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The "hard problem" is only a problem at all because it is ill defined. I don't get why many people think the hard problem is a problem. We think therefore we ar

The "hard problem" is only a problem at all because it is ill defined. I don't get why many people think the hard problem is a problem. We think therefore we are. What would a solution to the so called (I argue non-existent) hard problem look like? Why is the hard problem a problem? What new, useful information would "solving" it deliver? Ah since we know why humans share a common qualia for red now we can do X? I don't get it. Attempting to rationalise away an irrational premise, i.e. a hard problem exists, is always going to fail to convince believers. What is the point in attempting to define something that is ill-defined to start with? Here is my position. Consciousness is a word. What it means varies over time and and space and according to who uses it. The mental model of who uses it may or may not correspond to objective reality in a broad or narrow sense. Magic is a word too. Just because we can explain N magic tricks does that mean that there is some "essence" of magic that is left unexplainable, i.e. the hard problem of magic? Just because we can come up with words for things does not mean that we actually know what we are talking about. I think "consciousness" as a word is not concretely defined therefore I am sceptical of a single unified natural phenomenon underlying the word. Giving a mental model a name does not necessarily give it reality.

RichardCA 6y ago
The way I get out of that conundrum is to ask what would happen if the Earth were destroyed in some cataclysmic event and there were no humans left. I mean do you agree that the universe would still exist? Do you think some other life in the universe might have consciousness, even if it's organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to us? How would you go about examining that question? Carl Sagan spent a lot of time looking for ways to pose that question in ways that make it possible to "do science" about it and not just trail off into ideas that are beyond discussion, beyond meaning. I mean if you are looking at a planet to see if the surface has been worked in a way that proves the existence of a technology-capable species (even if it was long extinct), you're talking about something "real" at that point. Also, the book "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem is really wonderful in the way it evokes the mystery of how a being can be sentient and utterly non-comprehensible to us. Quite brilliant really.
- morpheos137 6y ago
  >I mean do you agree that the universe would still exist? I have no basis for answering this question either way. Maybe the universe requires a conscious observer for wave function collapse. If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound? Who knows. >Do you think some other life in the universe might have consciousness, even if it's organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to us? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on how rare life is in the universe. So far we have one example. >How would you go about examining that question? I wouldn't since earth would be blown up and I wouldn't exist. If you mean when earth is still here then I wouldn't because unless intelligent life is very common space is simply too vast to find it. Sagan was wrong about a lot of things. Anyway not to be a downer but if other intelligent life exists in the universe the chances of us meeting it is very low. So low that the human race is more likely to go extinct before meeting creatures from another star system. If a superposition of universes exists in the same region of meta-space-time then maybe it is higher. For example UFOs may be from "here" just another plane that some times leaks into ours. Imagine multiple earths in multiple universes some of whose inhabitants have learned to cross between.
  - RichardCA 6y ago
    Apply Occam's Razor. You're not concerned with it because it doesn't concern you. You're offering a tautology.
    - morpheos137 6y ago
      The theory that consciousness exists IS a tautology itself. I think therefore I am. So what new information does that tell me?
      - RichardCA 6y ago
        You asked the question, "Why is the hard problem a problem?" There's a documentary where someone asked Richard Feynman why magnets work, he spends almost 10 minutes talking about how a scientist assigns meaning to a question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q "When you explain a 'Why', you have to be in some framework where you allow things to be true." So what I would say is that people generally allow Cartesian Dualism to be "true" and that's the thing that needs to be challenged. Sometimes this is called Nondualism or Nonduality. If you look at it that way, the idea that the consciousness problem is an appropriate area for inquiry seems like a straightforward idea. As far as Carl Sagan being wrong, he was big on the idea that our subjective minds are just a thing that hydrogen atoms do, if you give them billions of years to do it. But he never came out as a Strict Materialist. He also liked to poke holes in religion but never came out as an Atheist. Yes, he was being clever and cute about it. But I don't think that makes him wrong, just that he was onto something more subtle about the nature of what we are. Human beings are a way for the universe to know itself.
telmo 6y ago
I have a first person experience of the world. You probably do too. Everything that I know, including all of the science I have learned, all of the books I have read, all the music I have listed too, all of the people I loved and even this post that you wrote and me replying to it exist for me purely within my first person experience of reality. My subjective experience of reality is the only thing I have direct knowledge of. Everything else I must doubt. If you think about it, I am sure you will come to the same conclusion. My paycheck says that I am a scientific researcher, and I have a deep appreciation for science. It provides me with models that go all the way from the subatomic world to societies, that expose regularities in reality, that allow me to understand how many things fit together, and to make predictions. But these are the things that are "just words" or, better yet, symbols. My conscious experience is the thing that I DO KNOW. Maybe it's all a dream. Maybe I'm a brain in a jar. Maybe I was created one nanosecond ago, and I am just a random fluctuation in some process and all of my memories are part of that. And yet, and yet, the most fundamental phenomena of them all, the thing that I have experience of, is not predicted by any of the scientific models. There is no reason why a bunch of atoms should "become conscious" once their interactions are complex enough. There is no way to build a scientific instrument that measures consciousness. Sure, you can build a scientific instrument that detects brain states that we assume to be correlated with consciousness, but this is just crude analogy. Firstly we can never be sure, and secondly we don't know where the boundaries of the phenomenon are. Is a star conscious? Is the universe? Are the individual cells in your body? How do you know? How could you tell? That is the mystery. I find that the people who deny the mystery have something equivalent to a religious belief, and that they are not necessarily aware of it . Believing that matter -> ??? -> consciousness is not so different from believing in creationism. A comforting story that makes reality seem intelligible, but that has no basis other than one's wishful thinking and group think. It certainly has nothing to do with science or rationality, at least so far.
- morpheos137 6y ago
  >I have a first person experience of the world. What is that composed of? I would say thoughts, feelings (somatic, sensory, psychological, psycho-motor state) and memories. Ok so - now supposedly fundamental atomic "consciousness" is actually composed of reducible parts. At least three, thoughts, feelings, memories. Which of these is scientifically unexplainable in principle? Thoughts are models of something, like an equation, image, or a program. Feelings are the product of sensory-thought integration. Memories are simulations of past thoughts and feelings. I think subjectivity is an illusion. Probably in a minority here though. With a sufficiently powerful scanning tool i.e. super fMRI you could measure the neurocorrelates of thoughts and feelings. Consciousness is a word. Subjectivity is an illusion existing in living people. Obviously past historical figures are not subjectively conscious because they are dead. So where did this supposedly existing thing "consciouness" go? Wouldn't a simpler, more scientific explanation be that it never existed to begin with. You say denying consciousness as a real extant thing is akin to religious belief but then you agree there is no possible mechanism for how it could arise materialistically. Isn't it simpler just to say it doesn't exist as something separate from the ensemble of functions of a living brain after all?

