↪Gnomon
No, no, no. It's not nearly so complicated, there's no need for all this complicated verbiage. Science studies objects and objective facts - how big is it, where is it, how fast is it moving, how does it interact, what causes it, etc. This it does for everything from the sub-atomic to cosmic scales. But as consciousness does not appear as an object, it is not included in that analysis as a matter of principle. Let's not loose sight of the forest for the trees. — Wayfarer

Are you saying that scientists should simply leave the Mind/Body problem to impractical philosophers? I suspect that pragmatic scientists and Buddhists, with no metaphysical axe to grind, would agree with you : "shut-up and calculate"*1. Yet, metaphysical monistic Materialists also simplify the "problem" by insisting that Mind is nothing but Matter doing what comes naturally*2. So, they resolve the "problem" by telling Idealistic philosophers to butt-out.

The OP concluded that the circularity of the Science vs Philosophy battle makes the problem insoluble*3. If it's as simple as you imply, why can't we drive a stake into the heart of the Hard Problem? Maybe the eternal recurrence of this topic is due to the Materialism vs Idealism divide within philosophy. My unorthodox BothAnd philosophical worldview simplifies the problem by assuming a monistic substance (Information) that can exist as both Matter and Mind. Problem solved! :wink:

*1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is only hard within the context of materialism.
https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/comments/169rqih/hard_problem_of_consciousness_is_not_hard/

*2. Some argue that the hard problem of consciousness is not actually hard, and that it can be solved through further analysis of the brain and behavior:
___Google AI overview

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

The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness was introduced by philosopher David Chalmers. Chalmers basically divides the problem of explaining consciousness into two parts: hard problem, and "easy" problem. The easy problem is discovering all the biological and physical mechanisms of consciousness, while the hard problem concerns explaining the subjective first-person quality of being conscious.

Chalmers is a well known dualist when it comes to the philosophy of mind, and I suspect that his framing of consciousness into two problems is a manifestation of property-dualism. The mental properties of the mind corresponds to the hard problem, while the physical properties of the mind correspond to the easy problem. My question is if dualism isn't correct, would there be a need for two problems of consciousness? I don't think so.

Must we insist that explaining consciousness at a mechanistic level any easier than explaining the subjective first-person experience aspects of consciousness? My hunch is that the so-called easy problem of consciousness at a mechanistic level is equally as difficult as the so-called hard problem at the subjective level. They might even be the same problem.

The 'hard problem of consciousness' formulated by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers has heated the minds of philosophers, neuroscientists and cognitive researchers alike in recent decades. Chalmers argues that the real challenge is to explain why and how we have subjective, qualitative experiences (also known as qualia). The central question of the hard problem is: Why and how do subjective, conscious experiences arise from physical processes in the brain?

This question may seem simple at first glance, but it has far-reaching implications for our understanding of consciousness, reality, and the human experience. It goes beyond simply explaining how the brain works and targets the heart of what it means to be a conscious being.

A concrete example of this problem is the question: "Why do we experience the color red as red?" This is not just about how our visual system works, but why we have a subjective experience of red in the first place, rather than simply processing that information without consciously experiencing it.

In the following, I will explain that both the question of the hard problem and the answers often given to it are based on two, if not three, decisive errors in reasoning. These errors of thought are so fundamental that they not only challenge the hard problem itself, but also have far-reaching implications for other areas of philosophy and science.

The first error in thinking: The confusion of levels of description

Let's start with a highly simplified example to illustrate the first error in thinking: Imagine a photon beam hits your eye. This light stimulus is transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve, where it excites a specific group of neurons.

Up to this point, nothing immaterial has happened. We operate exclusively in the field of physics and physiology. This process, which describes the physical and biological foundations of vision, can be precisely grasped and analyzed with the tools of the natural sciences.

Interestingly, the same process can also be described from a completely different perspective, namely that of psychology. There the description would be: "I see something red and experience this perception consciously." This psychological description sounds completely different from the physiological one, but it refers to the same process.

The decisive error in thinking now occurs when we swap or mix the levels of description. So if we suddenly switch from the physiological to the psychological level and construct a causal relationship between the two that cannot exist in reality. So if we claim that physiology is the basis of psychology, or that the excited group of neurons causes the conscious experience of red.

In truth, it is not a causal relationship, but a correlation between two different levels of description of the same phenomenon. By falsely establishing a causal relationship, we artificially create the seemingly insoluble question of how neuronal activity can give rise to conscious experience.

This mistake is comparable to suddenly changing lanes on the motorway and becoming a wrong-way driver. You leave the safe area of a consistent level of description and enter a range where the rules and assumptions of the previous level no longer apply.

The Second Error in Thinking: The Confusion of Perspectives

The second fundamental error in thinking is based on the confusion of the perspectives from which we look at a phenomenon. Typically, we start with a description of the visual process from a third-person perspective - in other words, we describe what is objectively observable. Then, suddenly, and often unconsciously, we switch to first-person perspective by asking why we experience the process of seeing in a certain way.

By making this change of perspective, we once again establish a supposed causal relationship, this time between two fundamentally different 'observational perspectives'. We try to deduce the subjective experience of seeing from the objective description of the visual process, which leads to further seemingly insoluble problems.

This change of perspective is particularly treacherous because it often happens unnoticed. It leads to questions such as "Why does consciousness feel the way it feels?", which already contain in their formulation the assumption that there must be an objective explanation for subjective experiences.

The Third Error in Thinking: The Tautological Question

A third error in thinking, which is more subtle but no less problematic, is that we ask questions that are tautological in themselves and therefore fundamentally unanswerable. A classic example of this is the question: "Why do I see the color red as red?"

This question is similar to asking why H2O is wet. We first define water as wet and then claim that this definition must be explained physically. Similarly, we define our subjective experience of the color red, and then demand an explanation of why that experience is exactly as we have defined it.

Such tautological questions mislead us because they give the impression that there is a deep mystery to be solved, when in reality there is only a circular definition.

The consequences of these errors in thinking

The effects of these errors in thinking go far beyond the 'hard problem of consciousness'. They form the basis for a multitude of misunderstandings and pseudo-problems in philosophy and science.

On the one hand, they form the basis for large parts of esotericism, which speaks of a 'spirit' that only arises through a language shift and is then constantly expanded. The same applies to explanatory approaches that want to ascribe additional, mysterious substances to matter, such as 'information' in the sense of an 'it from bit'.

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein already held the view that the majority of philosophical problems are based on linguistic confusion. I would like to add that they are also based on unnoticed shifts in perspective and the mixing of levels of description.

Evolutionary Biology Explanation

With the evolutionary biological emergence of sensors and nerves, the orientation of organisms took on a multimodal quality compared to the purely chemotactic one. Centralization in the brain brought with it the need for a feedback mechanism that made it possible to consciously perceive incoming stimuli – consciousness, understood as the ability to sense stimuli. This development represents a decisive step forward, as it allowed organisms to exhibit more complex and flexible behaviours.

With the differentiation of the brain, the sensations experienced became more and more abstract, which allowed the organisms to orient themselves at a higher level. This form of abstraction is what we call "thoughts" – internal models of the world that make it possible to understand complex relationships and react flexibly to the environment.

This evolutionary perspective shows that consciousness is essentially an adaptive function for optimizing survivability. Consciousness allowed organisms not only to react, but to act proactively, which was an evolutionary advantage in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment. The hard problem of consciousness can therefore be seen as a misunderstanding of the evolutionary function and development of consciousness. What we perceive as a subjective experience is essentially the evolution of a mechanism that ensures that relevant stimuli are registered and processed in an adaptive way.
Because without consciousness, i.e. thinking and feeling, sensors and nerves would have no meaning.

The explanatory gap" is misinterpreted by many philosophers as an "unsolvable problem" (by philosophical means alone, of course) for which they therefore fiat various speculative woo-of-the-gaps that only further obfuscate the issue. — 180 Proof

Not at all.

In philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the difficulty that physicalist theories have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced. It is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine.[1] In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels.

The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem". — Wikipedia

As I've shown already in this thread, the hard explanatory problem has scientific validation, namely, that of the subjective unity of consciousness, and how to account for it in neurological terms. This is one aspect of the well-known neural binding problem, which is how to account for all of the disparate activities of the brain and body can culminate in the obvious fact of the subjective unity of experience.

As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.

There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the Neural Binding Problem really is a scientific mystery at this time. — Jerome S. Feldman, The Neural Binding Problem(s)

Your continual invocation of 'woo of the gaps' only illustrates that you're not grasping problem at hand. It's a hard problem for physicalism and naturalism because of the axioms they start from, not because there is no solution whatever. Seen from other perspectives, there is no hard problem, it simply dissolves. It's all a matter of perspective. But seen from the perspective of modern scientific naturalism, there is an insuperable problem, because its framework doesn't accomodate the reality of first-person experience, a.k.a. 'being', which is why 'eliminative materialism' must insist that it has no fundamental reality. You're the one obfuscating the problem, because it clashes with naturalism - there's an issue you're refusing to see which is as plain as the nose on your face.

