What occurs to me, reading that article, is that what his model is describing is ego, the self's idea of itself. — Wayfarer

It’s about phenomenal consciousness - which includes that of which we are consciously aware - so I think this is about right.

I don't think it addresses the aspect of the hard problem concerned with what it means to be. — Wayfarer

How do you view the hard problem as concerned with “what it means to be”?

? — Luke

That's a mislabeled response from me. When I said "no", I meant that you are correct in your explanation of the article, but I disagree with the article.

Do you doubt that the article offers a proposed solution to the hard problem? Have I created bias by announcing that that's what the article is about? — Luke

Yes, I doubt it, and yes you did.

Furthermore, I doubt that anyone would honestly disagree that the article proposes a solution to the hard problem. — Luke

Have they agreed? Sorry if I missed a post here that agreed that the article proposes a solution. I read some who praised the article as a good article or exciting.

Edit:
Just in case I wasn't clear on my first response to the article, I deny that the article promises a solution, I deny that the article has provided an insight (this is important for me) -- what it provided is a caricature of how humans come to be aware of their senses and how it mischaracterized what it meant to philosophy when other philosophers say that our concept of plurality came first before our concept of "self".

If there were no experiential dimension then there would be no hard problem, but since there is, there is. — Luke

Consider what it would mean to say that there is no experiential dimension. Unless that possibility is conceivable, then the hard problem isn't conceivable. Can you really conceive an absence of experience?

Consider the empirical criteria we might use when we assert that a sleeping person is unconscious. Then consider the rational arguments the the sleeping person uses after waking up, when they infer on the basis of amnesia to have been unconscious during sleep.

Is our empirical criteria regarding the present unconsciousness of a sleeping person the same as, or even comparable to, the amnesia that the awoken person appeals to when inferring "self unconsciousness" in the past?

Granting this, how does it imply that the hard problem is inconceivable? — Luke

We can take the hard-problem in it's broadest sense, as asking what grounds the existence of first-personal phenomenological criteria that are used to understand propositions?

For phenomenologists who consider first-personal phenomenological criteria to be the very essence of meaning, the question is circular and makes no sense from their perspective. Which is what i was getting at above.

On the other hand, scientists working in the natural sciences will either side with the phenomenologist or not, depending on whether they believe the inter-subjective empirical criteria that they use to understand scientific theories to be ultimately grounded in first-person phenomenology or in pure reason. (e.g whether they are ultimately empiricists equipped with a deflationary understanding of truth and an anti-representationalist understanding of their own minds, or whether they are ultimately rationalists equipped with a correspondence understanding of truth and a representational understanding of themselves).

As for Dennett, he sometimes sounds like a rationalist who agrees with the phenomenologist that the question is meaningless, but for opposite reasons, namely due to a narrow interpretation of the natural sciences as denying the question on the basis of it being materially inconsequential (as opposed to be phenomenologically inconsequential)

However, what I found most fascinating is the idea that qualia constitute the self, rather than being something perceived by the self.
— Luke

I haven't read through the full thread, so forgive me if you have already done so, but could you point out a specific passage from the article that you interpreted as promoting such a view? — wonderer1

Have you read the article? It's not long.

But we still have to address the crucial question: Why? Whatever could have been the biological advantage to our ancestors, and still to us today, of having conscious experience dressed up in this wonderful – and, some philosophers would say, quite unnecessarily exotic – fashion? To quote Fodor again:

Consciousness … seems to be among the chronically unemployed … As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well if they weren’t conscious. Why, then, did God bother to make consciousness? What on earth could he have had in mind?

I can’t answer for God. But in answering for natural selection, I think we can and should let first-person intuition be our guide. So, ask yourself: what would be missing from your life if you lacked phenomenal consciousness? If you had blindsight, blind-touch, blind-hearing, blind-everything? Pace Fodor, I’m sure there’s an obvious answer, and it’s the one we touched on when discussing blindsight. It’s that what would be missing would be nothing less than you, your conscious self.

One of the most striking facts about human patients with blindsight is that they don’t take ownership of their capacity to see. Lacking visual qualia – the ‘somethingness’ of seeing – they believe that visual perception has nothing to do with them. Then, imagine if you were to lack qualia of any kind at all, and to find that none of your sensory experience was owned by you? I’m sure your self would disappear. — the article

I don't see why it would be unreasonable to answer Chalmers with, "That's just the way evolution went." — wonderer1

"That's just the way evolution went" does not explain the "adaptive end", the evolutionary purpose, or the biological advantage of the development of phenomenal consciousness. In other words, it does not answer the hard problem of why we have phenomenal consciousness. "Evolution did it" is about as explanatory as "God did it".

