Proving mind-body dualism is sort of the opposite of Chalmers' goal. The word "physical" was originally a medical term distinguishing bodily ailments from mental ones. We've long since learned that mental problems often have physical causes, so Cartesian duality was diminished by that. Chalmers pointed out that as scientists investigated functions of consciousness, experience or phenomenal consciousness seemed to remain outside the grasp of scientific language. He believes that inserting experience into the scientific vocabulary as a thing to explain would advance the science of consciousness.

I'm reading a book now that attempts to pinpoint when in the evolutionary story phenomenal consciousness appeared in animals. In the introduction, the author talks about Chalmers in order to clarify what the topic of the book is: that it's about experience as opposed to functionality. The fact that this has to be explained is a testament to our legacy of mind-body dualism.

If you get that distinction: function vs accompanying experience, then you don't need the P-zombie as a philosophical tool. You're seeing the difference. As for whether its possible, it's at least metaphysically possible, which just amounts to being able to imagine the p-zombie.

Or are you saying you can't imagine the p-zombie at all?

We accept the simple abstract pixelated icon as-if it is the complex concrete mechanism inside the black box computer. And that acceptance is a useful belief for our non-technical purposes. What we see is 2D pixels, constructed by 4D computer processes, to represent some aspect of reality outside the box. Hence, Hoffmane asserts : "we see the theories we believe". You and I act as-if our senses are reporting reality, when actually all they see is the symbols. In other words, we see reality in the form of as-if ideas, not as-is matter & energy.

We do have limited resolution due to biological size scale structure of the sensory input. We also do not perceive directly even these low resolution signals due to subsequent signal processing, but only some form of composition bundled together with predictions or expectations based on earlier input, memory and the current state of mind.

However, none of it means outside reality is not what we perceive it is, only means our perception is blurred, both spatially and temporally. But if you could sense every tiny vibration, or quality of each atom in every molecule, and see all of the electro-magnetic spectrum, then perhaps you would be staring into the pure chaos and things would only make less, not more sense. So limits are not necessarily a bad thing, they can help put things into a context or bring them under a certain perspective.

We have microscopes and telescopes to artificially increase our resolution, and what we see on macro and micro scale is structurally/geometrically consistent with what we perceive through our biological resolution, more or less. This gives us confidence that reality is objectively real and indeed like what we think it is, as much as it matters to us at least. Therefore, any other proposition about reality can hardly be any less speculative than that.

I do consider mathematics as a kind of fundamental law of nature independent from human experience. — ovdtogt

Lots of folks would follow suit.

I rather think that Nature has its intrinsic relations, which we observe and explain to ourselves by means of mathematics, specifically developed for that purpose alone. We also create the laws, but the laws represent the principles under which Nature seems to operate, at least as far as humans are concerned, and also at least as far as we can tell.

Events in Nature occur in succession, which is independent of human experience, but only humans call that succession “time” and only humans recognize “cause and effect” from it, which are hardly independent of human experience.

If you think math is independent of human experience, how would you explain how we came to be in possession of it?

digestion isn't a presupposition for our very knowing — schopenhauer1

Can’t think on an empty stomach!

There is something about brain states that allows the very knowing of all the other states and this is really what makes it unique. — schopenhauer1

Sure but

So it is not just equivocating brain states with mental states — schopenhauer1

But I don’t see how this follows. What is the problem with equivocating brain states with mental states?

but what we are really asking in a philosophical sense is why is there an "inner feeling" at all with mental states? — schopenhauer1

I’m not sure if you’re alluding to the hard problem here. But if you are then I would say, if the problem makes sense, it’s not interesting anyways. It’s like asking “why is there gravity at all with matter”? Who cares? There just is.

If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain... Does this mean we are closed off from others in some kind of profound way? — Andrew4Handel

The philosophical problem is created because we are focused on the number of things and their being identical. "They are two people, so how do we know their, say, pain, is identical". And we picture this as when there are two blocks but the identical color; we say the color is the same, and that it is one color.

But with people it is more like when we both have cars; we each have our own car, but if both of our cars are Porsche 911s, we have the same car (to the extent they can be described the same). Wittgenstein puts it like this:

Another person can't have my pains."—Which are my pains? What counts as a criterion of identity here? Consider what makes it possible in the case of physical objects to speak of "two exactly the same", for example, to say "This chair is not the one you saw here yesterday, but is exactly the same as it". In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain. — Wittgenstein, Philososphical Investigations, #253

So we can have the same pain ("I have a searing headache on the back of my head", "me too!", as @Banno points out), and memory, dream, thought, etc. However, the real issue is that we each have our own body, so you have to express your pain for it to be said it is the same as mine (my pain is "private" like a secret, not "private" as if unable to be had by another). So we feel unsure of this descriptive solution, as if the problem remains. Philosophy mistakenly takes it as a ("hard") problem of knowledge, in the sense of certainty (and so "correlation" or "identity" become the sticky points).

But the simple truth is that, yes, we can be closed off from others in a profound way. You may not express your pain as the same as mine, and I may reject your expression of pain. This knowledge is different than certainty, it is the acknowledgement of pain. In this sense, I may not acknowledge that you are in pain, react to your claim that you are in pain with: "I know" (your pain). I may not accept that my heartache is the same as yours (I am putting on a brave face; or I won't let you make a fool of me).

Not to be known is thus your conviction (PI, p. 223 3rd), not an intellectual lack (me not being certain of your experience @Michael). Language can bridge any divide between us, but we must remain responsible to being intelligible to each other (Cavell).

To those who agree with the OP, me inclusive, try this on for size: The HARD problem of consciousness

I am not going to disagree with you (as there are all sorts of senses in which you are right), but on a low level, I'm not sure why asking for a method by which we try to evaluate the medium in which we exist and whether it would not be better to exist in a different medium is not an invitation to do philosophy with me. In as much as there is the suggestion that language (i.e. community) sets the rules for what questions are tractable (or not), it seems to be the case that even if different questions don't arise in a new language, perhaps other answers will. It is like trying to solve a math problem in one field using tools of another - sometimes it is a waste of time (impossible, possible but vastly less efficient, etc.) and sometimes it makes a hard problem easy.

In the end, we have but one life (or one moment) to do as we will, and as far as I can tell, it requires a choice. Making the right choice, knowing what the right choice is, knowing what the choice is, knowing how to make the right choice, and making a choice wisely are not the same thing. Doing philosophy tends to be about making choices wisely, no?

I don't totally agree with you. I see no complete certainty in intellectual matters for us on earth. At the back of my mind I suspect it is all just matter that we know and think with. If I could prove spirituality it would be based on faith no more, right? — Gregory

That depends on what you mean by certainty. If by certainty you mean the impossibility of self-doubt, then I agree that that is impossible for a human to have. But doubt can sometimes be more of a psychological than an epistemological state. I have no epistemic reason to doubt that my plane will almost certainly arrive safely at its destination, for instance, but I still might experience fearful doubt psychologically. But if by certainty you mean adequate justification to constitute a genuine item of knowledge, then I disagree. For instance, I believe we have adequate justification to know that 1+1=2. And while we might doubt this in psychological way, or come up with a wild thought experiment that causes us to question this knowledge, I don't think either of these are sufficient to undermine our knowledge that 1+1=2.