'Speculative woo-of-the-gaps' is at bottom simply the observation that there are things about the mind that science can't know, because of its starting assumptions. It's a very simple thing, but some guy by the name of Chalmers was able to create an international career as an esteemed philosopher by pointing it out.

First, this paper needs more focus. About half way through I forgot what you were even trying to show. You jump from this idea, to that idea from this philosopher, to over here, and I don't see a lot of commonality between them. You could probably cut your paper by quite a bit and still get to the point that you want. — Philosophim

Thank you. I wanted to connect all the points I made because they build one upon another. The reviewers had no problem with that, accepting the paper in 12 days.

First, are you a neuroscientist? This is an incredibly bold claim — Philosophim

No, I am a theoretical physicist by training, a generalist by work experience, and a philosopher by inclination. I am aware of the boldness of my claim. For that reason I needed to I needed to start from the ground and build up, dealing with logically successive topics.

A neuroscientist will tell you, "We don't yet understand everything about the brain yet." — Philosophim

I neither expect nor assume that they do. I do assume that they will not abandon the view that the brain represents and processes data. The need for representation and processing was seen by Aristotle, and the fact that the brain is the data processing organ was established by Galen. So, it is unlikely that further discoveries will change this fundamental fact after all this time.

There is more than enough evidence that consciousness results from a physical basis. — Philosophim

There is no such evidence. There is lots of evidence that the contents of awareness depend on physical processing, but contents are not our awareness of contents (which is what subjective, not medical, consciousness is).

The hard problem really boils down to "What is it like to be another conscious being?" — Philosophim

I suggest you re-read the section of the paper in which I quote Chalmers on the Hard Problem. There is no problem of what it is like to be a bat, because problems are about understanding experience, not about having experiences we cannot have.

Does that mean that we don't need physical medium for consciousness to exist? No, we do. — Philosophim

This is a different problem -- that of "immortality of the soul." It is one that natural science does not have the means to resolve. I do agree, however, that rational thought requires the physical representation of data.

The hard problem reflects the failure in our ability to experience what it is like to be another conscious being. — Philosophim

You do not understand what the Hard Problem is. Chalmers said, "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect." This is not a problem about the experience of others, but of subjectivity per se. To be a subject is to be one pole in the subject-object relation we call "knowing" -- the pole that is aware of the object's intelligibility.

This is not what emergence means. — Philosophim

The point that contextualizes my definition is that "emergence" is ill-defined. You quote one definition, but there are others. I say what I mean by "emergence" to avoid confusion in what follows. We are all allowed to define our technical terms as we wish.

And yet we find plants react to the world in a way that we consider to be conscious. — Philosophim

This is equivocating on "consciousness". There is medical consciousness, which is a state of responsiveness, and this is seen, in an analogous way, in plants. That kind of consciousness need not entail subjectivity -- the awareness of the stimuli to which we are responding. You made the point earlier. We cannot know what it is like to be a bat or a plant, or even if it s "like" anything, instead of something purely mechanical -- devoid of an experiential aspect.

Almost certainly AI will inevitably, if not somewhere already, be labeled as conscious. — Philosophim

This non-fact is non-evidence.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading and responding to my work.

But yes, some new phenomena or discovery comes to light that sheds some light into what was already deemed extremely problematic centuries ago, like the hard problem, or machines thinking. — Manuel

I agree, the truly "hard problems" are the ones which get put aside and neglected for the longest periods of time, hundreds or even thousands of years. They tend to be fundamental, basic ontological issues, so that the work-around is basic and foundational to the ensuing conceptual structure which develops from it. A good example is the interaction problem of dualism, which is very closely related to the hard problem of consciousness.

If we take the hard problem as most basic, fundamental, and therefore most ancient, we can see that the classical work-around for this problem has been dualism. But in ancient Greek philosophy, the incompatibility between the material world of becoming, and the logical world of being and not being, was exposed. Since the logical world was apprehended as consisting of ideas which were considered to be immutable eternal truths, the interaction problem developed because it was impossible to show how this realm of immutable "objects" could interact with an ever changing material world.

The work-around for the interaction problem was initiated by Plato, as "the good", and developed by Aristotle as final causation, later blossoming into free will and intention. The modern day "hard problem" is just a form of extreme ontological skepticism, which rejects all of the significant metaphysical work-arounds produced over the past millennia, to bring us right back to the basic, fundamental problem, and have another go at that problem from a new perspective. The "new perspective" is the one currently obtained from all the gained experience and new knowledge developed over that time period.

I'm just directly responding to the question of evidence.

I think the hard problem of consciousness IS a hard problem. I don't disagree with you that it's a hard problem. — flannel jesus

It's possible we disagree about what the evidence is saying, and what the hard problem is. I do not think the evidence is insisting that consciousness is produced by the physical things and processes we know so much about, despite the fact that it doesn't exist in their absence. Maybe. But if so, there's no hint of how. So maybe not.

I don’t think the solution to hard problem is figuring out how the physical produces the mental. I think the solution is figuring out what else is there with the physical.




Fair enough. But I want to emphasize things, as well.

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?

Yes, we know a ton about the physical processes of the brain. But nothing the world's leading experts know "remotely" explains consciousness. Plenty of correlation. Plenty of location. But no explanation. Greene doesn't give a non-robust scientific explanation. There is no partial explanation. There is only It happens here, and It just happens.. The fact that it doesn't seem to exist without the physical means, obviously, the physical is involved. But that's not a robust explanation. It's only an assertion that physical is involved.

Sure, we can't yet explain it with matter. It's not like we can explain it with something else either. It's not like there's some other more complete alternative that sufficiently gives an account of consciousness. — flannel jesus

Maybe there is something else we can explain it with. Maybe something non-physical is also present. We have no problem accepting that space and time are one, or that matter warps it. And wet have no problem accepting the impossible, contradictory nature of quantum mechanics. I don't think the idea that there is something non-physical involved with consciousness is any more outlandish, considering none of the people who know the most about physics and neurons can find an explanation that only involves the physical.

You are not describing the HPoC. It's true that nobody/thing can experiences my subjective experiences. But the HP is not that we can't communicate subjective experience; it is how a clump of matter can have them at all. — Patterner

You may have misunderstood that point within the full context of what I was communicating, or I was unclear. It is not that we cannot communicate our subjective experience. Its that we cannot experience another's subjective experience. Meaning that there is no objective way to measure another's subjective experience.

We can very clearly identify and even medically manipulate consciousness. We use anesthesa to put people unconscious. You can drink alcohol, get drunk, and alter your consciousness. Consciousness is clearly physical. How we define consciousness through behavior, and test to understand it at a mechanistic level is the easy problem. Have we fully solved the easy problem? Not at all. Science will likely take centuries to uncover how the brain works at a complete physical level.

The bet you referred to, as I understood it, was about the Easy problem. You can read it here.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8 I'm careful to make a full claim on this because this is one article from a news reporter who may not have understood the full subject. But from my understanding, the neuroscientist believed they would have a neuronal explanation of what causes consciousness. This is the easy problem. Even if this is answered, the hard problem of what it is like to experience consciousness for any particular subject will still exist.

" Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with so-called “easy problems” of consciousness: the problems of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness. These features can be explained using the usual methods of science. But that leaves the question of why there is something it is like for the subject when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present. This is the hard problem.

In more detail, the challenge arises because it does not seem that the qualitative and subjective aspects of conscious experience—how consciousness “feels” and the fact that it is directly “for me”—fit into a physicalist ontology, one consisting of just the basic elements of physics plus structural, dynamical, and functional combinations of those basic elements. It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious. And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject. There seems to be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical world and consciousness. All these factors make the hard problem hard."

https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/#:~:text=The%20hard%20problem%20of%20consciousness%20is%20the%20problem%20of%20explaining,directly%20appear%20to%20the%20subject.

This is a continuation from a previous thread titled the "hard problem of matter" by Metaphysician uncover.

If conciousness is fundamental/primordial, then logically it's distinction from physicalism would derive directly from the 4 elementary components of existence: namely Energy, Matter, Space, Time and their interdependent dynamic/behaviours.

What springs to mind then is Einstein equation E=MC^2.
Where Energy is equivalent to mass by a factor of C^2.
C^2 being the "speed of light" squared.

If we assume consciousness is the interaction between thought and memory, then the stand-ins I would select for a fundamental/primordial consciousness would be Energy (thought) and Matter (Memory).

Because memory is thought encoded in a stable format just as matter is energy pent up in a stable or crystalline form. Bonded to itself.

The hard problem of consciousness deals with the gap between thought and memory. Or between experience/sensation and the anatomical structure of the brain (the connectivity and pattern of neuronal arrangement that encodes previous or stored thoughts).

In this case the hard problem is narrowed to the relationship between Energy and Matter. Or how they are equivalent (unified, or "not a hard problem" ).