We seem to be in a similar situation: no understanding of physical processes, however complete, explains consciousness. — Art48

Quite so. I wonder why anyone is surprised. Why would anyone think matter gives rise to consciousness?

Chalmers defines the hard problem as a problem for materialism, not for everybody. . ,

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 it out.

Brian Green 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, according to the experts on opposite sides of the fence.

I'm saying that philosophy cannot solve a scientific problem because the latter concerns 'simulating some specifiable facts of the matter' whereas the former concerns 'interpreting concepts'. The folk concept "consciousness" has yet to be demonstrated to correspond to a specifiable fact of the matter, so prematurely declaring (how "consciousness" emerges?) "is a hard problem" is only semantic nonsense.

"An obvious question is whether all information has a phenomenal aspect. One possibility is that we need a further constraint on the fundamental theory, indicating just what sort of information has a phenomenal aspect. The other possibility is that there is no such constraint. If not, then
experience is much more widespread than we might have believed, as information is everywhere." ___Chalmers quote — Apustimelogist

This quote from Chalmer's essay on the "hard problem of consciousness" touches on a key issue of our philosophical debates. He asks whether Information is both phenomenal and noumenal. And my general answer is Yes. But, the phenomenal aspects are "easy", because our physical senses can detect them. So, it's the noumenal aspects that we argue about. My position is that Information is both Physical and Mental. But discussing mental stuff is like nailing jello to the wall, it's inherently squishy and hard to pin down.

Perhaps the most contentious feature of Consciousness is its experiential quality. He implies that "experience" --- as a form of generic information --- "is everywhere". And that sounds like Panpsychism, with the implication that even an atom has awareness of its environment. Hence, All-Mind-Everywhere-All-The-Time would be true. However, that notion implies that the world is not hierarchical, and that we cannot or should-not discriminate between one form of information and another.

So, if you define "experience" as a "feeling" in the human sense, I would have to disagree with Panpsychism, but not on materialistic grounds. That's because human interactions are infinitely more complex & multi-valent than atomic exchanges of positive/negative electron valences. So, although similar in one way, meaningful-feelings & energy-sharing are different in so many other ways. Electron bonding of atoms is phenomenal, hence observable by empirical methods. But sharing feelings is noumenal, and knowable only by the emotional inference that we call Empathy or Sympathy. Therefore, I would say that atoms are not sentient beings, and that Panpsychism is an over-generalization.

... is not my statement. — 180 Proof

Ok, so your statement amounted to claiming that the issue of how consciousness arises is a hard problem is semantic nonsense. Your use of parentheses makes a direct quote both unwieldy, and open to the type of sidestep above by explaining the parenthesized element.

So, that's what it amounts to - on paper. If you meant something else, so be it. But given what was actually put across in your post - that absolutely entails philosophers of mind who treat that as a serious metaphysical problem as either misguided or confused. Can you, perhaps, not be obtuse, but address that question?

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. — Patterner

But we fools rush in...

I asked a chatbot. — Wayfarer

I asked the ice, it would not say
But only cracked or moved away,
I thought I knew me yesterday
Whoever sings this song. — The Incredible String Band

Ducks on a Pond.

But this fool will declare, if anyone cares to attend, that just as marriage is not to be found in a man or a woman, but in a relationship, which is an ongoing process of dance, back and forth, so consciousness is a relation between an organism and an environment. ChatGPT is a materialist's teddy; a comfort-blanket/imaginary friend.

...meaning that appears does not precede the relationship that actualizes it. — JuanZu

Footprints mean feet, dinosaur footprints mean dinosaur feet. The Earth holds memory of the past as much as any brain. the information is there just as this post is here, but it is first in the writing, and later across the world in the reading that it becomes conscious. Or rather, a post is firstly a product of consciousness, and secondly an object of consciousness, or a content of consciousness. And to the extent that something of this is understood by another, we are 'of one mind'. This is called communication. There is a sameness produced when you see what I mean or I see what you mean. And, "where is this sameness or when is it?" are misleading, foolish questions.

I thought I knew me yesterday, because all knowledge is memory, but whoever writes this post is conscious, and that is not knowable, because it is presence, not the past.