I also don't think you need faith to believe in spiritual realities. I think the hard problem of consciousness provides adequate reason to believe that sentient beings are not purely material. Perhaps you can argue that I'm wrong about this, but I think it's at least theoretically plausible that sufficient evidence exists to justify belief in spiritual realities.

( 6 ) What it feels like to be in a reflexive, ongoing, intentional, historicising, projective, story telling and unitary affective state. What is it like.

I imagine much of the dispute regarding whether neuroscience and its philosophical analysis suffices for an explanation concerns whether ( 6 ) should be included in the list. — fdrake

What is awkwardly referred to as 'what it is like' is actually just describing 'being'. It is what 'being' refers to, when we use the term 'human being'. The human being is the subject who makes judgements, conducts scientific experiments, devises hypotheses and so on. But at the same time, the subject is never within the frame, so to speak, on the obvious grounds of not being among the objects of analysis. This was the basic thrust of Husserl's critique of naturalism, and one of the reasons phenomenology is most often cited as the basis for an alternative approach to objective analysis.

First of all we not only analyze first person experience.... — Nickolasgaspar

Mental is just a label we place on properties produced by specific physical processes in the brain. — Nickolasgaspar

You have a blind spot in respect of the issue at hand. 'Facing up to the hard problem of consciousness' is not trivial or redundant, but a statement about the inherent limitations of objective, third-person science with respect to the nature of first-person experience.

There's some scientific validation of the fact that this really is a hard problem. As it is relevant to the topic, I'll quote at length from The neural binding problem(s), Jerome Feldman. There's a section on 'the subjective unity of perception' which begins as follows:

There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008).

The reference to Chalmers is to the 'facing up to the hard problem' paper. He continues:

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. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. ....

Traditionally, the Neural Binding Problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades (rapid movement of the eye between fixation points). But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. 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).

So, contrary to all of the journal articles that you continue to cite, the subjective unity of perception, which is a major aspect of the 'hard problem', remains unexplained, and indeed inexplicable, according to this paper, which essentially provides scientific validation for the argument made in Chalmer's original article.

Essentially your approach is both 'scientistic' and positivist. You claim that if something cannot be made subject to scientific analysis, then it amounts to 'special pleading' or 'making excuses' or 'introducing red herrings'. But many of the philosophical objections to scientism - which is basically the belief that all that can be known, can be known by means of science - are cogent and well documented. If you spent a bit more time reading philosophy, and a bit less evangalising neuroscientific reductionism, you might begin to appreciate that.

If there is no hard problem, we should be able to reach scientific or philosophical consensus on those types of questions. — Marchesk

There is lack of consensus whenever testable hypotheses are absent. One of the consequences of that absence is language on holiday which is what dualism is.

Consider the opening sentence on Wikipedia for the hard problem: "The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why sentient organisms have qualia or phenomenal experiences ..." (italics mine).

You can see how dualism is built into the problem statement. Remove the italicized words and the problem becomes the much clearer one of explaining sentience - something that scientists can work with. That is, differentiating sentient creatures from non-sentient creatures (which we can point to) and providing testable hypotheses for explaining those differences.

Right, dualism is just one possible answer to the hard problem. — Marchesk

So my claim is that dualism is the root cause of the hard problem.

I see your argument as not advancing anything other than what we know. People experience quale, we can converse about it. — schopenhauer1

People converse about ghosts too. I'm suggesting that if we seek to define the problem in natural language then the ghosts will eventually fade away. See my reply to Marchesk above.

Consciousness causes wave collapse - It is not currently possible to empirically differentiate between interpretations of quantum mechanics.

True, but this is true for almost every interpretation of quantum mechanics. The only ones I know of that have actually been tested are some forms of objective collapse, which appear to have been falsified. There are ideas on how we might test MWI or information theoretic "It From Bit," models but they are well beyond our current technological capabilities.

Of course, "Consciousness Causes Collapse" (CCC) might be uniquely hard to falsify, but obviously it hasn't proven particularly difficult to reduce its cachet despite this-- it isn't very popular-- so I don't think this is too much of a threat.

It seems likely, to me at least but also to many others, that there never will be. That means it's metaphysics, not science, at least until the issue is resolved.

Right, but this is true of virtually all of quantum foundations. Mach famously held that atoms were unfalsifiable and unscientific. Quarks were held to be unfalsifiable pseudoscience until just a few years before they were "verified." Lots of elements of string theories are unfalsifiable.

My counterargument would be that if you bracket off these issues as non-scientific it puts a stigma on them (and indeed a prohibition on research in quantum foundations was dogmatically enforced from on high until the late-90s). Philosophers in general lack the skills and resources to pursue these ideas; they have to be done by physicists. In many cases, we see theories that are initially attacked as unscientific coming to mature and eventually develop means of testing the theory against others. This in turn, sometimes leads us to new theories that are not falsified, while existing dominant theories are, resulting in scientific progress. But even when such theories don't pan out, they often do manage to tell us things about the world or our surviving theories.

Per Poppers evolutionary view of science, we need such suppositions because they are the "mutations," that allow science to keep "evolving." Of course, most mutations result in the death of the organism (or the scientific career), but occasionally they are hugely successful.

In any event, we currently have a number of theories about what causes quantum phenomena that are empirically indiscernible given our current technology and knowledge. By what rights should we select any of them as canonical? The idea behind enforcing the Copenhagen Interpretation as orthodoxy was that this secured science against metaphysics, but this is not what it did. Instead, it enshrined a specific type of metaphysics and epistemology as dogmatism.

Fine Tuning Problem - There is no fine tuning problem. It's just an expression of a fundamental misunderstanding of what probability means and how it works.

How so? Certainly it's a problem that is taken seriously. The rapid coalescence of support for the Many Worlds Interpretation over that past decade is often based around the conception that the interpretation is "more likely," because it answers the Fine Tuning Problem. But of course, the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation seems to do that too, at least at first glance .

The hard problem of Consciousness - We have this argument over and over here on the forum. Many of us shake our heads when others tell us they can't conceive that consciousness and human experience can be understood scientifically.

I personally think it's incredibly premature to say that consciousness cannot be understood scientifically. But the question remains, "why do the origins of consciousness yield so slowly to the same methods that have allowed us to understand so many other phenomena with a great level of depth."

Answers to the Hard Problem are so diverse that I agree with the pronouncement that such diversity is indictive of a discipline that is flailing. When conferences on the topic have speakers talking about pan-psychism, Bayesianism, dualism, idealism, computation causes conciousness, quantum effects, etc., all as the missing basis for consciousness, i.e., everyone going in wildly different directions, it's not the sign of a problem that is proving tractable.

What this interpretation might do, however, is allow an explanation of why it's so hard to find consciousness using the same tools we use for understanding other complex processes. It shouldn't make it "unknowable," though. I don't think it's a huge merit, but one that occurred to me.

I won't clutter your thread any more with my skepticism. I don't mean to be disruptive.

Skepticism is fine. I'm deeply skeptical of CCC myself. It just occurred to me that, if one puts that aside, it does seem like it might offer up an answer for two big issues in the sciences. Rather than being an argument in favor of CCC though, this might be more of an argument against accepting MWI on the basis of it "solving" the Fine-Tuning Problem.