Thus, taking the equation E=MC^2 the hard problem is the C^2 component.
Let's break it down.

Speed is a relationship between Distance and Time. Which is good because it means these 2 remaining core elements of existence are factors of the equation between energy and matter - in the "speed of light".

Light is energy. So energy features in both sides of the equation: Energy = mass x (distance/time) of energy (light) (squared).

Therefore the equation is "self-referential". A promising facet if we are considering the concept of "self" or consciousness as a primordial.

That would suggest that it only requires energy to satisfy the equation or in other words, energy has the capability to manifest both itself (action) and what it acts on (matter). And it uses time and distance dynamics to do so (speed).

Or rather that time and distance (space) are a byproduct of the conversion between the two.

So a change in speed/rate is the difference between thought and memory for such a conscious entity. This means distance must be able to expand/contract and time must be able to dilate/contract from net zero (0)when energy is just energy, to some positive integers when energy converts to mass (ie the emergence of the space-time dimension).

Sound familiar? For me it sounds like relativity.

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

Is this explanation scientific? Certainly not. Scientific objectivity being based on physicalism not subjectivity/theory of mind. But is it a reasonable or rational union? Perhaps.

This "thesis" is about formulating a paradigm that unifies scientific explanations with panpsychist/spiritual or theistic ones. Something that both describes the content or workings of conscious awareness and the physical observable world - the fundamental interactions of the physical world paralleled with a theory of mind explanation, and where the dichotomy between them arises naturally from the same unifying dynamic.

But, that's for you to decide/critique. Have at it.

I have been watching videos and reading a little bit about the hard problem of consciousness and also about qualia. It seems like philosophers are discussing how the physical can create our experiences, or our consciousness. This is what I assume is called the "explanatory gap". — Flaw

Let's try to get clear about which explananda sit on either side of the alleged "gap". Unfortunately there's a lack of uniformity in the relevant terminology, and persistent disagreement about the underlying philosophical issues.

Chalmers puts it like this (in his influential 1995 paper, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness"):

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. [...]

What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open. [...]

This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere. — David Chalmers

(Here are links to the cited papers by Nagel and Levine.)

As someone with a computer science background with a little experience with AI & machine learning, I was wondering whether or not consciousness can be simulated and what that would "mean"? — Flaw

By definition a simulation is not the genuine article. For example, a computer simulation of an ecosystem or star system is not a genuine ecosystem or star system, even if it's a very accurate and useful model.

It seems there's no reason to suppose that packing more and more information-processing functions into a program would ever yield the sort of "subjective character" of experience that's said to generate the hard problem of consciousness.

John Searle has provided influential arguments along these lines dating back to 1980. He offers a brief and amended presentation of his views in a handy little 1997 book, The Mystery of Consciousness.

Computers play the same role in studying the brain that they play in any other discipline. They are immensely useful devices for simulating brain processes. But the simulation of mental states is no more a mental state than the simulation of an explosion is itself an explosion. — John Searle

the hard problem of consciousness claims that mental activity can not be reduced to physicality — Hermeticus

According to whom? I just watched a quick interview with David Chalmers where he very clearly articulated that scientific methods (such as MRI) will definitely help us understand the activity of the brain. He called this the easy problem of consciousness because he did expect breakthroughs in this area. He even clarified that 'easy' should not be taken literally. The easy problem of consciousness is as hard as the hardest scientific problems that we're dealing with.

The MRI breakthrough only supports his distinction between the 'easy' and the 'hard' problems. It takes us closer to solving the 'easy' problem (what do activities in the brain look like?), but doesn't move the needle on the 'hard' problem (what is it like to be something?).

Perhaps your opinion is that we only need to solve the 'easy' problem of consciousness, and that we don't need to take the 'hard' problem seriously. I don't mind that. It sounds pragmatic.

Can you give me an example of a neuroscientist you think is committing this error? — Isaac

I described the conditions which would qualify as an error. I have not intent to judge any particular individual unless you bring the person here to take part in the discussion so we could make that judgement. Sorry if this disappoints you.

So "the hard problem .." is not a scientific problem like I've stated. — 180 Proof

No not really, because the specific problem I stated is not explicitly "the hard problem". To tell you the truth, I still don't really understand the supposed "hard problem". I'm dualist so I don't see "the hard problem", it appears to be the consequence of unreasonable premises and poor ontology. I see a lot of hard headed people though.

Thank you. I wanted to connect all the points I made because they build one upon another. The reviewers had no problem with that, accepting the paper in 12 days. — Dfpolis

This is irrelevant. The acceptance of a paper does not mean it cannot be written better. You have proper citations, it fits the topic you are looking for, and it addresses a currently popular topic. But it is still a mess that loses its focus. I am quite certain you do not need many of these references to have gotten to your point.

There is more than enough evidence that consciousness results from a physical basis.
— Philosophim
There is no such evidence. There is lots of evidence that the contents of awareness depend on physical processing, but contents are not our awareness of contents (which is what subjective, not medical, consciousness is).

This is just wrong. https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/5-2-altering-consciousness-with-psychoactive-drugs/ At a very basic level humanity has been using drugs for centuries to alter our state of consciousness. Drugs are a physical thing. We can measure how the physical introduction of drugs changes the brain.

Read this about open brain surgery. https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/awake-brain-surgery/about/pac-20384913#:~:text=Surgery%20while%20you're%20awake,control%20speech%20and%20other%20skills.&text=Awake%20brain%20surgery%2C%20also%20called,you%20are%20awake%20and%20alert.

Generally surgeons will keep you awake and map your experiences when they stimulate certain areas of the brain. They literally alter your conscious subjective experience.

You do not understand what the Hard Problem is. Chalmers said, "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect." This is not a problem about the experience of others, but of subjectivity per se. To be a subject is to be one pole in the subject-object relation we call "knowing" -- the pole that is aware of the object's intelligibility. — Dfpolis

I mentioned "others" specifically to avoid the problem your claim runs into. The issue in monitoring other subjective experiences objectively is the fact that we don't know what the user is personally experiencing. If however you were to monitor your own brain state and record your subjective experience, you would be able to correlate the physical changes in your brain to your subjective experience. The problem again though, is that your information would not be able to be objectively compared to any other person's subjective experience because you cannot experience it.

This is not what emergence means.
— Philosophim
The point that contextualizes my definition is that "emergence" is ill-defined. You quote one definition, but there are others. I say what I mean by "emergence" to avoid confusion in what follows. We are all allowed to define our technical terms as we wish. — Dfpolis

Redefining words must be done with care as you then use a common word with a different meaning. No, we do not get to redefine as we wish if we want to be clear and ethical in our communication. If you do, generally it should be a tweak and not a completely new definition. Otherwise, It is a good way to hide points and sneak conflations in that would otherwise be more apparent to readers if you used a new word. I think that emergent is a common enough word that you should have attempted to cobble together a meaning that fit in with currently accepted definitions. Your definition as it is "the impossibility of deducing a phenomenon from fundamental principles, especially those of physics.", is not good. There are plenty of commonly known emergent properties that are not impossible to deduce from fundamental principles. This is too large of a divergence from the original intent of the word.

This is a different problem -- that of "immortality of the soul." It is one that natural science does not have the means to resolve — Dfpolis

Natural science has never found a soul, so it is not a problem to solve. It is like saying the "existence of unicorns" is a different problem. When you are making claims that consciousness is independent of the physical, you need to give evidence. So far all the evidence points to consciousness needing some type of physical medium to exist, and your paper has not shown otherwise.

And yet we find plants react to the world in a way that we consider to be conscious.
— Philosophim
This is equivocating on "consciousness". There is medical consciousness, which is a state of responsiveness, and this is seen, in an analogous way, in plants. That kind of consciousness need not entail subjectivity -- the awareness of the stimuli to which we are responding. You made the point earlier. We cannot know what it is like to be a bat or a plant, or even if it s "like" anything, instead of something purely mechanical -- devoid of an experiential aspect. — Dfpolis

Its not equivocation at all. You also now understand the hard problem. We can know that a being has all of the mechanical aspects of what we would identify with a conscious being. However, we can't know what that actual personal experience of being a conscious plant is. So of course the definition of a reductive consciousness cannot describe the personal subjective experience of the plant. It doesn't even try to.

If you believe that consciousness is only defined as, "Having a subjective experience," you are not using a reductive definition of consciousness, which is what you are supposedly railing against. Your denial that the plant might be "conscious", in the idea that we don't know if it has a subjective experience, is an agreement with my point. Its the hard problem. What we can do at this point is ascribe certain physical processes and responses of "beings" to what we would classify as "conscious". It does not require neurons, and it does not require that we know what the personal subjective experience of the being is.

Almost certainly AI will inevitably, if not somewhere already, be labeled as conscious.
— Philosophim
This non-fact is non-evidence. — Dfpolis

And I never claimed it to be a fact or evidence. I would think you would have looked into the debate of
consciousness in AI and this would not be a strange thing to mention.

