If you want to explain the hard problem to John Doe, just ask him which animals and which plants feel something.

Obviously, it's not a bogus problem because it affects people's behavior, one is an animal rights activist, another is an animal abuser, the next doesn't care. — SolarWind

This puts a moral frame around it. That works.

What do understand by "material" means in "materialism"? — 180 Proof

Well yeah, obviously this is a main question and what I meant by:

The map becomes confused with the territory. Or perhaps, the territory has no room for the specific kind of territory and we are back to square one. — schopenhauer1

At most (if your terms are coherent), a scientific problem and not a philosophical question. — 180 Proof

If it is, then scientific methods have set up inquiries into why qualitative things like "seeing red" are one and the same with the physical substrates/processes whilst not ADDING IN the consequent in the premise. That is to say, not commit the homuncular fallacy

What does "inner aspects" refer to? Are you implying that these "inner aspects" do not affect the "material"? If so, then they are also material; if not, then "inner aspects", with tespect to the "material", are a distinction without a difference, no? — 180 Proof

I'm not implying that. I'm only saying there is an inner aspect and what is the nature of "inner aspect" as opposed to things that do not have an inner aspect. That is to say, does a plant have an inner aspect? Why not? Does a primitive animal have an inner aspect? Why? If it does, what about that phenomenon makes it have the nature "inner aspect" as opposed to other processes. If you read that correctly I am not saying what processes are indicative of the inner aspect (i.e. these features means consciousness is present) but rather why those features have inner aspect phenomenon while others do not.

Your question oddly presupposes panpsychism.. as you almost assuming that material MUST have inner aspect.

Incoherent muddle. "Physical" =/= "material" (i.e. event-patterns =/= events). — 180 Proof

Don't know how to read this other than you hold some view of events that is supposedly outside the scope of the hard problem, but probably is anyways.

There exists qualitative aspects to things. — schopenhauer1

This is similar to saying that there is a relational aspect to things. Saying it like this closes the divide between physical and mental things. The hard problem is only a problem for dualists and physicalists, or those that believe the world is composed of a quantity of static objects independent of other things and then try to reconcile that with the qualitative aspect of the perception of quantities of static objects.

That is confusing. I would think it is the other way around. — Jackson

The hard problem is certainly trying to come from the position of neutrality. But It's impossible not to have preconceived notions about how the human brain should work. So if perfect neutrality is impossible, then I think we need to keep looking at the problem from different angles until things start to make more sense.

It's like suggesting that the experience of human vision isn't necessary in order to sense changes in the amount of light around us. No, it's not necessary. There could be other ways to do it. A different kind of functionality that takes place "in the dark". But vision is how our brain organizes all the different changes in light that we sense.

Imagine trying to keep track of every single rod and cone signal in your eye without the sensation of vision. It seems like the human body summarizes information whenever possible, and I don't disagree with the use of that technique. If that's the case, then we are one of those informational summaries.

It is the nature of a summary to be aware of the whole of the literature, while still being a different set of words on its own. We can't be a summary of the brain without having some awareness-of (connection-to) other parts of the brain. Yet at the same time, the summary itself is not merely a collection of all the other parts. The summary doesn't exist in those other parts of the brain. I think this discrepancy is a large part of why we find consciousness to be confusing: it is existing everywhere in the brain, and nowhere in the brain, at the same time. It seems out of place.

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!" — Bird-Up

But that is the question the hard problem shines a light on - how does electrical signals bounding around in our heads deceive our heads? In essence the brain is fooling itself into believing that it is not a brain. Why would it do that? What evolutionary problem would that solve (ie why would such a thing evolve in the first place)?

Perhaps it is good to specify that the problem I am talking about involves philosophy, not us in general as persons. It is easy to solve the difficulty from the point of view of us as persons, as some of you have already done: we as persons don’t need evidence, nor clear definitions, nor systems of thought, we just need to be human.
Philosophy, instead, either from a metaphysical point of view, or from what I think is like the current scientific drift of philosophy, needs definitions, clarity, evidence, logic, consistency. Even nihilists or postmodern thinkers need some kind of clear context where to put questions. This is where Chalmer’s hard problem, or my modification of it by referring to suffering, becomes a challenge.
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.

Because we are misled by what we think are the "easy problems". We think we have much better intuitions than we do. There are several hard problems, not just consciousness.