I found his book a little short on details. He seemed to be saying that things exist as they relate to one another and that relations are ontologically basic, not things. This really isn't all that different from the idea in metaphysics that things are essentially just a collection of the universals or tropes that describe them. This being the case, collapse occurs only relative to some other system. So, in the context of the Wigner's Friend experiment, the mystery is solved by the fact that no relationship between the friend outside the lab and the results of the experiment exist until just that time that the friend walks back into the lab and observes what has happened.

I think its an elegant way to put it but I do wonder if it wouldn't run into problems if explored more. It seems vulnerable to the same problems of identity that plague "bundle theories," in metaphysics. If an object is defined by its relations, then an object is actually continually becoming a different object; I am a different person when I'm in my dining room them when I'm in my living room, etc. It becomes difficult to ground propositions about entities when all we have is relations. Also, why do relations seemingly pop into existence at all times? Classical interpretations fix this problem by having entities, fields or particles, that exist regardless of their relations, but Rovel does away with these.

I do think that his starting point could work better with a process-based metaphysics though. If everything is essentially flux and pattern, and we classify objects as "emergent" or "mental constructs," then he might have less difficulties. The problem is that we tend to have a hard time thinking in terms of process and not objects; hence we had to wait a long time to think about heat in terms of motion instead of caloric, fire in terms of combustion instead of phlogiston, life in terms of process instead of elan vital, etc.

Yes, but the way you made it seem here:

Many of us shake our heads when others tell us they can't conceive that consciousness and human experience can be understood scientifically. — T Clark

You make it seem that the (fairly large) amount of people who acknowledge the hard problem deny the easy problems! Of course they don't deny that many aspects of physical correlates of consciousness can be observed such as processing, categorization, perceptual discrimination, and so on. Brain regions can be observed in an fMRI, neural networks can be modelled, brain chemistry can be analyzed. Matching behavior and mental aspects with their functional correlates in the brain can be conducted. No one is denying that easy problems are amenable to science. So I guess it is the way you worded it.

Rather, the "hard problemers" see the question of how/why the "what it's like" subjective/qualitative nature of consciousness as precisely not amenable to empirical methods. This article lays it out nicely:

Chalmers explains the persistence of this question by arguing against the possibility of a “reductive explanation” for phenomenal consciousness (hereafter, I will generally just use the term ‘consciousness’ for the phenomenon causing the problem). A reductive explanation in Chalmers’s sense (following David Lewis (1972)), provides a form of deductive argument concluding with an identity statement between the target explanandum (the thing we are trying to explain) and a lower-level phenomenon that is physical in nature or more obviously reducible to the physical. Reductive explanations of this type have two premises. The first presents a functional analysis of the target phenomenon, which fully characterizes the target in terms of its functional role. The second presents an empirically-discovered realizer of the functionally characterized target, one playing that very functional role. Then, by transitivity of identity, the target and realizer are deduced to be identical. For example, the gene may be reductively explained in terms of DNA as follows:

The gene = the unit of hereditary transmission. (By analysis.)
Regions of DNA = the unit of hereditary transmission. (By empirical investigation.)
Therefore, the gene = regions of DNA. (By transitivity of identity, 1, 2.)
Chalmers contends that such reductive explanations are available in principle for all other natural phenomena, but not for consciousness. This is the hard problem.

The reason that reductive explanation fails for consciousness, according to Chalmers, is that it cannot be functionally analyzed. This is demonstrated by the continued conceivability of what Chalmers terms “zombies”—creatures physically (and so functionally) identical to us, but lacking consciousness—even in the face of a range of proffered functional analyses. If we had a satisfying functional analysis of consciousness, zombies should not be conceivable. The lack of a functional analysis is also shown by the continued conceivability of spectrum inversion (perhaps what it looks like for me to see green is what it looks like when you see red), the persistence of the “other minds” problem, the plausibility of the “knowledge argument” (Jackson 1982) and the manifest implausibility of offered functional characterizations. If consciousness really could be functionally characterized, these problems would disappear. Since they retain their grip on philosophers, scientists, and lay-people alike, we can conclude that no functional characterization is available. But then the first premise of a reductive explanation cannot be properly formulated, and reductive explanation fails. We are left, Chalmers claims, with the following stark choice: either eliminate consciousness (deny that it exists at all) or add consciousness to our ontology as an unreduced feature of reality, on par with gravity and electromagnetism. Either way, we are faced with a special ontological problem, one that resists solution by the usual reductive methods. — Hard Problem of Consciousness - IEP

So I suppose the extent to which one is content with an evolutionary frame is the extent to which one is willing to allow for other influence. — Isaac

No, I think by the time you're arbitrating between evolution or alternatives, you've already resolved the problem, or put it on hold. It's no longer relevant. The problem is conceptual and starts before that; at the conceptual stage. [EDIT: I'll leave the previous sentence in; I like it in all its ineptness. It perfectly expresses the muddle I feel when confronted with this problem.]

It's a very hard to grasp concept, which is why we help ourselves with conecepts such as p-zombies. A p-zombie and a person with first-person experience would both behave the same, and thus share the same evolution. What sort of test could we devise to tell if one is a p-zombie or not? If p-zombies are impossible, how can we conceptualise evidence for this?

P-zombies aren't the point. They're a wishy-washy pin-point of some intuitive niggle people have. But the niggle's there. And the problem's bigger: there's a continuum that starts with solipsism and ends in pan-psychism.

I personally am a mysterian - in the context of science: I don't think it's possible to resolve that, because for first person experience (the ultimate subjectivity possible) there's only ever a sample-size of one; and the sample possible is different for each scientist (always only their own). Normally, talking objectively about subjectivity is not a problem; subjects can be operationalised so you can talk about them. Neuroscience is definitely evidence of that. But you can't do that for the hard problem; the empirical substratus this is about goes away, if you do. You assume the outcome one way or another and go on to more interesting questions (evolution of brainstuff being one of them).

I think the doubling of bodies as something you have and something you are is relevant here (Helmuth Plessner has talked about that, I think; it's been years and I've forgotten too much). When I say that my keyboard is made up of atoms, I can conceptualise this a matter of scale. It's easy. When I say, consciousness is made up of neural activity (which is my default working assumption), all I have is a correlation; the nature of the connection eludes me. Given that I tend to figure stuff out by comparison, and given that I'll never be able to entertain more than one first-person-experience at a time, I suspect it'll continue to elude me.

(For what it's worth, the hard problem is little more than an interesting curiosity to me. When viewed as a problem it's hard, but for me it's hardly a problem.)

if you're trying to criticise Spinoza, — fdrake

I'm not here to criticize, I have nothing against Spinoza, especially when I myself used to believe in something very similar to his view. I'm here to understand. Every time I encounter a metaphysical idea related to consciousness (and spinozism is related to consciousness), I try to find out how is that related to materialism, panpsychism, epiphenomenalism, idealism, dualism, or if it's something totally new. I'm trying to find out how that metaphysical idea deals with the hard problem, the meta hard problem, the combination problem, the dissociation problem, or the interaction problem.
Insofar, depending on the interpretation one prefers, in my opinion, spinozism has to deal either with the hard problem (a non-conscious force causes consciousness), or the combination problem. Moreover, it always has to deal with epiphenomenalism, even if it's not a classical case of epiphenomenalism.
I'm not saying that by having to deal with those issues, a certain idea is automatically wrong. Maybe Spinoza manages to avoid those issues or to give a solution to them.