To me this sounds like a description of stored energy and, therefore, I say in response: Where there's energy there's material and thus your attempt to occupy ambiguous position between material/immaterial is false. Your Enformaction, like Deacon's constitutive absence, stands squarely within the material world. — ucarr

My thesis of EnFormAction does exist "within the material world", because the observer lives in the world of tangible material objects and invisible physical forces. But I think your interpretation of the thesis is influenced by the materialistic nature of the English language*1. That's why our dialogs on the Philosophy Forum are so often fraught with harsh put-downs, when we fail to communicate on both levels. Some posters attempt to express philosophical concepts in concrete scientific language, while others use more abstract expressions when discussing topics like "Consciousness". That inherent ambiguity limits our ability to communicate, unless we understand that both Concretions and Abstractions exist side-by-side in the Real/Ideal world.

Perhaps you still haven't grasped the meaning of the BothAnd Principle. It acknowledges that our objective world is Matter-based, and that our subjective realm is Mind-based. So, I can agree with you, that the technical term EnFormAction is a brain-state in the material world. But it is also a concept in & about the ideal realm of Mind. :smile:

*1. Language is too material!
language is infused with materiality and should not therefore be considered as an abstract system that is isolated from socio-material reality.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-017-9540-0

*2. The BothAnd Principle :
Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ─ what’s true for you ─ depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html


Today, while perusing Deacon's book Incomplete Nature, I came across a philosophical term that I hadn't noticed in previous readings : Neutral Monism*3. Serendipitously, it happens to be pertinent to both this Consciousness thread, and to the BothAnd concept. It assumes that both Mind & Matter emerge from a single more fundamental root or cause. Both Particulars (material objects) and Relations (ideas about associations between things) exist in our Material/Immaterial world. So, William James coined the term Radical Empiricism*4 to include both empirical Things and theoretical Ideas under the purview of Philosophy.

In 500BC, Plato called that original Source or Essence : Form & First Cause. In the 17th century, Spinoza called that Single Substance deus sive natura. But in the 21st century, my thesis calls it EnFormAction, a contraction of Energy (causation) & Information (organization). EFA is neither Matter nor Mind, but it creates both of those sub-forms as distinctive aspects of the Real world. Moreover, the philosophical perspective of Radical Empiricism seems to be a BothAnd acknowledgement of the apparent Duality of reality, even as it postulates a Monistic origin of all things & ideas in our diverse multiform world. :nerd:

*3. Neutral monism is an umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind, concerning the relation of mind to matter. These theories take the fundamental nature of reality to be neither mental nor physical; in other words it is "neutral".
Neutral monism has gained prominence as a potential solution to theoretical issues within the philosophy of mind, specifically the mind–body problem and the hard problem of consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_monism

*4. Radical Empiricism is a philosophical doctrine put forth by William James. It asserts that experience includes both particulars and relations between those particulars, and that therefore both deserve a place in our explanations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_empiricism

The disjunction: science or philosophy, with respect to consciousness studies, runs parallel to the disjunction: physics or math, with respect to Relativity. Anyone operating within either of these two disciplines who aligns with either of these disjunctions assumes position to play the part of the fool. — ucarr

The point of my thesis is to provide a conjunction (BothAnd) that weaves together the disjunctions of Science and Philosophy. For example, Physics is empirical, but Math is theoretical; yet both exist in the same world as different forms of the same universal substance. So, I can agree that those who "align with either", to the exclusion of the other, is playing the fool. Watch your step! :joke:

You're close. I used "reification" to refer to the treatment of an abstraction as a thing, where thing is something that exists (i.e. it is ontic; part of the ontological furniture of the world).

I don't think abstractions are ontic. I reject platonism, which treats ideal forms as ontic. It's still fine to talk about them figuratively as things, but it's unclear to me if you're talking figuratively or literally. Please clarify, because this thread is about the "hard problem" -which is only a problem for materialism. If your solution is to assume the existence of the immaterial, please state this.

↪Gnomon
You're close. I used "reification" to refer to the treatment of an abstraction as a thing, where thing is something that exists (i.e. it is ontic; part of the ontological furniture of the world).

I don't think abstractions are ontic. I reject platonism, which treats ideal forms as ontic. It's still fine to talk about them figuratively as things, but it's unclear to me if you're talking figuratively or literally. Please clarify, because this thread is about the "hard problem" -which is only a problem for materialism. If your solution is to assume the existence of the immaterial, please state this. — Relativist

Yes. What you are labeling "reification", I would call an Abstract Noun. I assume that the referent of the term Consciousness is not an observable material object, but a rational inference. It does not point to a physical thing, but to a holistic behavior that we call Thinking & Reasoning. The word is an Abstract Noun, "denoting an idea, quality, or state rather than a concrete object". Would you classify Consciousness as "immaterial"? Is the denotation "figurative" or "literal"? You tell me. :smile:

I would have thought that the distinction between sentient beings and insentient objects is a fundamental not only in philosophy. — Wayfarer

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. Like you said, there is no brain correlate to what a person subjectively feels as pain, only what a person expresses or is observed to be in pain. Logically, this means we cannot state what a person feels like or does not feel like. Meaning, we cannot know the subjective feeling beyond their behavior. This also means we cannot know the subjective feeling despite their behavior.