Below are my continuing efforts to understand some important parts of your article:

Replicability is a type, rather than a token, property. We can never replicate a token observation, only the same type of observation. — Dfpolis

Thus, the consciousness impasse is a representational, not an ontological, issue. — Dfpolis

The consciousness impasse, the root of The Hard Problem, is a conflation of type replicability with token replicability, the latter being an impossibility.

Since humans are psychophysical organisms who perceive to know and conceptualize to act, physicality and intentionality are dynamically integrated. — Dfpolis

The above claim posits conceptualize and intend within an equation. Moreover, it implies the integral-holism of rational action. Sentient beings acting rationally are never bi-furcated across the partition of conceptual dualism. Objectivist-Physicalist science breaks the natural coherence linking sentient beings to creation. The Hard Problem is thus a problem of scientific methodology.

Ignoring this seamless unity, post-Cartesian thought conceives them separately – creating representational problems. The Hard Problem and the mind-body problem both arose in the post-Cartesian era, and precisely because of conceptual dualism. To resolve them, we need only drop the Fundamental Abstraction in studying mind. — Dfpolis

Descartes, acting the part of the villain (albeit unintentionally), spurred conceptual dualism: a categorical partitioning of mind and body; Polis, for remedy, argues the return to Aristotelian integralism-holism with respect to physicality-intentionality.

This tells us Aristotle’s agent intellect is the sin qua non component of Polis’ proffered solution to The Hard Problem.

The agent intellect is the self who does introspection: pattern recognition in response to present intelligibility; logical manipulation of information: deduction; inference; interpolation; extrapolation; inferential expansion; information combinatorics, etc.

Matter and form are logically distinguishable, but physically inseparable, aspects of bodies – another one-to-many mapping from the physical to the intentional. — Dfpolis

Key Questions -- Aristotelian awareness contains a physical component: Does agent intellect = self? Does agent intellect as self possess form? Does awareness possess boundaries?

For Aristotle, form and matter are not things, but the foundations for two modes of conceptualization. — Dfpolis

Form and matter are two modes of organization, viz., matter = extension/extendability; form = context/configurability.

Thus, the concept <apple> is not a thing, but an activity, viz. the actualization of an apple representation’s intelligibility. — Dfpolis

Herein activity = physical-intentional complex, viz., present intelligibility ⇔ sentience.

The essence of representation is the potential to be understood. — Dfpolis

Representation = present intelligibility.

Dualism is incompatible with the identity of physically encoded information informing the intellect and the intellect being informed by physically encoded information. — Dfpolis

Sensible-object_sense-organ complex: a swirling yin-yang of integral_holism; no discrete bifurcation.

An agent intellect is necessary because we actually understand what is only represented in brain states. Since neural processing cannot effect awareness, an extra element is required, as Aristotle argued and Chalmers seconds. — Dfpolis

Does the sensible-object_sense-organ complex generate Aristotle’s phantasm?> Yes, however, like a computer; it processes data, but there’s no self who comprehends what it’s doing; there’s no self who comprehends the present intelligibility of the data.

Key Question -- What happens if:

Abstraction is the selective actualization of intelligibility. — Dfpolis

becomes:

Abstraction is the reductive actualization of intelligibility. — ucarr edit

This question is based on my supposition (as influenced by your claim re: replicability) abstraction can only be of type and never of token; replication of token, by virtue of its definition, must always be an identity and thus cannot be an abstraction. An idea can never hold identity with a thing-in-itself. As, per Aristotle:

‘For the sense-organ is in every case receptive of the sensible object without its matter’ — Aristotle

The sense organ takes in the attributes of a sensible thing (form), but not its hyle (potential). It is the potential of a thing-in-itself to map to myriad configurations -- all of them individual instantiations of existence -- that abstraction to the logical cannot emulate.

Key question – Is abstraction, a subtractive process, necessarily a reductive process?

Key question – Can agent intellect generate anything other than abstractions?*

*Consider the inevitable sensory overload from blooming creation sans abstraction.

The Hard Problem of consciousness signals the need for a paradigm shift. — Dfpolis

The physical-conceptual complex of Aristotelian animism is a corrective reversionist paradigm. However, this reversionism is not retrograde because it meshes cleanly and closely with much of scientific understanding evolving henceforth from antiquity.

I have probably written here more than once, but, I like the question, so I will reply again.

The hard problem of consciousness seems to hard, because we have forgotten about the hard problem of motion, which we do not understand, but can study quite successfully.

And, then, I think if we clearly look at the situation, we have many hard problems, the problem of morality, the problem of will, the problem of identity, the problem meaning, the problem of mind, the problem of magnetism, the problem of first origins and on and on and on.

For whatever curios reason, consciousness is taken to be specifically more problematic than any of these. I don't see a reason to believe it.

The bet you referred to, as I understood it, was about the Easy problem.
— Philosophim

Not so. The byline of the article you cite says 'Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now.' The bet was lost. — Wayfarer

As I noted, I was a bit uncertain as to my claim. Thank you for the correction.

the neuroscientist believed they would have a neuronal explanation of what causes consciousness. This is the easy problem.
— Philosophim

No, it's not. That is just the problem that hasn't been solved. Again, look at the reference I provided upthread on the neural binding problen. — Wayfarer

Fantastic article, thank you for the reference! They noted there was nothing in the visual part of the brain that could map to a very specific subjective experience of consciousness, namely why we see things in high resolution. This is not the same as not finding neuronal mapping to all subjective experiences.

"There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. "

Reading this carefully, there are a few things to note. First, he can say that there is currently no area in the visual system that has been found to encode this detailed information from a book written in 2003. That is true, but not the hard problem. I also did not find a valid reference to his second claim from Martinez-Conde. I looked at his article and found this in the available abstract (I could not find the full article):

"Because all of our visual experience occurs in conjunction with eye movements, understanding their perceptual and physiological effects is critical to understanding vision in general. Moreover, the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual suppression during eye movements may be very important towards narrowing down the neural bases of visual awareness."

"Recent developments have led to new insights through a combination of behavioral, psychophysical, computational and neurophysiological research carried out under conditions that increasingly approach the complex conditions of the natural retinal environment. Among these, fixational eye movement studies comprise a promising and fast-moving field of research. This special issue of Journal of Vision offers a broad compilation of recent discoveries concerning the perceptual consequences of eye movements in vision, as well as the mechanisms responsible for producing stable perception from unstable oculomotor behavior. "

So I'm having a difficult time finding out how the author of the primary article can validly claim his conclusions. I still see the idea of mapping neuronal states to consciousness as the easy problem while being able to scientifically objectify the subjective state of consciousness as the easy problem.

I don't think that there is as strong a correlation as you're claiming. Certainly all of those influences affect the brain, and the state of the brain then affects the nature of conscious experience. But that doesn't amount to proving that consciousness is physical, as it's still not clear what consciousness actually is, other than it is something that, for organisms such as ourselves, requires a functioning brain in order to interact with the sensory domain. — Wayfarer

You and I have touched on this a bit in the past, and I'll refrain from going over them again. To sum, its a difference in approach towards knowledge that you and I take. I'm actually very open to there being alternative reasons for consciousness besides the brain. The thing is, I need evidence. Currently I have found no evidence that provides any indication of consciousness, in humans, without the brain. What would consciousness be if not matter and energy from a neuronal system? Without something concrete to examine, we have an unfalsifiable God of the Gaps consciousness, which I am not interested in. Do we need people like yourself who keep looking for some other evidence of consciousness besides the brain while science grapples with its problems? Absolutely. But until the day something is found, what we can safely claim knowledge to is that consciousness is caused by the brain.

There are also many hugely anomalous cases of subjects with grossly abnormal brains who seem to be able to function (see Man with tiny brain shocks doctors). — Wayfarer

He functions with an IQ of 84. That's the 'normal range' but hardly normal or Einstein. There are brains besides animals that are much smaller than ours, but still conscious. Show me a man without a brain who is conscious and you'll have something.

There is the case of psycho-somatic medicine and the placebo effect, wherein subjects beliefs and emotional states have physical consequences. They can be regarded as being 'top-down causation', in that the effects of beliefs and mental states operate 'downward' on the physical brain. — Wayfarer

Right, but where do beliefs and emotional states come from? The brain. The brain affecting the brain is a well known event. Show me something entirely outside of the physical realm that affects consciousness, and that will be something.

And finally the claim that 'consciousness is physical' is the very subject of the entire argument, and your claims in this regard still suggest, to me at least, that you're not seeing the point of the argument. — Wayfarer

No, the point of the argument is the hard problem. The hard problem has never claimed that consciousness is not physical, if we are regarding physical as matter and energy. Matter and energy has the capability to be conscious if organized right, just like water and hydrogen has the capability to be water if organized right. That's the point of the easy problem, to show that yes, they understand that consciousness is a physical manifestation of the brain. But will we ever be able to map consciousness objectively to what it is like to subjectively be conscious? That seems impossible.