I thought we'd be able to take it for granted that something which emerges from a collective of agents isn't necessarily conscious - like countries weren't. If you need more examples to block the syllogism, a handshake of agreement emerges from the actions of two agents, but is not conscious. Is that a clearer example? — fdrake

I'm not arguing crowds are conscious, I don't think they are, but I think that's an argument against panpsychism. I'm just saying that I've repeatedly heard/read that in Spinoza was a panpsychist (even on Wikipedia) and that in his view everything has consciousness. I've also sent you a quote from Spinoza saying: “all [individual things], though in different degrees, are...animated”1
i. Now:
A. If he was a panpsychist - a rock is conscious, a mountain, which can be divided into rocks is also conscious. So on what basis two guys shaking hands cannot form a new conscious entity?
B. If S wasn't a panpsychist, please tell me where could I frame him? Was he a materialist, a dualist, an idealist? Can we consider his metaphysics totally out of these concepts, therefore avoiding all the issues those metaphysical ideas encounter?
If someone asked S about the hard problem or the combination problem, how would he respond?

So my question still remains. How come some modes have thoughts and others don't? — Eugen

Bluntly, I think for Spinoza "they just do", thought is part of the essence of God, rather than a derivative property coming from the combination of finite modes (like neurons and tissues in our bodies).

I also think it's the case that "how do finite modes combine together in order to express the attribute of mind" would be seen as a category error in Spinoza's terms, things of one attribute (extension) don't interact together to produce another (thought). Things (modes) with both aspects can interact, but the extension of one doesn't cause the thought of another, so to speak. Contrast a doctrine like emergence, which says that if you get enough of the right kind of matter doing the right kind of thing, you get consciousness. In emergence you get the aggregate interaction of bodies causing thought. In Spinoza, that would make the attributes productively interact, so that logic of non-delimitation would come into play.

I think, much more tentatively here than before:

Spinoza says no to: Stuff interacts in a human body alone to produce thought.
Spinoza says yes to: Stuff interacts in a human mode during the production of thoughts.

Why no to the first and yes to the second? A human considered as a mode is both a thinking thing and an extended thing, the human body with the mind truncated out of it - a mass of interacting tissues and electrochemical signals - isn't a thinking thing, it's the body of a thinking thing.

Note.—Before going any further, I wish to recall to mind what has been pointed out above—namely, that whatsoever can be perceived by the infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, belongs altogether only to one substance: consequently, substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now through the other. So, also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, though expressed in two ways. This truth seems to have been dimly recognized by those Jews who maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things understood by God are identical. For instance, a circle existing in nature, and the idea of a circle existing, which is also in God, are one and the same thing displayed through different attributes. Thus, whether we conceive nature under the attribute of extension, or under the attribute of thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find the same order, or one and the same chain of causes—that is, the same things following in either case.

I said that God is the cause of an idea—for instance, of the idea of a circle,—in so far as he is a thinking thing; and of a circle, in so far as he is an extended thing, simply because the actual being of the idea of a circle can only be perceived as a proximate cause through another mode of thinking, and that again through another, and so on to infinity; so that, so long as we consider things as modes of thinking, we must explain the order of the whole of nature, or the whole chain of causes, through the attribute of thought only. And, in so far as we consider things as modes of extension, we must explain the order of the whole of nature through the attributes of extension only; and so on, in the case of the other attributes. Wherefore of things as they are in themselves God is really the cause, inasmuch as he consists of infinite attributes. I cannot for the present explain my meaning more clearly. — Spinoza, Ethics

What's the fundamental difference between a human being and a rock in Spinoza's view?

Doubtlessly you will find this answer unsatisfying, but the human being is a thinking thing and the rock isn't.

I don't know if you're going to find "bodies interacting to produce thoughts" in Spinoza, to my mind his metaphysics is in part a clever attempt to neuter that issue!

Could Spinoza's idea survive if the hard problem or the combination problem were true? What do you think, ↪fdrake ? — Eugen

I don't think the hard problem or combination problem are particularly relevant to Spinoza's thought. The claims that "bodies can interact to produce thoughts", or "thoughts are only derivatives of the motion of unthinking substance", or "little conscious things interact to produce big ones" are already in contention with his system. If you take his system at face value, neither the combination problem nor the hard problem could be articulated without a category error. If you take the hard problem and the combination problem as genuine problems, you're already thinking in a manner opposed to Spinoza's philosophy.

I have no problem with the metaphysics description and the use of words that do not lean on the physical. My concern is that it should not be forgotten that it is all physical at its core. — Philosophim

That's where you and I agree & disagree. Many years ago, after becoming disillusioned by the fundamentalist religion of my youth, I may have tended toward the opposite worldview. But as I learned more about Reductive science --- took basic courses in all the major divisions of science in college --- I saw the "real" world differently. But I also began to appreciate the philosophical underpinnings of most world religions, especially their Integrated Holistic approach .

My emerging new worldview was influenced mainly by Quantum Physics and Information Theory, which I did not learn in college. Prominent physicist John A. Wheeler's "It from Bit" concept gave me a new way to understand the substance of the world, wherein the core is indeed "physical", but with tangible Matter animated & motivated by causal Energy, and organized by logical Information*1. More recently, quantum physicists began to equate Energy with both Matter and Information. There you have have a combination of Space (corporality) , Time (change), and Form (organization)*2. In Terrence Deacon's triad : Material Morphodynamics (form change) + Energetic Teleodynamics (directional change ; purpose) + Causal Homeodynamics (evolution). So. Enformationism is about all of the above, but not about Religion. Instead, its a novel philosophical & scientific understanding of the immaterial (quarks & qualia) foundations of Reality. :nerd:

*1.
a> In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. ____Wikipedia
b> In physics, energy is a property intrinsic to anything that is able to interact in the universe. ___Wiki
c> Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. ___Wiki
Note --- You could say that I am a Physicalist (matter + energy), but not a Materialist (matter is all). However, it now seems that shape-shifting Information (EnFormAction) is all.

*2. Experimental test for the mass-energy-information equivalence principle :
A recent conjecture, called the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, proposed that information is equivalent to mass and energy and exists as a separate state of matter.
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/sci/article/2022/9/091111/2849001/A-proposed-experimental-test-for-the-mass-energy

I agree. I've noted several times that it is currently impossible to objectively evaluate someone else's subjective experience. But do note that this problem does not go away even if we remove science. — Philosophim

Objective or empirical evaluation of subjective experience may be an oxymoron. But Subjective theoretical evaluation of subjective Ideas is what Philosophy*2 is all about. No need to "remove" the reasoning of Science, just the requirement for empirical evidence. :smile:

*2. Purpose of Philosophy :
The study of philosophy enhances a person's problem-solving capacities. It helps us to analyze concepts, definitions, arguments, and problems. It contributes to our capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from large quantities of information.
https://www.jmu.edu/philrel/why-study-philosophy/why-study-philosophy.shtml

New perspectives should always be brought forward, but they must be tested against the hard rock of existence. — Philosophim

Rock on! New philosophical perspectives on specific material subjects (hard rocks) are indeed tested for empirical evidence. But new paradigms of universal concepts (worldviews) can only be tested for rational consistency, and conformance with ontological coherence. :cool:

I really appreciate your viewpoints as well Gnomon! I'm glad you're not taking my points the wrong way. I greatly enjoy chatting with thinkers like yourself, and I think you're setting up your language and approach to science and consciousness that is palatable to someone like myself. — Philosophim

