciousness to me.

Life experiences sensory information with differing levels of nervous-system complexity. These nervous systems could be ranked on a gradual scale, with humans fancying themselves to be at the top. The more complex and extensive the nervous system is, the more likely it is to be conscious. So where along that continuum do you mark the first real consciousness? Sounds like an opinion that is up for debate. This could lead to the realization that there is no definition of consciousness. Consciousness merely describes a set of characteristic traits that a nervous system could have. The more boxes they check, the more conscious they are considered to be.

But why that special designation of "conscious"? Couldn't I just say: "My body has nerves."

What is our motive behind creating the superfluous "conscious" label?

In conversing with you on this forum, would I be hallucinating your existence? — Harry Hindu

I didn't mean literally hallucinating the content of your existence, I meant we could be deceived that our conscious experience is more than just electrical signals bouncing around in our heads: "Whatever this sensation of consciousness is that I'm experiencing, it is something more!"

Are you sure about that? Maybe it only seems that way from our point of view.

The hard problem is a strange question to answer. You acknowledge the existence of conscious experience by emphasizing how it isn't really there to begin with.

I don't know what a view from outside of a head would look like. It's an impossibility. Third-person views are simulated first-person views. — Harry Hindu

"Simulated first-person views" sounds like a valid definition of the objective world. I've always thought of objectivity as an abstract model that we use to understand the world. Whatever the case, I'm just saying that two languages can describe the same thing; even if they use a different vocabulary. Subjectivity is the first language. Objectivity is another language.

My conscious experience is composed of shapes, colors, sounds, feelings, visual, auditory and tactile depth, etc. — Harry Hindu

The physical brain has developed an awareness-center so that it can obtain decision-making functionality. The shapes, color, sounds, etc would be the "summary" or "map" that our subconscious brain presents us with for the purpose of deciding. The "summary"/"map" is a secondary creation that does not represent the whole of the human brain with complete accuracy. The "summary"/"map" part is you.

There are two ways to look at this awareness-center in the brain:

• You could say that the awareness-center is obviously aware, in which case the awareness (conscious experience) is unremarkable and expected. From this viewpoint, the hard problem doesn't need to be asked.
• Or you could say that mere awareness doesn't constitute conscious experience. Following that viewpoint, conscious experience would be a side effect that mistakenly arises out of the awareness. In this case, we would be perceiving our consciousness to exist when it actually does not. Relative to the hard problem, you would say that our "in the dark" functionality only feels like it is illuminated.

Either way, conscious experience is the awareness-center doing its job.

I'm not sure if this makes sense. I can have a view of your body and it's behavior and deduce that you have experiences that are the causes of your behavior. But can I view my own view? Does that make sense? — Harry Hindu

I assume this was a rhetorical question, but I think "yes" is the answer. You can view your own view. Not with the default tools that mother nature provided, but I think it would be possible. Reminds me of a memorable scene from Westworld where a character views her own consciousness. Her reaction was disbelief paired with an overwhelming identity-crisis.

It seems to me that, in the context of philosophy, not just humanity, however we define the self, we are in the Catch 22 situation: if the self is something clear, then we are like machines with some kind of particular phenomenon that we can call “self”, that, as such, can be referred even to computers properly made; in this case we have the challenge of agreeing that a machine can suffer and, as such, can deserve empathy, fighting for its rights, even making laws to punish those who make violence against computers. In the opposite case, if the self is unclear, then there is not anywhere anybody suffering, so there is no philosophical need to defend the rights of oppressed people. — Angelo Cannata

There are two ways to dismiss Chalmer’s hard problem. The first is to solve it by making materiality primary and declaring humans to be complex machines. Dan Dennett holds to this view. I think that even though for him a conscious self is just an artifact , a convenient function, he would still argue that humans operate on the basis of complex motivational systems that computers currently lack, but that eventually we will be able to construct machines with such systems , and those machines es will indeed be capable of ‘suffering’.

The second way to do away with the hard problem is to dissolve it. This is the approach of phenomenology and postmodern theories. For them bodily and social
systems of differential drives , values and affects, what e than materiality, are fundamental and irreducible a prioris. This makes suffering intrinsic to reality, even without a constituting ‘self’.

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

It's not really about suffering, but our awareness of suffering. In what ways are we aware of suffering and how does that differ from actual suffering? What form does the awareness of suffering take as opposed to actual suffering? It seems that there can be one without the other. For instance, I can be aware of your suffering but not suffering myself. As a matter of fact, some people can take pleasure in others' suffering.