Qualia and reductionism
The problem can be solved quite simply by
1. Depicting the difference between life and inanimate nature
2. Realize that subjective experience from the first person perspective cannot be scientifically investigated
To 1. Life is already a structural concept and life is structure in that it can only be explained by the interaction of 'dead' building blocks. When we speak of life, we mean a system and not individual elements, because life is not represented in any single element.
However, physics only describes 'dead' matter, i.e. individual elements, so it cannot describe life with its rules. Trying to reduce life to physics must therefore fail. This applies not only to life in general, but to all expressions of life, including consciousness. Consciousness is a property of the individual, more precisely, of the brain.
Biologically, consciousness can be described as the orientation performance of a (central nervous) living being.
So whoever tries to explain consciousness physically commits a category error.
To 2. Consciousness is thinking and feeling, in general: experiencing. You can observe and measure this from the outside, you can experience it from the inside. But this experience is subjective. Nobody can feel my pain, it's my own pain and therefore you can't objectify it except by means of statistical correlations, but that's something completely different.
Conclusion: the hard problem of consciousness is a chimera! See: dr-stegemann.de

Kant attributed apriori categorical content to the subject.
— Joshs
I am neither Kant, nor a Kantian. I think his approach is fundamentally wrong.

I am an Aristotelian. — Dfpolis

Aren’t we all Kantians now , including those physicists who extend the scope of Quantum theory? That is to say, even though Kant’s ideas have been subject to a variety of critiques within contemporary philosophy and science, I know of no major theorist who has rejected his key premise, that the mind contributes to the organization of our experience, and this organizing, categorizing and synthesizing activity of the mind is the condition of possibility for empirical knowledge. What most disagree with is Kant’s claim that the mind’s organizing capabilities are grounded in a metaphysical a priori. Are you rejecting Kant’s central premise or offering a critique of Kant which preserves this premise?

So far, you have not criticized one argument in my paper. Instead, you have accused me to the errors of others and made unsubstantiated claims. Perhaps if you addressed what I actually wrote, we could make more progress. For example, in an earlier post, I listed 7 problems I have with the Standard Model. You could explain why these are not real problems — Dfpolis

As you have pointed out, your use of the term Standard Model is you own invention. This is a bold and risky move for an outsider to philosophy of mind. By creating a single overarching category de novo, and attempting to squeeze a diverse assortment of philosophical views within it, you are turning your back on an entire community of thought. Perhaps your Aristotelian-inflected model is a truly fresh perspective, but it could also be a reinventing of the wheel born of a lack of exposure to the relevant philosophical
history, beginning with Kant. After reading your article I am tending toward the latter conclusion. As you grapple with a solution to the Hard Problem alongside those you mention in your paper, it is clear that what you have in common with your interlocutors is the acknowledgment of contributions from two domains , the subjective and the objective. For you there is no split between what you call intention and the physical world. You say there is an identity between them: “the object informing the intellect is, identically, the intellect being informed by the object.”

Where you differ from ‘SM’ concerns how much work you expect intention, intellect and will ( form, potency) to do vs the physical pole (act, matter) . That is, how you define their relative attributes , functions, capacities and essence.Writers like Chalmers and Dennett will argue that concepts like ‘material’, ‘physical’ and ‘natural’ have evolved alongside our philosophical understanding. As a result, much of what was formerly attributed to the non-physical in the form of the subjectively mental can now be placed within the category of the objectively natural and material( although ‘physical’ is a more contentious term). This includes epistemological and logical-mathematical forms of meaning. This gives the subjectively mental little to contribute other than an affective feeling of what’s it is like to experience. For you, by contrast, epistemology, logic, Will, intentionality, propositionality and mathematics still belong to the subjective pole as pre-given capacities or attributes. Is it your hunch that these are divinely given?

... pre-given capacities or attributes. — Joshs

Aristotle begins with living beings that have certain capacities, including consciousness. If one starts here there is no answer to a question that is not asked, no solution to a problem that is not raised. No hard problem, or so it seems Dfpolis would have us think.

I suspect that if Aristotle were around today he would not be an Aristotelian. For one, in line with contemporary science, his concept of matter or material (hule) would have undergone a radical transformation. He would retain his focus on intelligible wholes and living beings, but he would no longer regard matter itself as something unformed. Matter or material is self-forming. Matter too is "being at work", energeia. A living organism is not simply a whole but a whole of wholes, a system of systems, self-organizing structuring structures.