Another way to express the Hard Problem is : "how does physical activity (neural & endocrinological) result in the meta-physical (mental) functions that we label "Ideas" and "Awareness"? — Gnomon

I still see that as the easy problem, as its a very clear approach. Eventually after research, we find that X leads to Y. Its a problem, and I'm not saying its 'easy', its easy in contrast to the hard problem. Its called a hard problem because there's no discernible path or approach towards finding the answer. If you shape a question about consciousness that has a clear path forward to attempt to solve the problem, that is an easy problem. — Philosophim

How does Physics (matter/energy) produce Metaphysical phenomena (mind/intention)? Nobody knows for sure, but there is a name for it. “Emergence” is a philosophical term for mysterious appearances with "no discernible path". Typically, the novel form is a whole system (with new properties & functions) derived from a previous system with different properties : e.g. solid an-isotropic crystalline Ice emerges from liquid isotropic water. In my thesis, I compare Mind-from-Matter emergence to physical Phase Transitions, not to occult Magic. :smile:

Emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism
Note --- Emergence is typically associated with Holism and Systems Theory. Information is the "difference that makes a difference".

Teleological Evolution
So it seems that our world got to where it is now via a series of identifiable stages due to "quantum fluctuations", "phase changes", "emergences" and "speciations" that collectively we call Evolution. But only the human-scale (macro) transitions seem to follow the normal macro level rules of billiard-ball cause & effect, instead of "spooky action at a distance". On larger & smaller scales those transformations seem to be much less random and more directional, even ententional. We can classify those various emergent phases into three domains : Quantum, Classical, and Cosmic.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page25.html

The easy is the 'how', the hard is the 'why'. — Philosophim

“How” is a scientific question, in search of intermediate physical steps. “Why” is a philosophical question, in search of meaning or purpose. How Mental functions emerged from Material brains is subject to empirical evidence. Hence, relatively easy compared to the Why question. The evolutionary purpose of C is fairly obvious, in that knowing-that-you-know gives you the advantage of flexibility of approaches to a problem. But the Cosmic purpose of C is less obvious, in that mechanical operations, sans awareness, were able to function for 14B years. Why now, does the cosmos manifest a new property : Self-Conscious? We sentient beings appear driven to know where we came from, and where we are going ; on a cosmic scale. The final or ultimate answer to such holistic questions seems to require information about origins & destiny, which has been offered by religions for millennia. For those of us lacking direct access to a Cosmic Mind, mundane philosophy will have to do the best it can. :wink:

The mind has three basic functions: thinking, feeling, and wanting. The three functions of the mind — thoughts, feelings and desires — can be guided or directed either by one's native egocentrism or by one's potential rational capacities. Egocentric tendencies function automatically and unconsciously.
https://www.criticalthinking.org/files/SAM-TheHumanMind.pdf

What we don't do is assume because we cannot answer the details, that there is some unidentified third property that must be responsible for it. That's a "God of the gaps" argument. — Philosophim

Not necessarily. The Enformationism thesis builds upon what we now know, by means of Scientific & Philosophical exploration, and to postulate a rational “third property” : EnFormAction, that has hitherto been called by another name, "Energy". EFA is envisioned as a kind of Proto-Energy (a seed) that can explain, not just material evolution, but the emergence of Mental properties, only after billions of years of “preparing the ground” for planting. The thesis acknowledges the logical question of “where did the Energy & Laws --- that propelled & guided evolution --- come from? Materialists typically take such immaterial necessities for granted. But philosophers tend to question everything, and to speculate beyond current knowledge. Do you think Science has all the answers that we need to know? Are you not curious about “Why” questions? A famous architect, an atheist, when questioned about his meticulous work, once said : “God is in the details”. :halo:

The only disagreement I have with you is that I believe we act exactly like physical machines, only more advanced. I do not see anything about humanity that is separate from the universe, but is one of the many expressions of the universe. — Philosophim

I'll grant you that notion of progression in natural evolution. But you seem to think I'm proposing something supernatural, or otherworldly. Supposedly-scientific postulations such as Many Worlds & Multiverses, do indeed go beyond the only world we know anything about. But EFA is merely a new name for a natural function that is well-known, but not well understood : the emergence of novelty from evolutionary mechanisms.

Do you think Darwinian Evolutionary Theory was the final word on how such things as eyes & minds came to exist in a material mechanical world? In recent years, scientists & philosophers have added such notions as Plasticity, Rapid Development, Epigenetics, and Cultural Evolution to Darwin's basic model. The article below illustrates the “gaps” in current biological science. The Modern Synthesis added genetic information to the crude notion of Random Mutation. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis added such concepts as multilevel selection, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, niche construction, evolvability, to Darwin's simple-but-powerful notion that biological novelty occurs without divine intervention. However, his evolutionary mechanism did assume that nature is capable of making informed choices (Selection) based on some logical criteria for fitness.

So, my thesis is just carrying-on the tradition of questioning supposedly "settled science". EnFormAction is merely a fresh look at an old scientific term for the physical Change Agency. EFA is not just brute force, but Directional Motivation (energy + information) . Evolution, like a guided-missile, seems to be moving, not randomly, but persistently toward more complexity & integration of sub-systems, with the human mind as the current apex. That direction is provided by the Information encoded in the program of evolution ; similar to what we now know is the key function of biological Genes, that Darwin had no mechanism for. :nerd:

Do we need a new theory of evolution?
Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/28/do-we-need-a-new-theory-of-evolution

Also, my understanding is that this primordial state is also matter and energy. It is a 'thing', and until we can find the state of a thing that exhibits itself differently from matter and/or energy, it fits in one of those two categories. — Philosophim

The Primordial State I referred to is not a scientific fact, but an informed guess. And the current best guess is that the universe started-out with no actual Matter, as we now know it. For example, both quarks & gluons are unobservable hypothetical entities, that are basically definitions without referent. So, I would prefer to call it an “Idea”, not a “Thing”. The postulated plasma had none of the structure* that we identify with Matter. So, cosmologists have proposed semi-magical “mechanisms” (e.g. instantaneous Inflation) to explain how the current clumpy configurations could have formed from such an unorganized state. My third category is merely a combination of Energy and Logic (the missing element of Darwinism). Anway, I figure that my informed guess is as valid as their speculation into the unknown. :cool:

Quarks appear to be true elementary particles; that is, they have no apparent structure and cannot be resolved into something smaller.
https://www.britannica.com/science/quark
Note --- No structure = no matter

In physical cosmology, structure formation is the formation of galaxies, galaxy clusters and larger structures from small early density fluctuations . . . . . In this stage, some mechanism, such as cosmic inflation, was responsible for establishing the initial conditions of the universe: homogeneity, isotropy, and flatness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_formation
Note --- Cosmic Inflation is essentially mathematical magic: "Voila! an instant universe!" Is EFA any less plausible?

Sidebar -- Firstly, Skalidris, I'm glad you're again posting to your conversation here. After your long absence, I was afraid you'd checked out permanently, and that's less fun.

The whole 'hard problem' arises from regarding consciousness as an object, which it is not, while science itself is based on objective facts. It's not complicated, but it's hard to see. — Wayfarer

Wayfarer above makes a good point. Herein, we're all talking about consciousness, voicing factual claims about it. These actions treat consciousness as an object grammatically speaking: "voicing factual claims about it." Predicate: voicing claims; Preposition: about; Object: it. Grammatically speaking, if you can predicate claims about something, then that something is an object, a thing. It's out there in reality to be examined and understood. If it's not out there, then what the heck are we talking about in this conversation? If subjectivity were ineffable, nobody would be talking about it. Nearly everybody talks about it at one time or another. I'm not seeing any modal difference between the efforts of neuroscience and the efforts of the typical layperson trying to understand the human psychology of their families and friends.

I think subjectivity and objectivity are always paired; I suspect their relationship is the bi-conditional logical operator. Regarding Nagel's: "There's something that it's like to be a bat." I'm waiting for an immaterialist to prove logically the necessity of the metaphysical separation of subjectivity from objectivity.

I'm trying to understand why the obvious grammatical objectification of consciousness doesn't carry over into objective reality. I don't, however, want to sidetrack us into lengthy discussions about the limitations and distortions of language; we all know that's a full topic unto itself.

Consciousness can indeed associate itself with all kinds of objects, but doing so creates a self referential problem, aka the hard problem of consciousness. — Skalidris

I take this to be the heart of your premise for this conversation. I'll try to parse it:

"Consciousness can indeed associate itself with all kinds of objects..." Why is this not a simple and clear example of one thing: consciousness, associating itself with other things: all kinds of objects? Isn't connection of things to things what "associate" means?

No, I haven't forgotten the immaterialist mantra: "Consciousness is not a thing." I know, your above statement is not literal. So what is it saying? If consciousness is not a thing, how does it perform actions, like "associate itself with all kinds of objects." Usually, subjects who execute actions are things. It's hard to authorize pundits who make statements that grammatically contradict the intended meanings of said statements.