Anthropologist Terrence Deacon's predecessor in the study of humanity, Polymath Gregory Bateson, unlike Shannon, defined "Information" as the Difference (distinction) that makes a Difference (meaning) to the observer*3. Since groundbreaking holistic scientists like Deacon & Bateson are not well known by professionals in the "hard" sciences, their vocabulary, and mine, may not be "palatable" to their Reductive way of thinking. But it should be acceptable to those of us in the "soft" science of Philosophy. The study of Minds does not lend itself to the knife-wielding dissection methods of Material science. :wink:

*3. In his 1972 book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson developed his idea of a "difference that makes a difference" in his talk to Alfred Korzybski's Institute of General Semantics. The talk was entitled "Form, Substance, and Difference." Form and substance referred to the famous Korzybski maxim "the map is not the territory."
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bateson/

PS___Speaking of "vive la Difference"*4; one way to discuss the difference between philosophical evidence and scientific evidence is to think about the "hard" question of sexual attraction. For example, some men are crass materialists who view females as a loose aggregation of parts : t*ts, *ss, p*ssy, etc. But that analytical approach misses the intangibles of femininity that are so irresistible to those who appreciate the finer non-things of life. :joke:

*4. Who first said Vive la difference?
Anatole France is attributed with first declaring the wonderful refrain, “Vive la difference!” with particular reference to the differences between women and men.

Much of your post seems to be mischaracterization of the problem and/or a poor choice of terms.

Take your first sentence for instance:

The hard problem also has to do with the fact that we are trying to understand the very thing we are using to understand anything in the first place. — schopenhauer1

What do you mean by "understand"? How do you understand something you use, if not by using it?

Consciousness is the very platform for our awareness, perception, and understanding, so this creates a twisted knot of epistemology. Indeed, the map gets mixed into the terrain too easily and people start thinking they know the hard problem when they keep looking at the map again! — schopenhauer1

What do you mean by "map"? I can use the map to get around the world because the map is about the world. Also, the map is part of the world!

We cannot help it, as a species with language. Language itself is a form of secondary representation on the terrain. We largely think in and with language, so to get outside of that and then reintegrate it into a theory using language is damn near impossible. For example, let's take a computer. The very end result is some "use" we get out of a computer. The use is subjective though. Someone can use the computer as a walnut cracker, and it would still get use out of it. The users experience and use of the computer is what makes the computer the computer. Otherwise it is raw existence of a thing. A computer is nothing otherwise outside of its use to the user. — schopenhauer1

What do you mean by "use"? How can you use something without knowing, or understanding, anything about it? Could you use a pillow as a walnut cracker? Using a computer instead of a pillow for cracking walnuts says something about the nature of walnuts, pillows and computers, no?

Then, let's go down to the other end to its components. Computers are essentially electrical signals/waves moving through electrical wires- moving on/off signals. These electrical signals are just impulses of electricity through a wire. That is it. However, because we quantized and represented things into a MAP of 0 and 1, and further into logic gates that move information to make more quantified information, we now have a way of translating raw existing metaphysical "stuff" into epistemically represented information. Every time we look at any piece of raw stuff, we are always gleaning it informationally. — schopenhauer1

An analogy would be digitizing an analog signal. Our brains seem to compartmentalize the stream of information from the environment. The mental objectification of "external" processes and relationships makes it easier to think about the world to survive in it.

Some ways that try to answer the hard problem is to call consciousness raw "stuff" rather than information (panpsychism or some sort of psychism). It is a place holder for simply metaphysical "existing thing" that we then represent as "mind stuff" or "mentality" or "quale". Other than panpsychism, which is just a broad view of "mind stuff", there is not much else one can do to answer the hard problem, because it will ALWAYS have a MAP explanation of the terrain. What is an electrical signal if not simply represented as a mathematical equation, an on/off piece of data, a diagram, an output of usefulness (the use of a computer discussed earlier)? The raw stuff of existence can never be mined. The terrain is always hidden by the map. — schopenhauer1

This is kind of what I was wanting to get at when talking about the monistic solutions. If the rest of reality is really made of the same "stuff" as the mind, then I don't see a mind-body problem. I don't see a reason to be using terms like "physical" and "mental" to refer to different kinds of "stuff", rather than different kinds of arrangements, processes, or states, of that "stuff". This is also saying that the experiential property isn't necessarily a defining property of the "stuff", rather a particular arrangement of that "stuff". So you can have objects without any experiential aspect to them. In other words, realism can still be the case and the world and mind still be made of the same "stuff".

Physicalism and Panpsychism aren't really saying anything different. They are both saying that the mind and world are made of the same "stuff" that can interact. There are simply different kinds of arrangements, processes, or states of this "stuff". The only difference is what they call the "stuff" - "physical" or "mental".

It is very frustrating to the point of willed ignorance that you keep misinterpreting/misrepresenting the hard problem of consciousness. In your own words, can you even summarize it correctly?? — schopenhauer1

The hard problem of consciousness is a philosophical problem concerning why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences.[1][2] This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give humans and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information, perform behavioural functions, or provide behavioural reports, and so forth.[1]

The easy problems are considered "easy" not because they are literally easy, but because they are problems that are in principle amenable to functional explanations: that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioural, as they can be explained (at least in principle) purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon in question.[3][4][1] Proponents of the hard problem argue that conscious experience is categorically different in this respect since no mechanistic or behavioural explanation could explain the character of an experience, even in principle. — Wikipedia - Hard Problem of Conscioiusness

That.

I've never felt I've really understood the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness. Although not a new problem, David Chalmers seems to be the contemporary go-to source. Here he is in 1995 with 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness':
"It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does." [my italics in there]

It seems to me all this distils down this to two short questions:
• Why do we have consciousness?
• How can we have consciousness?

Why Consciousness?
Consider that consciousness contains mental models of the world and its phenomena. Not a single, complete or accurate models certainly, but without doubt this still is a very adaptive feature. As humans have flourished via co-operative activity it’s not hard see the value of making abbreviated mental models we can transmit easily to others. Harvesting blackberries together we might discuss the ideal quality of that deep blue we know means a great pie will had at the end of the day. We'll probably share a good mental image of the topography of the area – discuss foraging directions, maybe even externalize this image with a little mud-map. That curious sensation of middle C is a usually rattlesnake around here, so best share that between our mental models as well. The day passes. When blissfully pondering all this I feel a twinge of anxiety as you catch me standing about savouring blackberries. You never do like me to leave you with all the work whilst I go about philosophizing - usually you punch me in the arm. Some internal realities are quickly updated to my mental model – with both your experienced emotions and mine - present, past and future. As the day progresses our similar but unique mental models constantly update as our external and internal conditions change and flow.

How Consciousness?
So, just in this, we have an everyday example of consciousness showing some pretty obvious functions at work. Familiar, but I doubt it’s a simple thing below the surface. In the pursuit of a piece of pie doubtless a great deal of complex brain activity went on. Had dragging about meters of cable through the brambles seemed more practical, I'm sure at least crude correlations of increased EEG brain activity could have been seen varying with demands of consciousness.

I think the workings of the material world is sufficient to account for this phenomenon (Physicalism is it?). While it's obviously too crude to say 'the mind is the brain' - it seems reasonable to propose the mind is at least 'a function of the brain'.