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

Correct , the diversity of properties emerging from different arrangements of matter is the amazing thing. Asking "why" this is possible its like a kid asking his mum ....why the sky is blue as if there is a purpose behind it.

Illusions that are not explained etc. — schopenhauer1

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.

...it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Apologies for the length, I got motivated. :cool: — Manuel

:up:

Oh sure, plenty of silly mysticism surrounding this topic. Which is strange, because, as I think you would agree, consciousness is what we are most acquainted with out of everything there is. — Manuel

Yes, the thing we are most familiar with is also the thing which seems strangest. Reminds me of Montaigne, 'We laugh and cry at the same thing.'

Replace "God" with "nature", and you have the hard problem, stated over 300 years ago. — Manuel

Indeed. If humans are still a thing in 300 years, I wonder where culture will locate this problem. I suspect a breakthrough, even if I am a mysterian by nature.

I am claiming that there is a reason he is imagining a “subjective experience”, the evidence being that he says it. That he wants it to be “explained” by a “mechanism” is not me “reading intentions”, it is the implications of his getting to his reason from those means. — Antony Nickles

Having written several complex and complicated papers that examine every angle before coming to a conclusion, I have some background to note that this is actually terrible writing. Writing should narrow in on a point so the reader has clarity. After the point is written, let the reader expand from there.

He is right to use the terms and points he is so that even a reader not well versed in philosophy can understand his point. That's fantastic writing. His reference is to sight blindness, and he's attempting to use medical and scientific terminology to explore a concept. Nothing wrong with that. His lack of exploring Locke is not an intention we can fairly make.

He has a problem. He has certain knowledge and vocabulary. From there he constructs an idea that is simple, relatable, powerful, and succinct. That's fantastic philosophy. Critique his main conclusions, the idea of solving the hard problem. If he chooses to sprinkle meaning behind it, why is that relevant to his main point at all? It sounds like you're more upset with where you think this can go than with his immediate idea.

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

As the crux of the issue. Seems to me that Humphries addresses one aspect of the problem - what is the evolutionary rationale for this capacity? Why are humans and other higher animals aware of themselves? It's like 'yes, I can see how the mind produces reflexive awareness of its own inner states'. He talks about the internal systems that allow that, and how it enriches the state of experience, but the rationale for it is evolutionary - how this contributes to our adaptive ability. That's why, I presume, Daniel Dennett posted it, as it dovetails nicely with his evolutionary philosophy, But it doesn't come to terms with the issue of what it means to be - the kind of concerns that animate phenomenology and existentialism. It's a different kind of 'why' - there's an instrumental 'why', and an existential 'why', if you like. I think Humphries addresses the first, but not the second. (Some discussion of this in the comments on the Aeon article, I note.)

I don't want to say that say, what we call "Mars" is constituted (made of) something mental, I don't think it is. But I grant that whatever we know about Mars comes through experience. — Manuel

You're not alone. Albert Einstein was walking with his friend Abraham Pais one afternoon, when he suddenly stopped and said 'Does the moon cease to exist when nobody's looking at it?' He was asking exactly the same question. I won't address it here though as it's a derailer.

I think it's essential to it.

As I said in my first comment, the question 'why are we subjects of experience?' is a strange question. It's tantamount to asking 'why do we exist?' The question is asked, 'why did consciousness evolve?' Humphrey quotes another philosopher to that effect:

As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well if they weren’t conscious.

For some reason, this strikes me as manifestly absurd. Even very simple critters are conscious - obviously not rationally self-aware and self-conscious - but some level of consciousness is required for them to react to stimuli and survive, to maintain themselves in existence. It's what differentiates organisms from minerals. So the statement is completely self contradictory - 'a conscious mind could do what it does, even without the attribute that makes it "a conscious mind" '. And I don't know that the phenomenon of blindsight is a persuasive argument for that.

But if you phrase the question 'why do I exist?', it is a much more open-ended question than the question of why the brain is configured in such a way as to give rise to the sense of self. The way the question is addressed by Humphrey is from an objective point of view - how to provide a plausible account for the fact that humans and other higher animals have a sense of self, given evolutionary biology and neurology (which, surprise!, is because it provides an incentive to continue existing - which is, after all, the only answer evolutionary biology can give, as continuing to exist is the definition of what constitutes a living species.) But is that all there is to the question of the nature of conscious existence?