"...but doing so creates a self referential problem, aka the hard problem of consciousness."

Have you elaborated how it is the case that when one thing associates itself with another thing, with one of the things being consciousness, a self-referential problem always ensues? Do either Nagel or Chalmers examine this self-referential problem?

Yes. Indeed you have a problem making predications about a subject that's not a subject. From the get-go, you're inhabiting the realm of paradox.

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

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

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

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?

In the second sentence you mysteriously claim "Consciousness can only be viewed as consciousness..." as if consciousness viewing itself doesn't objectify itself. In order to make your claim consciousness is not an object, you have to turn it into an object.

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

You claim consciousness is not approachable by setting up yourself in a paradox, then claim the paradox you've created is the proof objective examination of consciousness is impossible. Well, yeah, by your own setup.

Suppose we discard your premise and replace it with another premise: consciousness can examine itself. This gets us out of the paradox, at least grammatically speaking.

Can you show why we're still existentially locked within paradox and circularity when consciousness tries to examine itself?

Any materialistic theories about it is followed by this question "why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?". And any materialistic attempt to answer that question also ends up being followed by the same question, creating a circularity that seems impossible to escape. — Skalidris

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

Above I've underlined an important sentence. I'm surmising it expresses your core belief there is no possible materialist explanation connecting brain functions with subjectivity. I'm guessing you justify this belief by taking recourse to emergence and supervenience. I think your core belief is supported by a metaphysical commitment: consciousness exists outside of the subject/object bi-conditional.

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.

Do you have an argument to support this claim?

How can it be that consciousness exists outside of the subject/object bi-conditional?

I'm supposing immaterialism puts forward consciousness as its star witness for the possibility of existence uncoupled from materialism, and this uncoupling is centered within the circularity to which you refer.

You name the possible premises; do you name the impossible premises?

Let me try to name an impossible premise: a subject that is not its own object.

Can an existing thing not be self-referential (to itself) as an object? If it can, we must ask where is it located in space and time (both of which are material)?

Speaking generally, existence precedes essence and, speaking more specifically, 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.

Of course, immaterialism posits existence of essences outside of space and time.

Are we now afoot within Kant's transcendental idealism? Are we hearkening back to its ancestor, Platonic idealism?

No. Today's immaterialists have probably nuanced their positions beyond Kant.

What if: "when we ask ourselves 'why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?', we trigger a self referential explanation that has no other outcome than being circular..." is an important clue to the reason why consciousness as an objective thing appears to be immaterial?

I'm suggesting consciousness as a phenomenon is rooted in mnemonic echoings upwardly mobile through higher-orders of the self-referential. These higher-orders are essential to subjectivity. They play fast and loose with matter, but never uncouple from it completely.

The abstractionism of multi-tiered feedback looping via neuronal circuits of the brain is how we arrive at useful concepts such as infinity, sets and Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis.

Mnemonic circularity, ethereal but still material.

Please do not debate here whether or not the hard problem is a real problem. Let's assume for the sake of the argument that materialism is false because of the hard problem.

I believed that the hard problem comes down to the gap between the non-conscious and the conscious and therefore applies to any type of metaphysics that does not consider fundamental consciousness. I recently read works by Chalmers in which he argued that, in fact, in the case of a neutral substance (neither material nor mental), the hard problem does not necessarily apply.

A. Does materialism have a particular handicap compared to other types of metaphysics that do not consider fundamental consciousness, and if so, what is this handicap?

B. Are there rational arguments to circumvent the hard problem in other types of metaphysics, or does neutral monism / panprotopsychism collapse into mysterianism?

http://www.amherstlecture.org/chalmers2013/chalmers2013_ALP.pdf

Does materialism have a particular handicap compared to other types of metaphysics that do not consider fundamental consciousness, and if so, what is this handicap?

The particular handicap when it comes to materialist theories of consciousness is that we make a substance that is antithetical to consciousness and then try to paste consciousness into this substance. I think that the hard problem is more of an epistemic gap and should not be used to try and make ontological conclusions about the place of consciousness in reality,

Are there rational arguments to circumvent the hard problem in other types of metaphysics, or does neutral monism / panprotopsychism collapse into mysterianism?

I don't think the problem can be circumvented by showing how consciousness arises from matter, but I would block any ontological conclusions made from the hard problem. I am a mysterian when it comes to consciousness so I think that the hard problem exposes a fundamental epistemic block we have to conceptualising how consciousness arises from matter, but this cannot be used to justify ontological statements about consciousness being fundamental, or in the other direction it cannot be used to justify that consciousness is an illusion. Other metaphysics would only have the hard problem if they assume that consciousness is emergent from matter. Panpsychism to me just sounds like people are moving from our epistemic limitations on understanding consciousness to an unjustified ontological conclusion about matter having protoconsciousness which we have no evidence for. Neutral monism to me makes zero sense because I cannot even conceptualise what this mystery third substance would be.

I haven't seen a poll of professional philosophers in relation to this question, so I can't vouch that "most living philosophers" accept the hard problem as stated.

I'd very slightly change the formulation and instead say that the so called "hard problem", has generated of a lot of literature in contemporary philosophy.

You ask 10 different philosophers, and you'll get 10 different replies. Some take it to be solvable, others don't.

Personally, I side with those who think that it is not solvable in a manner in which we would like the answer to be, namely, to explain how matter produces experience.

Much more importantly, in my view, is that it is only one of many "hard problems". We've gotten so used to accepting these problems, that they don't bother us anymore: gravity was hard problem for Newton, motion was a problem for Locke and Hume and many others, the identity of objects is a hard problem going back to Heraclitus, and so on.

Your statement implies the belief commonplace subjective experiences should be easily accessible to the objectivist methodologies of science. It also implies the subjective/objective distinction is a trivial matter and should therefore be no problem for science.
— ucarr

Neither of these statements is true. — T Clark

I think the following list of your statements within this conversation support my interpretation above. In my opinion, they intend to show objectivist science is well on its way to explaining the subjective mind.

Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who studies the biological foundations of mental processes, including consciousness. The book I have is "The Feeling of What Happens." — T Clark

In the same way, mental processes, including consciousness, are not nothing but biology. But they are bound by biology in the same way that recorded music is bound by a CD or MP3 reader or radio — T Clark

If it can't be known by science, how can it be known. How do you know it?... You don't. — T Clark

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

the fact that many people cannot conceive that consciousness might have a physical basis is not evidence that it doesn't. — T Clark

You haven't provided any evidence that "Scientists examining "the hard problem" indicate how, regarding this question, the division between subjective/objective is deep and treacherous." — T Clark

Wayfarer has already done this on our behalf.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
— David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Hard Problem — Wayfarer

You're kind of a dick. — T Clark

Was the above ad hominem incited by,

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

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

I think your answer to this question is the essence of our debate. Why does the issue of this question enrage you? If I've enraged you by some other means, cite an example. If you're not enraged, why the hate speech?

Keith Frankish's illusionism argument. That the brain is performing the equivalent of a magic show, tricking us into thinking there's something about consciousness that turns it into the hard problem. I can't be sure exactly what his argument amounts to. He seems to be denying the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, since those are what leads to the hard problem. So I guess he's arguing for a functional account with the added twist that are brains trick us into say things like the "redness of red", or there's something it's like to be a bat, which we can't discover with neuroscience. It only seems like we have qualia.

Chalmers has said that if there is a dissolution of the hard problem, the meta-problem of explaining why we think there's a hard problem has to first be addressed. Frankish attempts to do that. I just don't know whether it seems like I'm phenomenally conscious is different than actually being conscious in the hard sense.

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard? — Banno

Again - the point of Chalmer's essay was the audience he has in mind, namely, those who claim that the whole question is basically one for science. It's a 'hard problem' for those who think the nature of consciousness (or being) can be given in purely objective terms. But as per your usual practice, you're seeking to steer the debate in a way that allows you to dismiss it, but without actually ever having indicated that you're addressing it.

So again, for the sake of the debate, the key paragraph from Chalmer's original paper:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. — David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

States of experience inhere in subjects of experience, and the subject of experience is never found amongst the objects of scientific analysis - hence, according to the 'eliminative materialists', cannot be considered real. (If I missed anything, let me know.)

I suppose that I should also mention that this so called "hard problem" was already well-known to John Locke — Manuel

From the aspect that you have Lock considering a problem close to the one about consciousness --because Lock doesn't speak about consciousness per se-- I believe a lot of philosophers can be included in the pool. However, the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" is a scientific, not a philosophical one. That is, it starts and ends in the world of science:

"An explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science. Consciousness therefore presents a hard problem for science, or perhaps it marks the limits of what science can explain."
-- "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" (https://iep.utm.edu/hard-con/)

I disagree if you are denying that the Aristotelian approach disposes of Cartesian dualism, which was my actual claim. Identifying — Dfpolis

Actually your claim was that Aristotelian conceptual space provides a means for rejecting dualism. You say it in the op, "The article rejects dualism as a framework...", and you claim it in the opening page of the article, "Aristotle’s conceptual space is unburdened by dualism". I'm sure that if you meant that Aristotle's conceptual space provides the means for replacing a simple Cartesian dualism with a more complex dualism, you would have said so.