This leads to the P-zombie. The creature that acts conscious, but we do not know if it subjectively feels conscious. But a P-zombie can sometimes confuse the issue as well, as people get stuck on the behavior. You know the debates. A rock is a more simple way of getting to the heart of the problem by removing the idea of behavior entirely. A rock does not act conscious, but we do not know if it subjectively feels conscious. For if we did know that it does or does not subjectively feel conscious apart from its behavior, then we would have an objective way of telling if something does or does not subjectively feel conscious. That is something we can never know be it rock, bug, animal, plant, or human.

Consciousness...

describes the organism as a whole. sure
is a mode of biology. sure
is what he is doing. sure

I'm happy to concede all of those points and moreover to add that consciousness as we know it would not exist if not for the physical system that it is constituted by.

The problem though, the hard problem, is that when we consider the entire organism, or when we consider it at the physiological level, or at the neuronal level. or at the atomic level, or whatever level, we can't give an account of why that matter is conscious. It's obvious that there are conscious people, but why are they conscious? What, in physical terms, accounts for their consciousness. Again, we can't just point to the physiology. In fact, we can't point to anything physical. Why? Because as you said that will only amount to a description of the system in physiological or physical terms; it will not answer the question of why the matter considered is conscious.

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. If it were not for our direct evidence in the first-person case, the hypothesis would seem unwarranted; almost mystical, perhaps. — Chalmers
That's a good explanation of the problem. — Patterner

Does that explanation imply that the "Hard Problem" is scientifically inscrutable, because the scientific method studies physical sensations from environment (other), not metaphysical experiences from the interior milieu (self)? Feelings are communications from-Self-to-Self, in a secret language. Even so, Philosophers are not deterred by open-ended questions --- we can debate them interminably.

Animals & Humans & Scientists can send & receive subjective feelings only by translating them into mnemonic gestures & conventional symbols. So, to learn what it feels like to be a sonar-experiencing bat, you would have to trade bodies with the bat, not just words & signs. Objective information is always second-person. But first-person feelings are what distinguish Self from Other.

According to Shannon, Information communication is always surprising (foreign), but feeling is familar. The barren bits of information in a computer, stripped of meaning, can nevertheless convey normalized significance to a mind, by use of symbols, analogies, & metaphors. But they can't convey the experience of a feeling via such indirect means : you had to be-here-now. :smile:


Mnemonic : an action that reminds us of something we already know from past experience.
Note --- For example, mammals display emotions in actions similar to those of humans. So, we can understand, by analogy, what they are feeling, even though we can't directly feel what they are feeling.

I won't get into it too far because I don't think this is the right thread, but I do believe I have a free will and I am not a compatibilist. Whether consciousness is entirely physical, or consciousness is non-physical, I am certain that I am free.

When I reflect on consciousness I try to think of it in physical terms to see your point of view. I put on my science helm (yes, it's a science helm and not a helmet), and I reduce all of reality to the level of atoms bouncing around in the void. Thanks Epicurus or Lucretius or Hobbes or whoever's idea that was. "Here are some atoms in this rock. But these atoms in my brain produce consciousness," I think to myself. And I wonder, "why are these brain atoms producing consciousness? What is special about them?" "Well maybe when you arrange atoms in that way they are conscious?" "But Not Aristotle," I say to myself, "that is entirely an ad hoc explanation and besides, why would the arrangement of the atoms matter?" And I am unable to answer. And that's the hard problem as I understand it. If you have an answer to that problem, I would be happy to hear it.

And I actually do think consciousness as we know it, whether it is itself physical or nonphysical, arises out of physical matter/energy.

But these atoms in my brain produce consciousness," I think to myself. And I wonder, "why are these brain atoms producing consciousness? What is special about them?" "Well maybe when you arrange atoms in that way they are conscious?" "But Not Aristotle," I say to myself, "that is entirely an ad hoc explanation and besides, why would the arrangement of the atoms matter?" And I am unable to answer. And that's the hard problem as I understand it. If you have an answer to that problem, I would be happy to hear it. — NotAristotle

Sure, on the question of how brains create consciousness, we're still trying to figure it out. That brains create consciousness? We've figured that out. Why do brains create consciousness? Its the same as asking why do two gases at room temperature combine together to form a liquid that we need to drink to live. Existence is magical and fascinating. What matter and energy can do is astonishing. Why can it do that? Why isn't everything just a bunch of rocks? The fact that there exists anything instead of just 'nothing' amazes me. Why does it? A question for humanity that may never be answered.