David Chalmers discusses Humphrey's earlier work in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, saying that it fails to address the hard problem of consciousness, suggesting that Humphrey's approach is reductionist and that it relies too heavily on the assumption that consciousness is a mere byproduct of brain function (in other words, assuming what it needs to prove, or begging the question.)

I know that my objection is easily dismissed. The reductionist approach dismisses the whole idea of there being such a problem in the first place! But the question remains whether reductionism has addressed it or whether it's not really seeing it in the first place. (A different kind of blindsight, maybe.)

my mind is the most real thing I know. — flannel jesus

From where I've been looking, that was the mistake Descartes made. Your mind does the knowing, your mind presents you with the "I" to attach the knowing to, and your mind is making that proclamation, not just that it is real, but apparently is most real in an apparent hierarchy of reality. Just like Descartes; mind choosing itself over matter (and, like everyone, since at least Plato, whose Minds privileged Mind, Idea, Spirit, over "flesh". And after all of that, not only has your mind made a pre-biased assessment of itself, but I don't even think your mind is real. Your body is. Mind is its projections which have evolved such that aware-ing our real natures has been completely overshadowed.

As for the so-called hard problem, the problem itself is a projection; a mechanism which we have interpreted as preventing the flow of Mind's projections from body to body. Yet look at us, and how shared our experiences really are by Mind's methods of communication. Telepathy is not necessary. It's not that we are intersubjective; its that the Subject does not separate Mind. The bodies are "permeable". Mind is one process moving through humanity as History. Subjectivity is exactly tied to the Subject, which because it stands in for the Body, and because we perceive, because of History thus far bodies as separate, we assume the Subject too is an isolated mind. And the quality of experience, or qualia, may differ micro-locally from body to body; but these variations are how Mind moves, and do not isolate us. We share the same Narratives going forward in our becoming, because we construct that Narrative together.

At the clear-to-me risk, that in my insistence (as a courtesy) on brevity, I will repeat my failure, I may as well say something about this. It can happen because the physical, the only reality, is not really generating anything. That you think it is a new reality generated out of an existent utterly other reality, you are in the common human illusion. Or, you are, at least, mistaken. — ENOAH

I don't think a new reality is generated out of an existent other reality. I was referring to your use of the word, "generate". I didn't use the term. I initially responded to bert1's mention of the relations, "produces/causes/is-identical-with". I'm not a dualist. The dualist is the one with the hard problem, not a monist.

I don't see it as two realities. There is one reality and reality is a causally connected relationship. If there are multi-verses and those multi-verses have a causal impact with events in our universe, then the multi-verse is one reality. If they don't then there are multiple realities but we'd have no way of showing that and would be pointless to try.

I think traditional phenomenology, which addresses, as you raised, the problem of understanding objects as they "must be" vs as they "appear" to us; that is moving into new directions. One, is that the traditional did not throw its net out far enough. If it had, it would have left to Science how we sense red, or the aroma of coffee. The real question phenomenology is after is why we "experience" it as red. And this is the result of images, once constructed and saved in memory to trigger a feeling which in turn triggered a drive and action (like many sentient animal), now have developed into its own sophisticated system of constructing images (using neurons) to trigger ultimately feeling and action.

It is only because that once strictly organic system of conditioning responses for survival has evolved in humans into Mind, that "red" and "aroma" have meaning, a mechanism in the system wherein those once strictly organic feelings, are attached to Narratives--experiences.

And how does something physical generate these experiences? You rightly asked. It doesn't generate anything real at all. These are "codes" hijacking feelings to create this illusion of meaning and that meaning matters. It doesn't. Matter matters. — ENOAH

None of this explains how an illusion is created by something that is not illusory. An illusion is a misinterpretation of sensory data, not that the data itself isn't real.

A mirage is exactly what you'd expect to experience given the nature of light and how it interacts with your eye-brain system. In explaining the causes you don't dispel the illusion. Instead, you make it a real consequence of real causes.

The one thing that I am sure of is the existence of my mind. From there, everything else is unprovable. Yes, even solipsism could be true. I am not a solipsist because I wonder if there isn't an "external" world, then why does it seem like there is? The same could be asked about consciousness. If the mind is an illusion then why is it so brute?

We may not have direct access to the world but don't we have direct access to our "illusion"? My mind, illusion or not, is part of reality. There are causal forces at play where my mind is the effect of prior causes and my mind is the cause of subsequent effects. Culture is one of the effects of human minds on the world.