I'm being hard on you on this point, because I believe that you ought to leave your intentions as open and revealed as possible. If your intent is to reproduce and understand Aristotle's conceptual space for the purpose of applying it to some of the problems of modern science, that's one thing. But if your intent is to find principles for a rejection of dualism, which induces you to cherry pick Aristotle's writing and pretend to reproduce his conceptual space, that is a completely different objective.

The reason I'm so critical on this point, is that in our prior discussions you and I had disagreement as to what Aristotle says about where the form of the object comes from, when a natural object comes to have material existence. I told you that Aristotle seems quite clear to me, to compare the coming into being of a natural article to that of an artificial object. In this case, the form comes from an external source, the mind of the artist, and it is put into the matter. You insisted that Aristotle allowed that the form inhered within the matter itself, in a natural object. But of course Aristotle's analogy of comparing a natural object to an artificial object does not really allow for that interpretation.

It is an important difference, because by saying that the form of an object inheres within the matter, you interpret "form" as necessarily the property of matter. This allows you to deny dualism, and cling to emergence. However, to claim that Aristotle supports this position is simply wrong, because it completely neglects Aristotle's "Metaphysics", especially his cosmological argument where actuality is shown to be prior to potentiality. Therefore form must be prior to matter, and come from a source other than matter.

While it is peripheral to my article, I think you are looking in the wrong direction for the source of the concept of potency (dynamis). As I note in my hyle article, (https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=POLANR&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FPOLANR.DOC), the source of the concept is medical, referring to the hidden healing power of medicinals. A. then applied it to the argument against the reality of change in order to go between the horns of being and non-being. Thus, the origin and original application of the concept are physical, not mental. — Dfpolis

Aristotle's principal demonstration of the concept of "potential" is provided in his biology, "On the Soul", and he uses this concept to describe the powers of the soul, self-nourishment, self-movement, sensation, and intellection. The secondary explanation of "potential" is in his "Metaphysics" where he works extensively to establish the relationship between potential and matter. As such, he reality of "potential" which Aristotle argued for, is derived from introspection. It is subjective, mental. That the concept of "matter" is used as leverage against sophists who argued that change is not real, indicates exactly the opposite of what you claim. The concept is pulled from the subjective self, as the principle of continuity and identity, and applied to the physical, to validate the intuitive notion that a changing thing can maintain its identity as the same thing, despite changing. The sophists who would deny the reality of change would insist that at each moment the changing thing is a new thing, instead of allowing that the thing remains as the same thing, while its properties change.

quote="Dfpolis;784638"]The conclusion you cite is not based on the type-token distinction. That is only used to justify the use of introspection. The conclusion is based on the Hard Problem being an artifact of a dualistic (in the Cartesian sense) representation or conceptual space.[/quote]

You very clearly use the type-token distinction as the basis of your rejection of dualism. It is actually the only real argument against dualism which you provide in the article.

[quote=Denis F. Polis, The Hard Problem of Consciousness
& the Fundamental Abstraction]What is at stake is replicability. Since science seeks universal knowledge, data must, with few exceptions, be replicable by competent observers. Replicability is a type, rather than a token, property. We can never replicate a token observation, only the same type of observation. It is as absurd to reject replicable introspection because its token is private, as to reject Galileo’s observations because he made them in solitude.

Thus, the consciousness impasse is a representational, not an ontological, issue. Since humans
are psychophysical organisms who perceive to know and conceptualize to act, physicality and intentionality are dynamically integrated. Ignoring this seamless unity, post-Cartesian thought
conceives them separately – creating representational problems. The Hard Problem and the
mind-body problem both arose in the post-Cartesian era, and precisely because of conceptual
dualism. To resolve them, we need only drop the Fundamental Abstraction in studying mind.

Seeing dualism as a representational artifact disposes of both ontological and property dualism.
Properties depend not only on an object’s nature, but also on how we conceptualize it. For
example, we can justifiably think of an apple as red, or as having a certain spectral response.
While the intentional and physical theaters of operation seem disjoint, our abilities to know
material objects and to will physical acts spans them. Thus, a conceptual rather than an
ontological partitioning of human nature underlies both the Hard and mind-body problems.[/quote]

The statement that each instance of observation is particular, unique, and cannot be replicated is an ontological principle. That the truth and reality of this ontological principle produces a representational problem is another issue. It does not make the ontological issue into a representational issue, it just shows a representational issue which manifests from the ontological issue. To reject the FA, and deny the ontological separation between the representation and the thing represented, as the means for rejecting both ontological and property dualism, is just an imaginary fiction. It is not based in reality at all, therefore it serves no purpose toward a philosopher's seeking of truth.

I am not sure what you are saying here. We are able to know from experience, and so a posteriori, that all knowing involves a known object and a knowing subject. Whether we focus on one (as the FA does) or attend to both, is a matter of methodological choice. If attend to both, we are not employing the FA.

Further, I see no reason to think we know anything in a truly a priori way. — Dfpolis

To demonstrate my point, let's assume, as you say, that all knowing involves a known object and a knowing subject. There are certain necessary conditions, essential aspects of what constitutes a "knowing subject". One of these necessary conditions is the FA, (that there is a distinction between known and knower) as an a priori principle. The something known is not simply the knower, or else there is just a supposed knower, and no knowledge. Therefore we cannot know anything about knowing without reference to the FA. This is Descartes' principle. The thinking is logically prior to the being, and the point is that we cannot get access to the being without the thinking. Therefore we must address the thinking first, of which the FA is a basic part, there is something separate from the thinking, which is thought about. To proceed without the FA is to put the being before the thinking, but this renders the FA, which is very real as an intuition and a priori principle, as unintelligible. As a result the whole act of thinking and consequently knowing, also become unintelligible.

Evidence of this unintelligibility is your statement "I see no reason to think we know anything in a truly a priori way". Your method of placing being as prior to thinking has rendered the a priori as unintelligible to you, so your response is that the truly a priori cannot be apprehended by you.

The agent intellect does not create content. It actualizes (makes known) prior intelligibility, which is the source of known content. — Dfpolis

I believe this statement is derived from your faulty interpretation of Aristotle. What you call "prior intelligibility" is characterized by Aristotle as potential. Prior to being "discovered" by the geometer, (brought into actuality by the geometer's mind), the principles of geometry existed as potential. Within Aristotle's conceptual space this is an act of creation, just like the actions of an artist described above, creating a material object. The artist works to put form into the creation, and the form is not within the matter (potential) prior to the creation. So in the case of "discovering" ideas, the form, which is the essence of the idea, comes from the mind of the geometer in an act of creation, and this is an act of creation by the agent intellect. The need for the "agent" intellect is to account for the real causal activity of the intellect, creativity.

If the intelligible object had actual existence in some mode independent of the mind which "discovers" it, then it would have to be the passive intellect which receives it into the mind. The passive intellect is posited as a receptor, because it is necessary to have something which can receive the forms of sensible objects through sensation. So if these intelligible objects exist independently they would have to exist as potential if it is the agent intellect which acts on them. However, the cosmological argument demonstrates that it is impossible for potential to exist independently of form, therefore the reality of such independent potential is denied. Therefore the Christian theologians posited independent Forms, as prior to material existence, to account for the forms of natural objects.

That is the standard Scholastic view. My view is more complex, and is given in my hyle article. Briefly, hyle plays a passive role in cases where there is an intelligent agent informing a result, but not in natural substantial change, where it is a "source of power." — Dfpolis

But don't you see this as an inconsistency? You are assigning to matter special powers to act which are inconsistent with the concept in Aristotle's conceptual space. This is the problem which the Neo-Platonists ran into, assuming The One, to be absolute infinite potential. It has no actuality, therefore no act, and the becoming of material objects cannot be accounted for because there is no act as causation. That matter cannot have such special power is the reason why the cosmological argument is so powerful. So we need to release this idea, which gives matter special power, creating inconsistency in Aristotelian conceptual space, and respect the force of the cosmological argument. Potential (matter) on its own could have no power to act. Therefore we need to assume some source of actuality, a Form, which is independent from matter, and prior to the existence of material objects, which produces an actual material form.

The seed of this idea is found in Aristotle's biology, the definition of soul which you cited, the first actuality of a body having life potentially in it. When we look at living things, we see that organization is within the body even at the most fundamental level. The body is organized as soon as it is a body, it comes into being as an organized, living body. Further, there must be an actuality which causes the existence of the organized body. As cause of the organized body, this first actuality must be prior to the body itself.

This is the principle which is drawn out further in his Metaphysics, to apply to all natural things. A material object consists of matter and form. And, by the law of identity the object must be what it is, it cannot be something other than it is. Therefore when the object comes into existence as an orderly thing, its form must be prior to its material existence, to account for it being what it is rather than something else. As in the case of the artist, the form comes from somewhere other than the matter. And, absolutely speaking, there must be a Form which is prior to all material existence, so this reinforces the conclusion that the form comes from somewhere other than the matter.

