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I read your link, but I don't find Clark's argument terribly convincing. He writes in the conclusion: "If indeed qualia are identical to certain functional inf
by chimprich 10y ago
I read your link, but I don't find Clark's argument terribly convincing. He writes in the conclusion:
"If indeed qualia are identical to certain functional informational processes, then the hard problem of consciousness (what Chalmers more or less takes to be the easy problem) is the empirical one of discovering just what these processes are."
But why should certain "functional informational processes" be a certain experience? Even if Clark is correct it doesn't seem to really explain anything. I'm not sure it's even scientific; is it at all testable?
It seems to me that no one has come up with a good explanation of what consciousness is, or even made any sort of dent in the problem. Saying that consciousness is the physical experience of the brain, or that it's quantum mechanics, or it's an illusion or whatever are interesting guesses but they haven't led us anywhere.
- titzer 10y agoMaybe I just latched onto his argument because it already agreed with it in some sense. It boils down to a hypothesis, not a proof: If the brain's activity _did_ somehow give rise to experience, wouldn't _this_ experience--the one you are having right now, reading this sentence, thinking these thoughts, breathing, etc, even the sensation of the redness of red--have to be exactly that? Moreover, if the brain's activity gave rise to a _different_ experience, then we'd experience _that_ instead. In other words, _if_ there is an experience that is _produced_ by the signaling behavior of brain, then _this_ must be it.