If the mind is an illusion then what does that say about all the scientific knowledge based on observations? If our observations of the world are not real, then does that mean our understanding of brains and neurons is not real? Asserting that the mind is an illusion, or not real, pulls the rug out from under all the scientific knowledge we've accumulated.

It seems to me that you do not mean by "reality" what most of us mean by it. Most of us mean by "reality" the kind of thing that we encounter in experience. When you say that reality does not generate real experience, you cannot possibly be using reality in this sense.

One test of whether something is real, is whether it can do something. Our experiences do many things. They inform us, modify our responses, etc. So, they pass the test. — Dfpolis

I agree. I define reality as a causally linked system.

As a theoretical physicist, I learned that whatever happens, happens for a reason, In physics, it is because there are laws of nature that make our observations turn out as they do. Over time physics has improved our descriptions of these laws -- call our descriptions "laws of physics". We do not try to explain the laws of nature, because that is not our remit, but that does not exempt them from also needing a reason for happening. Philosophy has the remit to provide that reason. So, what exempts your fundamental from the need for further explanation? — Dfpolis

If there is some fundamental aspect to reality then wouldn't it follow that there is an aspect of reality that does not need a reason for happening. I mean, what does fundamental mean if not that there is some aspect that "just is". If not, then there would be an infinite regress of reasons, or reality is an infinite causal chain with no beginning and no end, or another possibility could be a loop of causality.

Perhaps what I truly need to face up to, is the fact that such a truth, if it exists and does not live up to human "reasoning" cannot be mutually pursued in a forum which necessarily prides itself in the mastery of human reason. — ENOAH

It’s called ‘the hard problem’ for a reason! You’re dealing with a question that is at the basis of a great many philosophical questions and there are no easy answers.

I take an idealist approach. I see philosophical materialism (physicalism, reductionism) as being part of the problem to which a properly-constituted idealist philosophy is the solution. And I will say there's support for this within cognitive science, or the type of cognitive science which stresses the sense in which the mind constructs our experienced reality. Take a look at my thread The Mind-Created World.

Also check this video out.

Any thoughts we would have about it implies our consciousness, not someone else's, so it's impossible to know. — Skalidris

Correct.

"How can we objectively measure and explore the purely subjective experience of being conscious?" With our current understanding of science, we can't.
— Philosophim

Well we can't, however advanced sciences become, that's what this "logical proof" is about. — Skalidris

Never say never! Yes, this seems impossible today. But science is full of 'making the impossible possible'. Did we conceive that cell phones would exist 300 years ago? That mankind would ever be able to travel to the moon? Judging what is possible in the future based on what we know today has a history of throwing egg on the face of our collective human race. :)

This is why it is viable to call it 'the hard problem' instead of 'the impossible problem'.

We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation.

That 'extra ingredient' is missing from physical explanations: — Wayfarer

Yes, and that extra ingredient is the inability to objectively grasp other subjective experiences. Again, this does not mean there is some actual essence we're missing. It means we are at a limitation of what we can evaluate objectively: the personal subjective experience. This does not mean subjective experiences aren't physical. We can evaluate a brain objectively and state, "According to what we know of behavior, this brain is in pain." We just can't objectively state 'how that brain is personally experiencing pain'.

I don't think Chalmers is trying to suggest that there is a soul or essence in that sense. I'm certainly not trying to resurrect a Cartesian soul. But I also think that the physicalist picture that arises from denying the reality of consciousness (in effect) is also mistaken, because it's grounded in faulty premisses from the outset. — Wayfarer

There is nothing faulty with the physical evaluation of consciousness and the brain in observed outcomes and behaviors. Give a person anasthesia, and you can knock them unconscious. We can know personally what its like to be knocked unconscious, but we cannot objectively know what its like for another brain to experience being knocked unconscious. The physical experience does not deny that a consciousness has a subjective component, it simply understands that objectively explaining the personal experience itself is outside of the realm of testing, as we need to know what its like for another consciousness to be that consciousness.

Its really just a variation of the old, "I see green, you see green, but do we really experience the same color?" Does this mean that green is not a wavelength of light, or that our conception of green in daily use is faulty? No. We still have physical eyes, and physical brains that interpret that light into the subjective experience of 'green'. We could poke around in your brain and trigger you into saying, "I see a green tree," We just can't objectively know what the personal experience of 'I see a green tree' is to you specifically.