The observation of others' suffering takes a different form than my own suffering. From my perspective, others' suffering is a "physical" state (ie they cry, moan, pout, etc,). For myself, it's a mental state. I don't need to be aware of the "physical" state of my body to know that I am suffering. I can close my eyes and still be aware of my own suffering. This is not the case for others' suffering and this is essentially the hard problem - which is more about awareness of states-of-affairs and what form that awareness takes, and why it is different to be aware of others' suffering as opposed to our own suffering.

By science I mean the instruments that detect physical matter....Not saying we can't go beyond that if we understand the problem. — Mark Nyquist

As far as I can see, there's no reason to think that consciousness can't be understood in terms of principles we already are aware of. I don't see any hard problem.

. After all, what is it that is "extended"? — Constance

That's what we want to know. Chalmers is a good start if you're interested in the philosophy behind developing a scientific theory of consciousness. He explains the difference between functional consciousness (the easy problem) and phenomenal consciousness (the hard problem.). He's very well versed in theory of mind and the amazing success science has had so far in explaining functionality.

Science has the conceptual framework to address the easy problem. It lacks that framework to address the hard problem. To make progress, the realm of the physical will have to expand to include subjectivity. — frank

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed. We artificially split it off it and now are trying to append it back on like a new object.

Imagine a technologically naive culture, cut off from the rest of the world, or maybe part of a multi-generational dystopian experiment, where DVDs and DVD players are a given. There would eventually arise a hard problem of DVDs. You can't answer that problem by saying "movies are just a name we give to certain DVD microstructures". You have to explain how it is that the material DVD "contains" audio and video. — hypericin

Great. So given that we know the answer to this one, in your own words, what type of answer would this yield? What's the answer to "how does a DVD contain audio and video?"

It is not about describing in detail how consciousness works - that is supposed to be the Easy problem (hah!) — SophistiCat

What trips people up is conflating an understanding of consciousness with understanding the NCCs (neural correlates of consciousness). You can imagine in the future that we might have a complete accounting of the NCCs, a complete description of all the relevant brain structures and how they interact with one another. But nonetheless, we still can't conceptually make the leap from this description to the first person features of consciousness: qualia, what-is-it-like, etc. On the one side, in the third person, is the objective description of neural structure and activity. On the other side, in the first person, is the consciousness stuff. Unifying this dualism is the task of the hard problem.

I think we are in basic agreement here?

Subjective experience is not something magical or exotic. We all sit here in the whirling swirl of it all day every day. Why would something so common and familiar be different from all the other aspects of the world? — T Clark

Your statement implies the belief commonplace subjective experiences should be easily accessible to the objectivist methodologies of science. It also implies the subjective/objective distinction is a trivial matter and should therefore be no problem for science. Scientists examining "the hard problem" indicate how, regarding this question, the division between subjective/objective is deep and treacherous. Why do you disagree with them?

You're claiming the objectivism of science does not handicap its examination of subjective mind? — ucarr

Your above observations do not answer my question. Are you unwilling to answer it?

Well, I also suggested a solution to the problem of qualia, which is the hard problem.

I don't know if Kant nor the Tao Te Ching have specific any bearing on the question. — Wayfarer

Your question was "Any examples come to mind of sciences or scientists that do?" I can see I didn't answer that question very well, although I think my answers were relevant to how science might examine consciousness effectively. As I said in a previous post:

Phenomenology isn't really philosophy at all. It's psychology. So much of it makes definitive statements about phenomena and processes that can be verified or falsified using empirical methods. — T Clark

I wouldn't be surprised if psychologists have completed studies that are relevant to those questions, but I can't name any. I have set a new task for myself. On the other hand, if I'm right that the phenomena phenomenologists describe are subject to empirical verification or falsification, phenomenologists have made factual statements without evidence. I've been wondering whether the insights they describe are based on introspection, but I haven't seen acknowledgement that that is the case. I consider introspection a valid form of evidence, at least potentially.

As for the Tao Te Ching, it is a statement from that particular source of the perennial philosophy - you could find comparable aphorisms in Christian mystical theology, but again, for those who understand the world that way, there is no hard problem (or any problem :-) ) — Wayfarer

I think the Tao Te Ching, as well as Kant and Heidegger, make statements that are, at least potentially, empirically verifiable.