Pininng this here as it’s relevant (rather than start a new thread). Christof Koch rejects the mainstream physicalist accounts of consciousness, declaring that ‘the problem of experience’ is such that it must acknowledge the possibility of something beyond matter-energy-space-time. If it is physicalism, it requires extension of the concept of the physical. I think it amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of the hard problem argument.

When philosophers like Chalmers ask questions like "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?" they don't really mean 'why' in the sense of "what evolutionary benefit has it?" They're looking for a 'how', as in "Explain how, exactly, that information processing (or whatever function) somehow produces/causes/is-identical-with consciousness?" — bert1

But it leaves no evolutionary role for consciousness to play, which was wonderer1's point. — bert1

I agree with you. How do we know that blind sight patients, or those that disassociate their awareness from their consciousness aren't merely misusing language in describing their experience? It seems to me that only someone that assumes that their consciousness is something like a soul that can exist apart from their body (which I would argue most people believe) would say such things.

Think about it. Do we go about our lives with the conscious experience of focusing on each step that we take when walking from one room to another? No. One could say that our walking happens unconsciously, yet we don't disassociate our self from the act of our walking. Walking is something that we learned a long time ago and we have become so good at it that it happens almost instinctively in that we don't have to put much, if any conscious effort into doing it. But when we were toddlers and we were learning how to walk we had invoke a conscious effort into doing it. We had to focus on the intricacies of the placement of our feet, our balance, the surface we were walking on, etc.

Now that we can walk on auto-pilot we don't disassociate our walking from our self because we say things like, "I walked over from my house..." It is only in these special (mystical) circumstances of blind sight and drug use that individuals use language in such a (mystical) way as to disassociate their selves from their awareness.

The same can be said regarding riding a bike and driving a car. Can a blind sight person do such things? Could a blind-sight person tell the difference between a ripe and rotten apple by their sight alone?

If the answer to these questions is "no", then p-zombies are false. There is a use to consciousness, and this is what defines us as humans and different than other animals.

I think the primary role of consciousness is in our learning, as it takes conscious effort to learn anything. Blind-sight is in the domain of the instincts. Instincts are built-in learned behaviors based on limited stimuli. Consciousness provides a much more detailed model of our environment and as such has made us much more adaptable to sudden changes in the environment that instincts are not able to. Instincts are best for environments that change little and slowly.

Of course, none of this actually addresses the hard problem of how "physical" neurons are produces/causes/is-identical-with "non-physical" consciousness. But, IMO, the hard problem is based another faulty assumption of dualism. I believe a type of informational-monism could be the solution where the world is not physical/non-physical. It's all information.

We have no reason to believe that non-human life does more than process data. So, the application of the sensation-perception distinction to non-human life is gratuitous. AI shows representations generating appropriate responses can be fully explained with no appeal to subjectivity, qualia, or concepts properly so-called (signs that do not need to have their physical structure recognized in order to signify).

In perception, the world is not just "doing its own thing." We only sense it because it is acting on us. So, in perception, "what is happening in the world" and "what is happening to me" are inseparably bound. What is happening is the world is acting on me — Dfpolis

Some of the assumptions here (animal cognition as internal processing of external data, perception as a one-way relation between an independently constituted external environment and an organism) are content with older neurobiological thinking, but autopoietic enactivist approaches view things differently, as Evan Thompson explains:

Cognitivism made meaning, in the sense of representational seman­tics, scientifically acceptable, but at the price of banishing conscious­ness from the science of the mind. (In fact, cognitivism inherited its consciousness taboo directly from behaviorism.) Mental processes, un­derstood to be computations made by the brain using an inner sym­bolic language, were taken to be entirely nonconscious. Thus the con­nection between mind and meaning, on the one hand, and subjectivity and consciousness, on the other, was completely severed.

This radical separation of cognitive processes from consciousness created a peculiar "explanatory gap" in scientific theorizing about the mind. Cartesian dualism had long ago created an explanatory gap be­tween mind and matter, consciousness and nature. Cognitivism, far from closing this gap, perpetuated it in a materialist form by opening a new gap between subpersonal, computational cognition and subjective mental phenomena. Simply put, cognitivism offered no account what­soever of mentality in the sense of subjective experience.

The cognitivist metaphor of the mind as computer, which was meant to solve the com­putational mind-body problem, thus came at the cost of creating a new problem, the mind-mind problem. This problem is a version of what is now known as the "hard problem of consciousness".