The problem is the 'hard problem' has been used far too often by people to mean more than it is stating. It does not deny the physical reality of consciousness that has been discovered by neuroscience. You are your brain. The question is, "Can we objectively understand your brain as a subjective experience?" That's currently outside of what we can objectively know, and may never know, at least in our lifetimes.

Its not a difficult concept, but people try to make it difficult because they think its a way to make us more than our brains. Its not. The only way we're going to get that answer is continual research into neuroscience. Philosophy may have more to bring to the table, but I'm not seeing any further discoveries from this line of thinking.

I'm interested in how Neurolink is developing for example. This is a great article on the idea of how it will feel. https://medium.com/swlh/neuralink-what-do-isobars-feel-like-when-they-move-ff3070198263

Here's an article on the first patient playing Mario kart with the Neurolink: https://www.pcmag.com/news/neuralink-patient-also-uses-brain-chip-to-play-mario-kart

As we can see, the physical brain and consciousness is alive and well in terms of behavior and interfacing with other forms of reality like computer chips. What does THAT feel like? What brain activity are they recording to do that? This is the exciting stuff we should be thinking and talking about. Will we be able to achieve the science fiction dream/nightmare of having chip interfaces do more for us like access memory, help regulate our emotions, and more? Will all of this data through multiple chip use begin to map out the brain in ways we haven't imagined yet? If we want philosophy to stay relevant, we need to follow the discoveries that are being made today, or find some way to push science into areas we want to explore like 'personal experiences'.

My main point is that the hard problem really is a secondary problem. The question of physically contained non-physicals is primary to understanding consciousness.

So it doesn't take place in the dark, in your sleep or when you are dead because all the biological functions need to be in place for consciousness to be fully developed.

Not sure what in the dark means? Unconscious?

Non-physical, to me, means non existent. — Mark Nyquist

My main point is that the hard problem really is a secondary problem. The question of physically contained non-physicals is primary to understanding consciousness. — Mark Nyquist

I don't understand. Are non-physicals physically contained? Or are they non-existent?

Non-physical, to me, means non-physical. I wouldn't see how the fact that there are physical things rules out the possibility that there are non-physical things.

First up, great work reviewing those videos and taking it on.

This is a question I've been asking for some time now from you Wayfarer, "What is it for consciousness to not be physical?" Here Chalmers gives a clear reply. And this definition of 'not physical', I have no problem with. Its a classification of category, not a claim that, "It is not matter and energy"...Check out around 6:40. His notes are:

"The hard problem is concerned with phenomenal consciousness: what its like to be a subject. — Philosophim

Right - and he says, straight out:

7:05: Lawrence Robert Kuhn: "is your consciousness immaterial?"

David Chalmers: "It's not physical"

He says 'there are properties of the world that go beyond atoms and space and time'. It is a claim that whatever consciousness is, it's not included in space-time-matter-energy. He says outright (7:16) we need to add a further property to our inventory of the world's properties, namely, 'consciousness'. He then says, it doesn't mean it has to be located 'up in heaven' or 'in some wholly different realm' - he says it might be an additional property that is associated with matter (a position which is called 'panpsychism'). But it's crucial to recognise that he doesn't say it can be explained in terms of known physical properties. He says that science has to admit consciousness as a fundamental property. By that he means it is irreducible, it can't be explained in terms of something else.

This definition of 'immaterial' is perfectly fine for me — Philosophim

Well, that's progress, so long as you understand what you're agreeing with.

I was with you until you said it had to be something other than physical. We don't even know if something other than the physical exists. — Philosophim

I keep trying to explain that this is because of the way that we conceive of 'something other than physical'. As I said already, we see it the way we do, because of the way modern thought has divided the world into 'the physical' (the things science can examine, matters of objective fact) and 'the subjective' (mind, thought, etc), following Descartes, who called the mind 'res cogitans' or 'thinking substance'.

Notice that Chalmer's says that the fact consciousness is not physical doesn't mean it's (7:26) 'up in heaven' or 'in the land of ectoplasm'. He says that because we're inclined to concieve of 'the non-physical' in those terms - ghostly ethereal stuff, thinking substance. So it's a trap! Chalmers is pointing out that we have to approach the whole question in a different way: neither 'physicalism', nor 'immaterialism' in that archaic sense.

Just like we cannot have space without matter, and time without matter, it is not a claim that we can have consciousness without matter. — Philosophim

Right. There's your 'thinking stuff' again.