It is as if you said: "Hard problem? What hard problem? There is no hard problem. Consciousness just is. No further explanation is needed or possible." — Fooloso4

The ‘hard problem’ argument is aimed at a specific audience namely those reductionists who claim there is or can be a physical explanation for the nature of consciousness. It’s a hard problem for naturalism. But there is no such problem for those who don’t make that claim.

:up:

If you disagree that the article proposes a solution to the hard problem, then what would you say the article is about? — Luke

A rehash of what's already been written about phenomenal experience in philosophy, except with fancy words and invention or creative license, which unfortunately is unwarranted since he was actually talking about biological and physiological activities. We have scientific records, no need to invent things. — L'éléphant

Which is it? Is it a rehash of what's already been written about phenomenal experience in philosophy or is he actually talking about biological and physiological activities?

Here again are passages lifted from the article -- passages are in quote marks: (I suppose I have to work harder because I'm in the minority of disagreeing with his "solution")

Let’s imagine, however, that as the animal’s life becomes more complex, it reaches a stage where it would benefit from retaining some kind of ‘mental record’ of what’s affecting it: a representation of the stimulus that can serve as a basis for planning and decision-making.

A mental record, in other words, a temporal perception, which has already been written about a thousand times by the likes of Descartes, Hume, A. Shimony, etc. — L'éléphant

Please cite references to their work that addresses the hard problem of consciousness regarding how or why qualia could have evolved, or why we have any phenomenal experiences at all.

I believe the upshot – in the line of animals that led to humans and others that experience things as we do – has been the creation of a very special kind of attractor, which the subject reads as a sensation with the unaccountable feel of phenomenal qualia.

What are these attractors? He explains it in this passage:

And, I suggest, this development is game-changing. Crucially, it means the activity can be drawn out in time, so as to create the ‘thick moment’ of sensation (see Figure 2c above). But, more than that, the activity can be channelled and stabilised, so as to create a mathematically complex attractor state – a dynamic pattern of activity that recreates itself.

It means retrieving the information from memory. — L'éléphant

Is that all it means?

You have not specified where you disagree with the article. I take it you disagree that the author is proposing a theory of the evolution of phenomenal experience which would help to resolve the hard problem of consciousness? However, this disagreement is already addressed by what you've quoted above, which indicates the author has a theory regarding "the creation of a very special kind of attractor, which the subject reads as a sensation with the unaccountable feel of phenomenal qualia." That is the topic of the article. You may have missed the fact that the author proposes a theory regarding the evolution of phenomenal consciousness.

Here is a snippet from the article's introduction:

Why do visual sensations, as experienced in normal vision, have the mysterious feel they do? Why is there any such thing as what philosophers call ‘phenomenal experience’ or qualia – our subjective, personal sense of interacting with stimuli arriving via our sense organs? Not only in the case of vision, but across all sense modalities: the redness of red; the saltiness of salt; the paininess of pain – what does this extra dimension of experience amount to? What’s it for? [....]

Sensation, let’s be clear, has a different function from perception. Both are forms of mental representation: ideas generated by the brain. But they represent – they are about – very different kinds of things. Perception – which is still partly intact in blindsight – is about ‘what’s happening out there in the external world’: the apple is red; the rock is hard; the bird is singing. By contrast, sensation is more personal, it’s about ‘what’s happening to me and how I as a subject evaluate it’: the pain is in my toe and horrible; the sweet taste is on my tongue and sickly; the red light is before my eyes and stirs me up.

It’s as if, in having sensations, we’re both registering the objective fact of stimulation and expressing our personal bodily opinion about it. But where do those extra qualitative dimensions come from? What can make the subjective present created by sensations seem so rich and deep, as if we’re living in thick time? [....]

In attempting to answer these questions, we’re up against the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’: how a physical brain could underwrite the extra-physical properties of phenomenal experience. [....]

I believe sensations originated as an active behavioural response to sensory stimulation: something the animal did about the stimulus rather than something it felt about it. — Nicholas Humphrey

What discussion title would you have used instead? — Luke

"Nicholas Humphrey's Seeing and Somethingness -- His Personal Account of What Goes On In Our Brain If or When We Have Sensations For Those Who Have Not Studied Or Read Or Understood Neuroscience". — L'éléphant

It's a bit wordy. Also, it isn't the topic of the article. The article proposes a theory of the evolution of qualia, about how and why qualia evolved.

I don't believe it's possible to define the hard problem in such a way that it cannot be solved or has not already been solved. Chalmers originally defines it as the problem of explaining how consciousness arises from matter. and in this form it isn't even difficult. The problem seems to be ideological rather than philosophical.

There's no possible characterization of consciousness. It is utterly primitive to us as information-processing creatures. — Apustimelogist

Very much agree. So did Kant. He placed the origin of the both the world and the intellect prior to the categories of thought. If you assume it is primitive then you have solved the hard problem. There are still plenty of difficulties to overcome but none that are intractable.

I found your post above perceptive and a good summary of the situation, but unnecessarily pessimistic/ .

I think fundamental ontology is likely impossible to comprehend and the next step is a computational or informational explanation of why that is and for how that hard problem arises in intelligent machines like us in the first place.

This would be a hopeless approach for for the reasons you give. A fundamental theory must look beyond computation and intellection.

But if you think human beings are are intelligent machines or one of Chalmers' zombies then I'm afraid you're stuck with the hard problem for all eternity. This assumption renders the problem impossible. .

.

. .

Who actually has a suggestion though? — Apustimelogist

Have you examined the suggestions of the Buddha, Lao Tzu and the Upanishads? Afaik there is no other explanation for consciousness that works. .

When I say experience is primitive, I just mean in a kind of epistemic sense - experiences are immediately apparent and intuitive to us and they don't have an explicit characterization... I just see blue, I cannot tell you what it is/

Okay. But I''m speaking ontologically. I'm suggesting that consciousness in its original state is prior to experience and is known simply as what it is. . .

My whole experience (tentatively I would say consciousness) is just a stream of these things. They cannot be reduced further... they are the bottom and foundation for everything I know and perceive. That is to say nothing about reality but just that experiences are the primitive, irreducible foundation of what I know and perceive.

If you explore your consciousness I predict that you'll eventually discover that consciousness is not a stream of things. These 'things; are the contents of consciousness, not the phenomenon itself. Meditation is the practice of seeing beyond these things to their underlying basis. This basis is beyond time and space, and knowing this is what 'enlightenment' means in Buddhism. . .

Not sure what you mean by experience-experiencer duality beyond conventional dualism. I am not sure what "experiencer" means.

An experience requires an experiencer. I;m suggesting that if you explore your consciousness you are capable of transcending this duality for the final truth about consciousness. The task would be to 'Know thyself', as advised by the Delphic oracle. When Lao Tzu is asked how he knows the origin of the universe he answers, 'I look inside myself and see'. . .

Again, my notion of primitiveness just relates to the immediate, irreducible apprehension of experiences after which there is nothing more basic epistemically.

This is a very bold assumption. I wonder whether you realise that what you're proposing is that the nondual doctrine of the Perennial philosophy is false,. .

I don't think you can have consciousness free of information nor do I understand why you think this is required for a solution.

An information theory without an information space is not fundamental or even coherent. You may believe that consciousness cannot be free of information, but it is telling that having made this assumption you cannot explain metaphysics, consciousness, or the hard problem. Have you considered that your problems may be caused by your own assumptions? .

I don't think there is priority here. If there is information, it exists on an information space; n information space is defined by the information in it. One doesnt come before the other

In order to draw a Venn diagram one must first have a blank sheet of paper. .

I don't see what your alternative suggestion could possibly be if you don't believe dualism is true. Regardless of what you think the fundamental reality is, the evidence is overwhelming about how consciousness relates to or can be characterized in terms of brains in a functional sense (I hope you understand what I mean when I say functionally). What is your alternative characterization?

My suggestion is that consciousness is prior to number and form and that its function is simply knowing. All the rest is cogitation, intellection and conceptualisation. If you cannot imagine my alternative suggestion then this can only be because you've not studied philosophy beyond the walls off the Academy. You'll find the same suggestion in every book you ever read on mysticism. Those who investigate consciousness rather than speculate come back to report that at its root consciousness is prior to number and form and free of concepts and ideas. . ,

I am starting to think you haven't understood anything I have said at all. Its hard to believe now that you could have said my previous post was perceptive and a good summary if you really understood it. Neither have I been trying to think about some fundamental theory that resolves the hard problem. My initial post said that I didn't think the so called hard problem could be solved at all.

Yes. So I chipped in to say it was solved long ago and is easy to solve. The solution would be to abandon dualism and pay attention to what those who study consciousness have to say about it. It is astonishing how few people bother to do this, and so not at all surprising that so many people struggle with the hard problem. . . .