Tell me then in what way "the hard problem ..." is a scientific problem particularly in neuroscience.

I was just saying this same thing. Worldview comes into play in the assumptions people make about it.
— frank

Which renders the 'hard problem' meaningless. — Isaac

Does it? Remember that when gravity was first introduced into physics as a thing to be explained, no one imagined that it's a matter of curved space. The worldview of the time wouldn't allow that.

So as we go to explain phenomenal consciousness, couldn't the same problem exist? That we don't have a worldview that allows the explanation to appear yet? Why not?

:ok: So "the hard problem .." is not a scientific problem like I've stated.

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?

Because folk bring their baggage with them.

I think you're broadly in agreement with Chalmers here. — frank

I don't see how. Chalmers famously labelled it the 'hard problem', didn't he? I'm suggesting it isn't a problem at all. I can't think of any way we could be much farther apart than that.

I don't see how. Chalmers famously labelled it the 'hard problem', didn't he? I'm suggesting it isn't a problem at all. I can't think of any way we could be much farther apart than that. — Isaac

Regardless, your view is similar to his.

It's best to untangle the language first, at least to figure out what we're trying to talk about.

The word is an obvious nominalization, as evident by the suffix "-ness". Nominalizing adjectives and verbs is a natural and sometimes perilous part of language. So we'll have to look at the root word to gain any understanding here.

The word “conscious” (or "unconscious") has typically been applied to describe organisms, the body, the "physical correlates". In fact, there is little else on Earth the word can be applied to without raising serious absurdities. But, for whatever reason, the word has been nominalized along the way.

Knowing that "conscious-ness" is a nominalization, and "conscious" invariably describes conscious things, it follows that what we're speaking about is any number of conscious things considered in abstracto, that is, removed of every other physical properties for the purposes of analysis.

Unfortunately, having mentally excised the physical properties we're left with nothing to think about or even to apply the term. When the language turns a description of an object into its own "quality" or "essence", it makes it its own object, worthy of its own descriptions and so on. The problem is, the moment we look around, there isn't any extant object or substance or event or place upon which we can pin the word. So the "hard problem" is so difficult because you're trying to explain essentially nothing.

It's very simple why the hard problem of consciousness is hard - consciousness is unobservable, a necessity if science has to take a shot at explaining it. Hence I recommend the Eastern approach of meditation (self-reflection) if we are to make any headway in the field of consciousness studies. However this is not an either-or kinda deal I'm offering. I recall hearing/reading how, under the aegis of the present Dalai Lama, high lamas, experts in meditation, collaborated with American and European neuroscientists to deepen our understanding of the mind. Anyone with links to that research?

Anomalous Monism is only concerned with third-personal causal analysis of propositional attitudes, and so it isn't really relevant to the "hard problem". Rather, AM concerns the "soft problem" of inter-translating the public ontologies of scientific psychology and the physical sciences.


"Davidson restricts the class of mental events with which Anomalous Monism is concerned to that of the propositional attitudes—states and events with psychological verbs such as ‘believes’, ‘desires’, ‘intends’ and others that subtend ‘that-’ clauses, which relate subjects to propositional contents such as ‘it is raining outside’. Anomalous Monism thus does not address the status of mental events such as pains, tickles and the like—‘conscious’ or sentient mental events. It is concerned exclusively with sapient mental events—thoughts with propositional content that appear to lack any distinctive ‘feel’."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/

The "conscious events" that AM doesn't address are those that correspond with our private use of language as indexicals, as in the cry " owww toothache!!" - an occasion that constitutes a bespoke use of language, that in spite of appearances isn't justified by, nor needs to be justified by, a priori established linguistic conventions regarding the public meaning of "toothache"in the referential or functional sense of a noun or verb.

If I cry "owww toothache!!" , although the noun "toothache" has (many) public definitions that a dentist might use to assess the physical state of my mouth, my cry of "toothache!" bears no semantic relation to the dental definition of toothache, for I am privately using "toothache" as an indexical, rather than publicly using it in the dental sense of a noun. So regardless of whether or not I 'actually' have "toothache" in the sense of a dysfunctional dental property, my cry of "toothache!!" still stands as a fact, even if outsiders are puzzled as to what it could relate to from their perspective.

Although indexicals are excluded as objects of Davidson's analysis, given that indexicals a) serve to ground public definitions in the minds of each and every individual and b) that people use the nouns and verbs of their public language as indexicals in an unpredictable bespoke fashion, indexicals contribute to the indeterminancy of translation and reference that Davidson appeals to in the context of the propositional attitudes he analyses.