Enactivism asserts that via sensory-motor coupling with an environment, an organism enacts a world. The organism’s interactions with its environment are characterized by a certain functional autonomy, such that what constitutes its world is determined on the basis of its normative goals. Subjective consciousness arises out of this normatively driven activity.

The term the enactive approach and the associated concept of enac­tion were introduced into cognitive science by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) in their book The Embodied Mind. They aimed to unify under one heading several related ideas. The first idea is that living be­ings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain them­selves, and thereby also enact or bring forth their own cognitive do­mains. The second idea is that the nervous system is an autonomous dynamic system: It actively generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity, according to its operation as a cir­cular and reentrant network of interacting neurons.

The nervous system does not process information in the computationalist sense, but creates meaning. The third idea is that cognition is the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action. Cognitive struc­tures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action. Sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment modulates, but does not determine, the formation of en­dogenous, dynamic patterns of neural activity, which in turn inform sensorimotor coupling. The fourth idea is that a cognitive being's world is not a prespecified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being's autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environ­ment. The fifth idea is that experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but central to any understanding of the mind, and needs to be investigated in a careful phenomenological manner

So I agree that "....the hard problem of consciousness is impossible to solve", but I don't see the logical proof because it seems we are talking about two different things both referred to as consciousness. — Carlo Roosen

Well, I'm also talking about the " first person experience", and people who explore the hard problem of consciousness are also talking about this, aren't they?

Dreams, hallucinations and imagination don't fit easily into discussions on consciousness, do they? — kazan

Dreams and hallucinations are often considered to be altered state of consciousness, so it's still consciousness. But it's interesting because a lot of things we associate with consciousness can disappear in these states, like the self awareness can become very fleeting, or the sense of reality.

Yes and No. Yes, we know that it happens in the brain. No, we do not know HOW. That's the HPoC. — Patterner

We're really not that far off from one another. Please don't take my disagreement as hostile. :) The reason why we don't know how is because we cannot currently know what its like to be the thing having the subjective experience. If we could, the hard problem would be solved.

I am the being having the subjective experience. That does not help me understand how it is achieved. — Patterner

Actually, you could determine how you experience. If you were in brain surgery and a doctor stimulated a region of your brain in the same way and you experienced a sensation every time, you would know how to create the sensation by stimulation your brain. In a less sense, we do this with drugs like alcohol, caffiene, or pain killers. You are the only one who knows what it feels like however. We can't take, "the state of Patterner's subjective experience," and say, "Any time a person drinks alcohol, they will have the same subjective experience of being tipsy as Patterner does."

We do not know how to go about the HP. That's why it's named the Hard. Because we don't know. How is all of that subjectively experienced? — Patterner

Right. We're along the same lines here again. This is because we can't know what its like objectively for something else to experience being them. That's all there is to it.

Physicist Brian Greene says there are no known properties of matter that even hint at such a thing. Why do I see red, rather than just perceive different frequencies, the way a robot with an electric eye might? — Patterner

The problem is we're looking at matter and energy externally for behavior. Since we cannot look internally to see what the experience of being that thing is like, we're stuck for now. Do we know how a robot with an electric eye experiences processing? We don't. We can observe behaviors, break it down into its bytes and bits, but when the entire process is running, when the code is flying by at millions of bytes per second, processes being monitored and checked...what is the experience like? We don't know. We currently can't know.

These things can, and do, take place without any subjective experience. — Patterner

Incorrect. We don't know. Just like I don't know if you have a subjective experience that is like mine at all. We do not know if a robot or a program doesn't have a subjective experience. It doesn't behave like a consciousness, but it doesn't mean there isn't a subjective experience. What is it like to be a bacteria? It responds, eats, and divides. What is it like to the be cells in my hands? The blood in my veins? All of these are living things. Do they have a subjective experience of being? We can't tell, because we can't BE the thing we're looking at.

If you're going to argue your position convincingly to someone else, you need to be open to tackling them. — Philosophim

And you need to be open to hearing your interlocutor, and I don't believe that you've been doing that.

Chalmer’s argument is directed at the inadequacy of physical accounts to accurately capture first-person experience, yours or anyone else’s.
— Wayfarer

Didn't you and I already address this on your first response to me? My point was that the heart of why this was is because we cannot know what its like to be another subjective individual. — Philosophim

Again, that is not the point of David Chalmer's essay, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. I'm taking issue with your paraphrase of his argument. If you want to argue that this is what he should say, feel free. But it's not what he does say.