It's great you're digging into this, but you will need to understand that you can't both agree with Chalmer's argument, and also hold that consciousness is physical.

//here is another essay (in .pdf) by Chalmers with a round-up of the various arguments for and against materialism in philosophy of mind. It's quite long but clearly written and may be a useful reference.//

This is picturing for literal sight of the ultimate self-referential grabbing. — ucarr

I’m afraid that is word salad. The fact that a hand cannot grasp itself is apodictic.

You're trying to set boundaries for the context of the HPoC debate. — ucarr

Not setting - describing. I don’t accept the Cartesian division but it is a real factor in culture, which the hard problem argument is intended to reveal.

Modern physics, with the backing of QM and the measurement problem, rejects the binary as falsity. — ucarr

You might enjoy a recent essay I have composed on that topic.

I think there's been a misunderstanding: I don't believe consciousness is an illusion, and I don't believe it is immaterial, I believe we cannot know either of these things.

The hard problem of consciousness arises when one believes consciousness can successfully study (and explain) itself as an object in the world. And the problem is that you need consciousness to study anything. If you've ever heard of primitive notions, it's the same principle: you cannot define and explain primitive notions with concepts other than themselves. Have you ever tried to explain what a "unit" is? What the logic connector "and" means? To use the latter example, imagine our brain had some kind of logic gate (in electronic circuits) that serve as "and" connector, we would know that whenever we use "and" or any process of linking things together, we use that logic gate. So naturally, we could try to define "and" as the physical process. It could be: “And” is a circuit that receives several inputs and gives an output of 1 if all inputs are 1. You can see that “and” is already in the definition and even if we try to phrase it differently to avoid the “and”, you’ll still need to talk about the several inputs being received, and what’s “several”? It is at least one unit AND another. Do you see the circularity?

Your first sentence implies consciousness cannot examine itself. Can you explain how this is the case given the fact that, in this very instant, we are examples of consciousness examining itself? If we're not doing that, then what are we doing? — ucarr

So even if we can associate physical processes with consciousness, we cannot break down the intuitive meaning into smaller parts, and breaking something into smaller parts is how we explain things. In other words, consciousness can examine the physical processes responsible for its existence, but it cannot examine its intuitive meaning inside the mind. Just like we can't explain what "and" means (using other concepts) even if we knew the physical processes behind it.

Can you explain why this premise is not an impossible premise leading to the logical circularity you're propounding? — ucarr

Because of the premise that consciousness is required for any explanation, any thought (including the perception of objects).
To go back to the "and" example, any definition or description of the material processes behind "and" includes the concept "and".

If, as you imply, consciousness is thwarted by the self-referential state into useless circularity, then that's a claim that supports: consciousness exists outside of the subject/object bi-conditional. — ucarr

No, it simply implies that we do not know. We don't know if it's material, causal, an illusion, we can't know anything because we use it to build any knowledge...

brain precedes mind, at least from the materialist point of view: brain and mind always co-exist, but there's no thought without brain, as demonstrated causally by the maxim: absent brain, absent mind. — ucarr

I agree. That's why we can study the physical processes responsible for consciousness. Just how we could explain the "And" logic gate but yet never be able to explain the "And" concept.

You are attempting to explain why people have consciousness from the evolutionary psychology standpoint. That's not the "hard problem of consciousness" - that's one of the "easy" problems.

And of course this question has already been taken up and developed long before you ever thought of it, so you might want to start by reading up on what's already been done in this area.

I take it that when you talk about contents, you are describing aspects or architectures of the mind, therein you are describing mental faculties — Manuel

No, I mean 'the contents of the book' - the story or other content. That comprises a set of ideas, or a narrative, or perhaps instructions. Sure, the book is physical, the ink is physical, the eyes which read the book are physical - they can be extracted and put in a jar - but what of the process of interpretation? What is it, that interprets a story, and discerns its meaning? Why is it you can translate all of the contents into different languages and even media, yet still tell the same story? The physical representation changes but the meaning does not. That's a hint for dualism right there!

You might say, well, that's what 'the brain' does. But we can't see 'the brain' doing that. If you conduct minute analyses of the vast amount of neuro-biological activity that goes on in any brain, you will not see anything like inference or ideas as such. Furthermore, you will have to invoke these very capabilities of inference and reasoning to interpret the data you do have. So, I'm arguing those capacities of intepretation and reasoning are internal to the operations of thought. They are not physical in any sense.