Patricia Smith Churchland derided mind-brain correlations such as Roger Penrose's theories, saying that "Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules." (Brain-wise: studies in neurophilosophy, 2002). I suspect this conflates ‘material substance’ with ‘material function’. We know very well of one way to model the world using tightly organised flows of energy through matter. We call this computing. Let me stress here that I’m not saying that the mechanics producing consciousness are just the same as for computing. But we at least know that very complex world-modelling occurs sans the pixie dust. Sure, it would be very nice to know exactly the minutest brain mechanisms involved. And I expect we will do, down the track, but even Darwin was not wrong until the discovery of genes.

To my mind what's more perplexing is the how of subjectivity. How can a thing be conscious of itself? Is there a little man in our heads who monitors our sensations and feelings? If so, who is conscious of this monitoring - another little man? That’s an oldie but a goodie, and I can't quite remember the author of this reductio (I think it was a reply to Descartes’s ‘ghost in the machine’, does anyone else know?). In any case, Nagel sparked concerns like again these back in during the Hard Problem's revival from the 1970s.
"If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account .." (OK, we've covered some of that ground but we’ll return to it)
"... But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view." ("What is it like to be a bat?" 1974).

Herein lies a questionable assumption: That consciousness consists of "a single point of view". In reality internal experience is often quite conflicted, and we are in least two minds about everything from a menu preference to ideas of jurisprudence. Despite what we say, we often aren't even fully aware of how we feel about things until our emotional responses to events interact over time with our thoughts about them. Personally I don't hold much faith in Freud, but one thing he got right is that a mental persona consists of far more than a "single point of view".

Physiologically that really shouldn't surprise us. Almost our entire brain is bifurcated and duplicated, not to mention subdivided into a complex web of many smaller structures all in continual inter-communication. Often these are working on different aspects of the same task – ‘parallel processing’ if you like. We don't need call upon an infinite series of observers to account for the subjective experience when just such a hall of mirrors would suffice: The inner life of self-consciousness may consist of one brain region of the interrogating another for results, then this process reversing and repeating towards resolution. Of course, when asked for if we want that second slice of pie we have to quickly gloss over this process and present a single view. The ‘single point of view’ is a necessary fiction, but a fiction nevertheless (here I think, is an interesting intersection with theories of personal identity)

Who is not familiar with subjective phenomena of an 'internal monologue'? Well, that's a question I'd love to see investigated. It might be very fruitful research to compare the reports of the internal monologue of people with very different brain anatomies, especially those with only one hemisphere (yes, surprisingly they can often function quite well) or those with a severed corpus callosum (that pencil-thin connective nerve bundle between the hemispheres).

Say no to Philosophical Zombies:
All this relates back to the 'why' question. If there was none of this inner modelling and updating then perhaps we wouldn't have or need any subjective experiences. We probably could get by as philosophical zombies - the kind of stimulus-response automata that B.F Skinner thought his lab rats were. (David Chalmers also came up with this image).

But being in two minds about things, while unfashionably indecisive, is very adaptive indeed:

First, playing out various consequences in a mental model hurts a whole lot less than relying on continual trial and error.

Second, we can also play out our own conflicting motivational processes in the relative safety of our own skulls - checking and balancing these against one another before acting in the world.

Third, we can model that vital element of human social reality – ‘other minds’. Thinking about how things effect other people's reactions is a vital faculty. Even better is to empathise with another. Doing this is almost to run their software on your own hardware. In the complexity of the human social world this seems far more adaptive than just running the basic zombie algorithm.

I'm sure there are many aspects to the Hard Problem I've overlooked. This is my first post. It’s blueberry pie I seek, not the humble stuff.

The hard problem of the hard problem of consciousness is that there's no good analysis of what explanations are, including (i) what makes something count as an explanation versus not count, and (ii) just what the relationship is between an explanation and what it's explaining. The ridiculous problem of the hard problem of the hard problem is that no one seems as if they could care less about this.

That's the point of the debate. If there's no hard problem, then it's just a matter of the easier problems amenable to neuroscience and psychology. Easier as in they don't cause a metaphysical or epistemological issue. — Marchesk

But we don't need a justification to ignore the hard problem. We can just concentrate on the easier problems regardless. It's not like the hard problems presents any barrier to physical research.

In addition, it seems to me that all Illusionism does is shift the problem. Isn't the problem of creating illusins of qualia just as hard?

The question does not make sense. Spinoza's metaphysics recognise the question has no answer because it fails to understand what it is talking about. — TheWillowOfDarkness

The question makes absolutely 100% sense. We assume one guy convinces Spinoza of something. That can lead to :
A. no difference, the ''something'' is not related to his metaphysics or even if it was, it wouldn't affect it;
B. It does somehow affect it and it would make Spinoza reconsider his own idea.

Any question some of you guys don't like, you just qualify it as a question that does not make sense.

it fails to understand what it is talking about. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'm pretty sure Spinoza would understand.

it is explained in that those to events (modes of extension) have relation of substance. — TheWillowOfDarkness

- could you please find another formulation for this? I tried google translate and I still couldn't understand. The sentence does not make sense in my native language.

you have to realise his system is saying the hard problem is logically impossible. — TheWillowOfDarkness

- that is not because he somehow proves that, but simply because Spinozism is not materialism, and the hard problem is framed in materialism. But I'm still failing to understand this:
in Spinozism, everything has a cause. Are those things that cause consciousness conscious? If not, what is Spinoza's explanation for how come non-conscious stuff causes conscious stuff. Simple as that.

In any case, it is impossible for an event non conscious state followed by a concious state to go unexplained — TheWillowOfDarkness

So please be free to explain.

In this respect, Spinoza's metaphysics are consistent with materialist style accounts in which states or consciousness are produced out of non-conscious bodies. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Ok, so in this case, if non-conscious bodies produce consciousness (which I doubt it in Spinoza's parallelism), then one could at least raise the possibility of hard problem. What is the proof in Spinozism (not just assume, because you said it makes the hard problem impossible) that non-conscious bodies produce consciousness?

His metaphysics are also consistent with certain pansychists postion in which each conscious experience is a production of an entity with its own conciousness experience--e.g. an account in which my brain, arms, fingers, cells and atoms each had their own personal experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Combination problem, same thing. What's the proof for that in Spinozism? Why do atoms have consciousness? What's the explanation for that in Spinozism?

If bodies without conscious experience generate experiences,the Spinoza's metaphysics are true. — TheWillowOfDarkness

IF!!!!!!!!!!!! But what if they don't? How does Spinoza demonstrate that non-conscious bodies create consciousness? Or he just assumes that?

Whatever exists, whichever of these possible conunterfactal states of existence happen, they are consistent with Spinoza's metaphysics. Spinoza is talking about what will be true of any of these possible events. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Well, this is exactly what my intuition was telling me from the beginning.

PLEASE ANSWER MY QUESTIONS

That's a misunderstanding though, of my own case anyhow. The point is an awareness of a certain logical sloppiness that's difficult to point out or to have pointed out. I suspect that one way to get there is to try very hard for a final clarity and come up against the limit, which isn't a definite limit but more like a vision of fog. I think this is something of what Heidegger was trying for with 'the forgetfulness of being.'