Ah! My apologies. I missed the last bit. I was answering affirmatively to...

Your "agreement" that people have pains seems to be no more than that people know how to use the word "pain" — Isaac

...the last bit ("that there is never any feeling of pain involved") doesn't make sense. There cannot not be a feeling 'pain' associated with the felicitous use of the word 'pain'. It's what the word means. The question here is not about whether people are using the folk notion felicitously. Of course they are. It's whether the folk notion refers to any object of science (or should).

You keep asking the equivalent of "when people say 'pain' do they mean pain?" That has no bearing on the question of the hard problem.

We're asking rather "is it odd that our use of the concept 'pain' doesn't have a physical referent. Is it a 'problem' for neuroscience?"

Anomalous Monism is only concerned with third-personal causal analysis of propositional attitudes, and so it isn't really relevant to the "hard problem". Rather, AM concerns the "soft problem" of inter-translating the public ontologies of scientific psychology and the physical sciences. — sime

Except that Davidson’s anomalous monism is a non-reductive physicalism, leaving open an explanatory gap between mental events and the physical properties they depend on.

“… a non-reductionist physicalist like Davidson does not claim that everything is physical; rather she claims that everything depends on the physical. She allows that there are mental properties at a higher level of complexity but mental properties supervene on physical properties at a micro-structural level. Hence, any alterations at the level of mental can be physically explained by some alterations at the level of micro structures.

The difference between a Davidsonian non-reductive physicalist and a Rortyan naturalistic pragmatist is that the former does not deny that there really are physical properties at the micro-structural level, because the efficiency of a physical vocabulary is a sufficient reason to extend its claims to ontology. In contrast, the latter thinks that Davidsonian "physical properties" and "the micro-structural level" are just theoretical suppositions that are meaningful only within a description or vocabulary. They think that it is sufficient for a denial of the existence of physical properties at the level of ontology, precisely because they are still description-dependent.” (ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM ELIMINATED:
RORTY AND DAVIDSON ON THE MIND-WORLD RELATION, Istvan Danka)

I read Chalmers to be saying that consciousness could be investigated as a scientific phenomenon if the 'powerful methods' stopped insisting upon reducing it into a mechanism that excludes the need for a 'subject.'. — Paine

But I agree - that's a different way of making the same point. What is the name for the human subject? Why, that is 'a being'. And the failure to grasp this fundamental fact is an aspect of what Heidegger describes as 'the forgetting of being'. I've had many a debate on this forum, some of them very bitter and acrimonious, because I claim that beings are fundamentally different from objects.

Elsewhere, Chalmers advocates, and Dennett dismisses as fantasy, the idea of a 'first-person science'. But, as has been pointed out, phenomenology was originally conceived by Husserl as a first-person science of consciousness.

So I disagree that my post 'looses sight' of Chalmer's point of departure. I'm simply saying that what he describes as 'the hard problem of consciousness' could be better depicted as the problem of the meaning of being.

Not at all; it speaks to the fact that our perceptual organizations are similar enough, and that the minutest details of external objects do not depend on who is observing them. — Janus

So what's your argument then? A bit of rock in the ground here is "similar enough" to a bit of rock in the ground on the other side of the world, that we can make conclusions and state "scientific" principles which apply to both. And, our "perceptual organizations" must be "similar enough" in order that a multitude of us can agree on these details. On what basis do you conclude that we can make valid scientific conclusions about the similarity in the rocks but not about the similarity in the internal perceptual organizations?

Some observations may be available only to those who are trained to know what to look for and what they are looking at, but all scientific observations are publicly available in principle. — Janus

You are missing the point. The observations are only made by those participating in the performance of the experiment. Therefore the observations are not publicly available. You can read someone else's observations, but to assume that the other person's observations are the same as yours would be in that situation, is to presuppose the principle you stated above, that "our perceptual organizations are similar enough". And if that presupposition is true then there is no problem for me to make scientific conclusions about your internal perceptual organizations based on an analysis of my own internal disposition.

The other possible way that observations are available to the public is if we follow the stated method to replicate, and do our own experimentation. If you've ever done this though, you likely have found out that we commonly do not really notice the same "minutest details". That's a faulty assumption on your part, and correcting it is what leads to the hard problem.