And why is it hard to find why these functions are accompanied by conscious experience? Because we cannot know what it is like to BE that other conscious experience. — Philosophim

Again, it's not what he says. He says that there is no satisfactory theoretical account of ANY conscious experience, not just of other people's or of animals. I've said this a number of times, and then you straight away repeat your incorrect interpretation of his argument. You can take issue with his argument, but that's different to misrepresenting it. That's what I mean by 'not hearing'.

Alright, then try to counter these points, because these points note that our autonomy is physical.

1. Drugs that affect mood and decisions. A person getting cured of schizophrenia by medication for example.

2. The removal of the brain or physical processes that result in life from the brain, and the inability of autonomy to persist.

3. Brain damage resulting in differing behaviors and consciousness. — Philosophim

I think by 'autonomy', you mean 'anatomy'.

Certainly, physical influences can affect cognition—there’s no disputing that. Drugs can alter mood and behavior, and brain damage can lead to significant changes in consciousness and personality. But this doesn't demonstrate that consciousness is entirely a product of brain activity. It’s important to recognize that causation can work in both directions. Neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections—shows that consciously undertaken actions and thoughts can have real, measurable effects on the brain’s structure and function. This is an example of top-down causation, where mental processes, such as attention, intention, and practice, influence neurophysiological changes, distinct from the bottom-up causation that is implied by physicalism. Your proposed schema is all 'bottom-up'.

Furthermore, the analogy of the brain as a receiver rather than just the generator of consciousness provides a different way to look at this issue. Just as a radio receives and tunes into waves without generating them, the brain may play a focusing or filtering role, modulating and organizing conscious experience but not wholly creating it. This view contrasts with the dominant idea that the brain produces consciousness in the same way that a factory produces a product. Instead, the brain might serve as a critical instrument through which consciousness manifests and interacts with the physical world. The fact that consciousness can change the brain's configuration through neuroplasticity suggests a dynamic interplay, rather than a one-way causal relationship between the brain and the mind. Besides, the origin of consciousness is arguably coterminous with the origin of life itself, and nobody really knows how that got started.

I don't know if the split-brain research is really relevant to that. In any case, it is discussed in Chapter 1 of Donald Hoffman's book Case Against Reality. He's a cognitive scientist, with a rather radical philosophical view, which I won't try and explain here. But after reviewing the split-brain experimental data, he concludes:

We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activity—or computer activity, or any other kind of physical activity—could cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience. We don’t have even one idea that’s remotely plausible. If we consider not just brain activity, but also the complex interactions among brains, bodies, and the environment, we still strike out. We’re stuck. Our utter failure leads some to call this the “hard problem” of consciousness, or simply a “mystery.” ...

What do we want in a scientific theory of consciousness? Consider the case of tasting basil versus hearing a siren. For a theory that proposes that brain activity causes conscious experiences, we want mathematical laws or principles that state precisely which brain activities cause the conscious experience of tasting basil, precisely why this activity does not cause the experience of, say, hearing a siren, and precisely how this activity must change to transform the experience from tasting basil to, say, tasting rosemary. These laws or principles must apply across species, or else explain precisely why different species require different laws. No such laws, indeed no plausible ideas, have ever been proposed. — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality, Pp 18-19

You seem to think that information can only matter if a human is involved. But if information can exist apart from matter and energy, how can this be? — Philosophim

Information doesn't exist in the same way that matter and energy do—it isn't a physical substance or force. Instead, information exists in the relationships between entities, and its significance depends on interpretation. Think of a book: where exactly is the information in that book? The ink on the page is simply matter, but the information arises only when a reader interprets it, and only if they understand the language or code it’s written in. The book itself is not one thing and its meaning another; rather, the meaning emerges through the interaction between the symbols on the page and a mind capable of understanding them.

Information, in this sense, is relational. It depends on the patterns or structures that carry meaning and on the existence of an interpreter. This makes information fundamentally different from matter and energy—it’s not a physical object but something that manifests through relationships and interpretation. I think this is what Norbert Weiner meant when he said 'information is information, not matter or energy'. And no, not just because he was a poor epistemologist.

What I'm noting is that the standard model of science posits that the brain is the source of human consciousness, at least in terms of behavior. — Philosophim

I think, actually, that you will find that a very difficult claim to support. You assume that this is what science posits, but there's some important background you're missing here.

At the beginning of modern science, proper, 'consciousness' in the first person sense was excluded from the objects of consideration. Proper objects were those which could be defined and analysed in terms of the primary attributes of determinate figure, size, position, motion/rest, and number etc. Qualities such as colour, taste, smell, etc, were deemed secondary or subjective.

Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36

Now, when you say 'the standard model of science', I think this is what you mean. And within that model the only 'real objects' are, well, objects. If 'mind' or 'consciousness' can be said to exist, then it can only be as a product of those objects. That's why you're incredulous at the denial of a causal relationship between brain and mind - to you, it's just 'the way things are'. But I'm afraid it doesn't hold up to philosophical scrutiny.

There's a reason why Chalmers says "arises from" rather than "is caused by." — J

What's the difference? If you are saying that something comes from the actions of something else, or from some other process that is in a different spatial-temporal location than what is arising, and is dependent upon the existence of that process, then you're talking about causality. "Arise" is a type of causal process.

But that's precisely the hard problem: Whence this "ability to sense stimuli"? Why couldn't the stimuli simply do their thing (including whatever self-correction you want to build into it) without being sensed? — J

Consciousness obviously provides survival benefits to the organisms that have it. It allows organisms to adapt to more dynamic environments rather than relying on instinctual behaviors to evolve which could take generations. The hard problem is more more about trying to explain how color "arises" from non-colored things, like neurons and wavelengths.

I'm not clear how the subjective experience of eating chocolate, say, is a product of, shall we say, patterns of interaction within a network, shaped by how beings engage with their environment. I'm trying to understand what this frame contributes to a 'deflation' of the hard problem. Can you tease this out a little more for a layperson? — Tom Storm

I think the hard problem comes down to the seeming chasm between what we think of as feeling and the way that empiricism treats objects other than minds. We are taught that non-mental entities have no inner feeling content, only neutral properties and attributes that dictate how they interact with other entities. And we contrast this dead neutrality with what seems to us to be an inner spark or soul or spirit that imbues a mind with feeling and sentience. In doing this we are treating both non-mental objects and subjective feeling as possessing intrinsic properties that exist apart from their interaction with the world. Put differently , we think essence, existence and being apart from interaction and relation: physical
objects have a dead, neutral being and subjective consciousness has a feeling being.

The practice-based approach I’m advocating argues that what seem like two irreconcilable contents, dead neutrality and living feeling, are not intrinsic contents or properties at all. There is such thing as intrinsicality, ‘inner’ feeling, static existence , being or essence. What we mistakenly believe to be such is instead a difference made by interaction. The world is composed of bits of differences. These differences are created through their interaction with other differences. But we must not think of these interacting differences in deterministic empirical terms as efficient causes. We’re not talking here about physical particles with assigned properties which produce predictable effects. Each difference is something new in the world, a new value. A system of differences is a system of values, each affecting and changing the others. These valuative differences are the origin of what we call ‘feeling’ and they are also the origin of the seemingly ‘dead’, affectively ‘neutral’ physical features of the world.

But in order to recognize this, we have to stop thinking of subjective feeling as a static inner content, and we have to stop treating non-mental objects as having pre-assigned internal properties producing dead, neutral ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. You may wonder how any normative stability is possible given all this continual transformation , but such stabilities are the rule. We always find ourselves ensconced within some community or other, and thus are able from the start to understand others even though we participate in these discursive practices with our own perspective. This is how we are able to agree on such things as scientific laws.

Vitalism used to be a solution to a "hard problem" based on the assumption that... — jkop

That hard problem was solved. The HPoC has not been. 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.

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. — jkop

All we know is that we are not aware of any consciousness that exists apart from biological entities. We don't know what the connection is between the two things.

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. — jkop

Fairly likely, at least.

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. — jkop

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". What possible physicalist justification can there be for this, much less an explanation? "Experience" is another imported word. 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.

I don't know what "appearance to a mind" means. It seems to imply that a mind can be independent from some appearance as if something appears to a homunculus in the brain. — Harry Hindu

I know, the right language is hard to find. What I think we want to describe is the subjective event that occurs when, say, I think of a purple cow. The image of the cow is rather like something that "appears to a mind" but if that seems too Cartesian-theater, no matter. We can perhaps find better language, but I hope the target concept is clear enough: First the cow isn't there (for me), and then it is, not as a pattern of neurons but as a cowish purply image. What has happened? That's the event we're concerned about, which I'm suggesting we could call a "phenomenon".

Any appearance in the mind is the result of some measurement in that the brain measures and interprets wavelengths of light and sound and these measurements are the means by which we interact with the world. — Harry Hindu

The problem here is that, in order to get from "brain measurements of wavelengths of light and sound" to "an appearance in the mind" and the idea that "we" interact with the world, we have to import some new concepts. Mind? We? Where did this subjectivity come from? Once again, the hard problem: How do we get from here to there? Why should there be anything like an appearance in the mind, if the brain seems ideally equipped to do the measuring on its own and respond accordingly?