A Cartesian bias might be transforming the problem of the meaning of being into the hard problem of consciousness. — plaque flag

I don't know what you mean by "logical sloppiness". I think all language is vague, but we manage more or less well to communicate our inner states regardless, and this is because we do it all the time, and are able simply to "get it" because we all have these states, we all know them directly. In fact they are what is known most directly, given that perceptions of the world are also, primordially, even though outwardly-directed, inner states.

Also inaccuracy in such communications is impossible to establish, so it is impossible to be wrong, and all that counts is whether people feel they get the inner states of others and the empathy that that sense of getting it invokes.

As an example, what I can see in this moment constitutes my visual field, and my visual field is not "out there" available for anyone else, and hence it also qualifies as an inner state.

Can you give some more detail about how you think a Cartesian bias could transform the problem of the meaning of being into the Hard Problem? For what it's worth I think the hard problem arises on account of outmoded metaphysical assumptions about the "brute" nature of matter.

There was a pretty interesting thread about panpsychism earlier. I've never really thought much about panpsychism before as I imagined it was something along the lines that the world we are part of is actually a sort of conscious experience itself, maybe something such as the mind of God. But it seems it is something else.

As I understand it, panpsychism is the claim that mentality (consciousness, experience?) is a basic constituent of the universe. I gather from some of the articles I have read this means that any material object has a mind, of sorts at least.

I'm not sure I follow that. From what I can gather, there are four main claims for panpsychism.

First, the argument goes that all objects, presumably down to very small scales (atoms?) must have some kind of mind.

Second, minds are expressed to varying degrees of sophistication according to the sophistication of the system (object), perhaps to the greatest sophistication in humans (in our experience, at least).

Third, mind is not an actual physical substance (I use the term loosely and am aware it probably means something in philosophy different from my usage). That is, it isn't like say gravity or the electromagnetic force which can be measured and which have a direct causal relationship to the world.

Fourth, matter isn't a manifestation of mind but rather mind is a manifestation of matter. Minds emerge from, are caused by, or are separate from, matter, nonetheless minds are directly attributable to material events.

Now, all of this seems quite odd. What problem is it that panpsychism attempts to answer? Clearly to posit an unidentifiable, unmeasurable and causally inert substance as a true, fundamental feature of the universe must mean there is a truly insoluble problem before us. In effect, it is saying here is a problem so hard to solve that the only answer can be a non-answer (I apologise in advance if I've completely missed the point of panpsychism).

From the various references I have read (and I accept mine is a very cursory introduction to the subject), it does rather seem to me that the problem is just the good old hard problem. It is just the problem of qualia. If minds were the function of systems to undertake say logical operations on information, ie to undertake computations, we'd have to conclude that computers do this. And that seems relatively explicable. We could expect that human brains are doing similar computational processes, also explicable. We could conclude that information is ubiquitous, that computations are possible, and that the universe has the property that systems can undertake computations. But isn't that already known, accepted and explained? So panpsychism can't be making that claim.

Is panpsychism only trying to explain the hard problem of qualia? If that were so, does it follow that if the problem of qualia were to be resolved in like manner to other physical matters (ie qualia are a describable and measurable physical event), would that undercut the rationale for positing panpsychism?

The hard problem introduce a new additional problem that in my view does not exist. When Red-Neurons are firing in X, the conscious experience of Red happen in X (X experiences a qualia). — Belter

You make this statement while saying there is no Problem. Here's the Problem .. Given:

1) Red-Neurons are firing in X
2) Conscious experience of Red happen in X

How does 2 happen when 1 happens? I think your main argument is that the Hard problem does not exist because of an improper use of language when asking this question. You might be correct but you have not explained what exactly is the problem with the question.

For now I see the question as a huge Problem. It is the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It is the Explanatory Gap on full display. Nobody knows how this works.

@Galuchat @bert1 @Wayfarer@Harry Hindu
The hard problem also has to do with the fact that we are trying to understand the very thing we are using to understand anything in the first place. Consciousness is the very platform for our awareness, perception, and understanding, so this creates a twisted knot of epistemology. Indeed, the map gets mixed into the terrain too easily and people start thinking they know the hard problem when they keep looking at the map again!

We cannot help it, as a species with language. Language itself is a form of secondary representation on the terrain. We largely think in and with language, so to get outside of that and then reintegrate it into a theory using language is damn near impossible. For example, let's take a computer. The very end result is some "use" we get out of a computer. The use is subjective though. Someone can use the computer as a walnut cracker, and it would still get use out of it. The users experience and use of the computer is what makes the computer the computer. Otherwise it is raw existence of a thing. A computer is nothing otherwise outside of its use to the user.

Then, let's go down to the other end to its components. Computers are essentially electrical signals/waves moving through electrical wires- moving on/off signals. These electrical signals are just impulses of electricity through a wire. That is it. However, because we quantized and represented things into a MAP of 0 and 1, and further into logic gates that move information to make more quantified information, we now have a way of translating raw existing metaphysical "stuff" into epistemically represented information. Every time we look at any piece of raw stuff, we are always gleaning it informationally.

Some ways that try to answer the hard problem is to call consciousness raw "stuff" rather than information (panpsychism or some sort of psychism). It is a place holder for simply metaphysical "existing thing" that we then represent as "mind stuff" or "mentality" or "quale". Other than panpsychism, which is just a broad view of "mind stuff", there is not much else one can do to answer the hard problem, because it will ALWAYS have a MAP explanation of the terrain. What is an electrical signal if not simply represented as a mathematical equation, an on/off piece of data, a diagram, an output of usefulness (the use of a computer discussed earlier)? The raw stuff of existence can never be mined. The terrain is always hidden by the map.

What problem is it that panpsychism attempts to answer? — Graeme M

Good question! It's the same old problem that philosophers and scientists have been wrestling with for millennia. David Chalmers gave the Mind/Body problem its modern name : The Hard Problem.

Problem? What Problem? : The problem of consciousness is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind. . . . We need to understand both what consciousness is and how it relates to other, nonconscious, aspects of reality. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

maybe something such as the mind of God. — Graeme M

The notion that the physical world is an idea (or dream) in the mind of god, is an ancient explanation for the existence of reality. Dreaming was believed to be magical, in the sense that things that don't exist in reality can be conjured up in dreams. That made sense to primitive people, but in our scientific age, we want more details about the hows & whys. In any case, a Creative Mind of some kind has always been the ultimate answer to those basic questions. The only alternative answer atheists have to offer is the shoulder shrug of Multiverse theory : "it is what it is --- don't ask why".

As I understand it, panpsychism is the claim that mentality (consciousness, experience?) is a basic constituent of the universe. — Graeme M

Psyche (soul) was indeed their best explanation for the emergence of Life & Mind from ordinary matter. And Psyche was most closely identified with human consciousness and reasoning ability. But the weakness of Panpsychism is the implication that stones and atoms are conscious of the outside world, including their fellow stones and particles. Yet, again modern thinkers find it hard to believe that dumb rocks have a "life of the mind" . That's why I prefer to use a term that has less religious and philosophical baggage : Information. It's similar to Spinoza's Single Substance of the Universe. And is now thought to be the "basic constituent" of the universe, by some scientists.