Dr. Penfield was practicing until 1960. That's before we had computers. — Philosophim

I don't see how the invention of computers has any bearing. The specifics of his claim haven't been shown to be incorrect, and the fact that it happened 50 years ago is not relevant. His main point is that his patients could clearly distinguish memories and sensations that were triggered by his instruments from their own volitional control. They would say 'you're doing that'. Penfield interpreted that to mean that their own awareness was separate to the reactions he was able to elicit by manipulation. That is why he tended towards a dualist view late in his career.

"Using fMRI brain scans, these researchers were able to predict participants’ decisions as many as seven seconds before the subjects had consciously made the decisions. — Philosophim

That indicates that conscious awareness of an action lags the unconscious, autonomic processes that initiate the action. I don't see how it has any bearing on the question of the nature of intentionality, and whether intentional actions can be understood as causally dependent on physical processes, which is really the point at issue. The 'placebo effect' and many other aspects of psychosomatic medicine show a 'downward causative' effect from states of mind and beliefs to actual physiology. According to the 'bottom-up' ontology of materialism, this ought never to happen. (Hence the hackneyed saying 'mind over matter'.)

As far as the overall efficacy of fMRI scans, this was one of the areas that was shown to be subject to the so-called 'replication crises' in the social sciences about ten years ago. See Do You Believe in God, or is that a Software Glitch

The problem that is always going to undermine physicalism or materialism is that being has a dimension that no physical process has. A first-person experience has a dimension of feeling that can never be replicated in a third-person or objective description. It's a very hard point to articulate, as it is more an implicit reality than an objective phenomenon. That is what the argument about 'the hard problem of consciousness' seeks to illuminate, and from your analysis of it, I'm not persuaded you see the point.

The physicalists have the hard problem of consciousness where consciousness is emergent from matter. — TheMadMan

Well perhaps, except that "consciousness" is no more mysteriously "emergent from matter" than walking is emergent from legs or respiration is emergent from lungs or a symphony is emergent from an orchestra. "Consciousness" is a (higher mammalian) CNS activity, or process, and not a discrete entity. I think the "mind from matter" formulation, therefore, is a pseudo-problem (resulting from assumed fallacies of misplaced concreteness & category error) that's "hard" only for cartesian dualists, ontological idealists & mysterians; for physicalists and/or (most) cognitive neuroscientists, modeling "consciousness" is only a highly complex research project that's still very much a work-in-progress – which demonstrates that "consciousness" is not some simple, quantifiable 'brute fact' like gravity, electromagnetism or vacuum fluctuations.

How does matter arise from consciousness?

Good question. :up:

Berkeley says "matter is an idea", no? Of course it is, and it is also more than just an idea – matter is the idea of more-than-/non-ideas (i.e. more-than-/non-consciousness).

edit:

NB: By "matter" – materiality – I understand embodied (i e. res extensia) as well as observational / experimental data. Physical then indicates any data-set (i.e. materials) which can be structured into a dynamic model. Rule of thumb concepts.

So it's hard to call the universe an organism, because it has no environment. Life climbs a ladder. It 'shits' more disorder than it creates. — plaque flag

Things tend to fall apart, but here we are, strange primates, increasing in complexity, godlike cyborgs, now creating synthetic brains better than our own. Even from the outside, we are not [just] drifting spacerock. — plaque flag

We can take an external view and look at patterns that stubbornly resist being erased. The pattern doesn't 'want' to die. — plaque flag

Philosophy makes darkness visible, drags ignorance into the light, wakes up the marching zombie. — plaque flag

qualia are slippery eels. — plaque flag

:fire: :100: I'm jazzed by the way you dance!

As I discern things, there is no "hard problem" for scientists, just another hard confusion that semantically bewitches philosophers.

@schopenhauer1

Why are we using science to attempt to back up our “feeling” of having a “personal” sense? — Antony Nickles

Are we?

Why is the feeling “mysterious”? — Antony Nickles

Because the hard problem of consciousness is a mystery in need of an explanation.

Ah. It’s this “mattering” and “significance” that we wanted all along — Antony Nickles

No, it's an answer to the hard problem that we wanted all along.

He goes on to say that if it could be proved that we each have a given, undeniable “self”... — Antony Nickles

Where does he say this?

...that we would treat each other better, which implies we could wash our hands of having to see others as human — Antony Nickles

If we treated each other better, then "we could wash our hands of having to see others as human"??