This ties back to the meaning of 'nous', that being 'the faculty which discerns truth.'

In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is [the faculty] that allows human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. This therefore connects discussion of nous to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same logical ways (which, I could argue, is close in meaning to Chomsky's 'universal grammar'). Deriving from this, it was also sometimes argued, especially in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual nous must require help of a spiritual and divine type. By this type of account, it came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it. — Wikipedia

This was actually the predecessor of Descartes' dualism, but Descartes transformed in such a way that it became untenable. Aspects of it are still maintained, however, in neo-Thomist philosophers, such as Maritain and others. That is the overall understanding I'm drawn to.

But what I argue, along with Strawson and Chomsky, is that the mental is physical, you simply are choosing what aspect of physical reality you want to elucidate. — Manuel

I'm dubious that Chomsky would ever describe the mind as physical. He questions whether 'the physical' is even a coherent idea.

There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be, with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine explanations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics becomes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of body. If we have such a theory in some domain, we seek to assimilate it to the core notions of physics, perhaps modifying these notions as we carry out this enterprise. — Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge

But then, such a definition of physicalism falls prey to 'Hempel's dilemma':

On the one hand, we may define 'the physical' as whatever is currently explained by our [current] physical theories...Though many would find this definition unsatisfactory, some would accept that we have at least a general understanding of the physical based on these theories, and can use them to assess what is physical and what is not. And therein lies the rub, as a worked-out explanation of mentality currently lies outside the scope of such theories [that being 'the hard problem'].

On the other hand, if we say that some future, "ideal" physics is what is meant, then the claim is rather empty, for we have no idea of what this means. The "ideal" physics may even come to define what we think of as mental as part of the physical world. In effect, physicalism by this second account becomes the circular claim that all phenomena are explicable in terms of physics because physics properly defined is whatever explains all phenomena.

I also found in this paper the following:

[Chomsky] accepts the thesis that “human thought and action . . . are properties of
organized matter,” but the indeterminacy of “matter” keeps that assertion from being a substantive metaphysical claim.

meaning that Chomsky would not agree with the claim that 'everything is physical', on the basis that 'physical' is insufficiently defined. (Likewise, Chomsky says 'I'll tell you if I'm an atheist if you can tell me what it is I'm supposed to deny' :-) )

Why introduce metaphysical differences, instead of talking about different aspects of the same reality? — Manuel

Because humans by and large have a false conception of the nature of reality. It is that, which philosophy is the antidote for.

This doesn't explain why I don't see the experience itself when looking at your brain. — Harry Hindu

What happens when we look?
Electromagnetic radiation (light) meets our photoreceptor cells within the eye, translating what are physical properties of this radiation (wavelength) into an electrical signal. This part is well understood because it is such a common occurance on the cellular level - you could consider it one of the most basic reactions that happens in organisms.

The electrical signal then moves on and is processed in the brain. This is where we have all of the complexity that leaves us so incredibly baffled - but as even Chalmer admits, these are merely "soft problems" which we may figure out as we broaden our knowledge of how these things work.

However, even if we don't know how the process works exactly, we now know fairly well what these singular experiences we experience are. They are electrical patterns in the brain and if you want to experience my experiences, it doesn't suffice to look, you have to have the exact same electrical pattern in your brain to experience the same thing I experience.

And that's where we have our evidence speaking for this argument and against "the hard problem of consciousness". Science has repeatedly demonstrated that experiences are reproducable through these electrical patterns. This is a major emerging field in tech and neurology.

Here is Michio Kaku, one of the most renown scientists in the world on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjcgT_oj3jQ

This video shows a reconstruction of the visual experience from brain patterns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

Science article about mind-reading algorithm:
https://www.science.org/content/article/mind-reading-algorithm-can-decode-pictures-your-head

Mandatory wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-reading

In this experiment neuroscientists fitted photosensitive proteins to neurons in mice, so they could fire the neurons with light and produce false sensations in the mice:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/04/30/editing-brain-activity-with-holography/

And the last source I'll present to you is, what ironically comes from Chalmers University of Technology, a feeling prothesis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldCRjfTcQXA

Why can't the experience that we feel correlate to the substrate? — Bird-Up

I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm saying that simply correlating X neural activity with Y subjective experience isn't the hard problem anymore. That is part of the easy problems. Rather, how is it that neural activity is one and the same as subjective experience is what is to be explained.