Is Information Fundamental? : https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/

Spinoza's Universal Substance : The most distinctive aspect of Spinoza's system is his substance monism; that is, his claim that one infinite substance—God or Nature—is the only substance that exists. https://www.iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/

Second, minds are expressed to varying degrees of sophistication — Graeme M

"Sophistication" may be a better word for the evolution of Mind, than the more common term "Complexity". Information is not just numerically complex, it is integrated and irreducibly structured. The Santa Fe Institute has been studying Complexity for thirty years, and that includes Information Theory. But, as scientists, they were mostly looking into meaningless syntax-only Shannon Information, defined as structure-destroying Entropy. They are now studying meaningful semantic structure-creating Bayesian Information, in pursuit of Big Questions and Hard Problems.

Santa Fe Institute : https://www.santafe.edu/engage/learn/courses/introduction-information-theory

Beyond Center : https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Life-Information-Causality/dp/1107150531

Can Integrated Information Theory Explain Consciousness? : https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/

Enformy : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

Third, mind is not an actual physical substance — Graeme M

True. Mind is not a physical thing, but a process of enforming (making sense of) experience. But in it's generic form as Information, it's an ontological meta-physical "substance" : the essence of Being, not the atoms of Objects.

Substance : The philosophical term ‘substance’ corresponds to the Greek ousia, which means ‘being’, transmitted via the Latin substantia, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/

Fourth, matter isn't a manifestation of mind but rather mind is a manifestation of matter. — Graeme M

Yes. Mind is a function of the material brain. It's what living brains do. It converts physical sensations into metaphysical concepts. But, according to the Enformationism Thesis, Mind-stuff and Body-stuff are merely different forms of Generic Information (causal, creative, power to enform, energy).

if the problem of qualia were to be resolved in like manner to other physical matters (ie qualia are a describable and measurable physical event), would that undercut the rationale for positing panpsychism? — Graeme M

Your hypothetical question answers its own query : Qualia are not "describable and measurable" Quanta. Hence the necessity for a different way to measure and describe Qualia and there role in physical Reality. We need to understand mental Qualia, because they are what gives meaning to life in a material world. :smile:

Qualia : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page17.html

It wouldn't be describable or measurable. It would only be inferred, like with other people's minds. The hard problem is one of subjectivity, which can' be scientifically measured or described. Panpsychism is trying to solve the irreducibility of conscious experience by spreading it out through everything so that it's a building block instead of just mysteriously emerging. — Marchesk

Panpsychism is said to have a “combination problem”. The combination problem does not require the mental to emerge from the physical. Nor does the combination problem require inert, passive, non-experiential matter to at some point become “experiential”. It is a proposed metaphysical (not scientific) solution to dualism or to emergence. It could be termed a dual aspect form of neutral monism. “The emergence of experience from the non-experiential would be sheer magic”

There are plenty of arguments for the hard problem. Basically, no amount of objective explanation gets you to subjectivity. They're incompatible. — Marchesk

Yes, “mary’s room” no familiarity with the scientific description of “red” (wavelengths, optics, neural paths, etc.) is a substitute for the actual experience “seeing red”. Scientific descriptions (verbal descriptions) are always incomplete in some sense and unsatisfactory substitutes for “the experience itself”. We can describe what happens in the “quantum world” we can even “predict in a stochastic probabilistic way” what is possible but we can’t explain it in any way that fits our “commonsense” notions of the world and reality.

Possibly, but the thing emerging is not complex and novel. The thing emerging is conciousness. The whole point of the hard problem is that conciousness itself is taken to be a familiar, obvious fact (otherwise we'd just be rid of the whole thing). It's the mechanism that's mysterious, and we're quite used to mysterious mechanisms. The whole history of science has been the gradual revelation of previously mysterious mechanisms. — Isaac

Allright, let’s approach the problem from the other end. We have “consciousness” this integrated, unified, self-aware, self-reflective form of “experience” or “mind”. We could not do science or philosophy otherwise. At what point in the chain of being “existence” or “life” do you think this ability disappears working your way down. Do higher animals have experience? Ants? Bees? Flowers? And how would you or do you know? What physical test or quantitative measure do you have?

Well, if the world contains both physical stuff and consciousness, but there doesn't seem to be a way for the physical stuff to produce consciousness, then an alternative would be that all physical stuff is conscious. — Marchesk

or the basic “stuff” or units of nature are both physical and experiential (neutral monism).
 

My conclusion allows me to claim that when you say:

EFA works only within the physical constraints of the only entropy-increasing world that we know via our senses, but understand via our reasoning & imagination. — Gnomon

You're referring to a realm of mind_matter monism. The mind/body problem is a problem due to a category error in physics_philosophy (mind_matter are two parallel categories). — ucarr

I think you are picking up on the perplexing problem, with online philosophical dialogs, of using common conventional language, which is inherently materialistic/quantitative, to discuss immaterial/qualitative concepts, such as Consciousness.

In my thesis, Mind & Matter are "parallel" in the sense that they are both descendant forms of Generic Information (EFA) that exist side-by-side in the real/ideal world. But they are separate categories, in that Mind is an an emergent quality separated from the Matter-only state by billions of years of evolution. So, qualitatively Mind & Matter are completely different kinds of thing/entity : metaphysical vs physical. Likewise, Ideas exist in the "Real" world, but are qualitatively different. Ironically, Materialists define "Ideal" as un-real ; denying the reality of their own immaterial concepts.

It's hard to make such philosophical distinctions, due to the basic materialism of the language : e.g. "thing" typically designates a material object, whereas "entity" is a more philosophical term. The materialism embedded in our common language only becomes a problem when we try to convey ideas that are not objective things : e.g. Consciousness. :smile:


Thing vs Entity :
An entity is something that exists as itself. It does not need to be of material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate, or present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity

Mind/Body Problem :
Philosophers and scientists have long debated the relationship between a physical body and its non-physical properties, such as Life & Mind. Cartesian Dualism resolved the problem temporarily by separating the religious implications of metaphysics (Soul) from the scientific study of physics (Body). But now scientists are beginning to study the mind with their precise instruments, and have found no line of demarcation. So, they see no need for the hypothesis of a spiritual Soul added to the body by God. However, Enformationism resolves the problem by a return to Monism, except that the fundamental substance is meta-physical (causation) Information instead of physical (consequence) Matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page15.html

'Cause and Effect' : Hume''s view that the relation of cause and effect supplies the basis for our factual beliefs. Observation leads us to believe in connections between physical objects and events. The power and force of these connections are not observable, only the changes in spatio-temporal relations.
https://academic.oup.com/book/400/chapter-abstract/135206122?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Note --- EnFormAction is a power or force that has both physical/material & metaphysical/immaterial effects/consequences.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth discusses what he calls the real problem of consciousness in this Philosophy Bites podcast: https://philosophybites.com/2017/07/anil-seth-on-the-real-problem-of-consciousness.html

He defines the real problem as building explanatory bridges between brain mechanisms and phenemonal descriptions. Neurophenomenology is this mapping between rich conscious descriptions and brain processes. It allows for a chipping away at the explanatory gap between the hard problem and neuroscience, which may end up suggesting the cause and not just an in-depth correlation.
— Marchesk

Mappings are useful. But no amount of Mapping gets us any closer to solving the Hard Problem. More Mapping does not chip away at the Hard Problem. This is all just more Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Science has known for a hundred years that Neural Activity leads to Conscious Activity. This is nothing new. The question is: How is Neural Activity Mapped to the Conscious Experience? There is a huge Explanatory Gap involved in any kind of Mapping or measurement of Neural Correlates.