RichardCA 6y ago

The way I get out of that conundrum is to ask what would happen if the Earth were destroyed in some cataclysmic event and there were no humans left. I mean do you agree that the universe would still exist? Do you think some other life in the universe might have consciousness, even if it's organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to us? How would you go about examining that question? Carl Sagan spent a lot of time looking for ways to pose that question in ways that make it possible to "do science" about it and not just trail off into ideas that are beyond discussion, beyond meaning. I mean if you are looking at a planet to see if the surface has been worked in a way that proves the existence of a technology-capable species (even if it was long extinct), you're talking about something "real" at that point. Also, the book "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem is really wonderful in the way it evokes the mystery of how a being can be sentient and utterly non-comprehensible to us. Quite brilliant really.

morpheos137 6y ago
>I mean do you agree that the universe would still exist? I have no basis for answering this question either way. Maybe the universe requires a conscious observer for wave function collapse. If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound? Who knows. >Do you think some other life in the universe might have consciousness, even if it's organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to us? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on how rare life is in the universe. So far we have one example. >How would you go about examining that question? I wouldn't since earth would be blown up and I wouldn't exist. If you mean when earth is still here then I wouldn't because unless intelligent life is very common space is simply too vast to find it. Sagan was wrong about a lot of things. Anyway not to be a downer but if other intelligent life exists in the universe the chances of us meeting it is very low. So low that the human race is more likely to go extinct before meeting creatures from another star system. If a superposition of universes exists in the same region of meta-space-time then maybe it is higher. For example UFOs may be from "here" just another plane that some times leaks into ours. Imagine multiple earths in multiple universes some of whose inhabitants have learned to cross between.
- RichardCA 6y ago
  Apply Occam's Razor. You're not concerned with it because it doesn't concern you. You're offering a tautology.
  - morpheos137 6y ago
    The theory that consciousness exists IS a tautology itself. I think therefore I am. So what new information does that tell me?
    - RichardCA 6y ago
      You asked the question, "Why is the hard problem a problem?" There's a documentary where someone asked Richard Feynman why magnets work, he spends almost 10 minutes talking about how a scientist assigns meaning to a question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q "When you explain a 'Why', you have to be in some framework where you allow things to be true." So what I would say is that people generally allow Cartesian Dualism to be "true" and that's the thing that needs to be challenged. Sometimes this is called Nondualism or Nonduality. If you look at it that way, the idea that the consciousness problem is an appropriate area for inquiry seems like a straightforward idea. As far as Carl Sagan being wrong, he was big on the idea that our subjective minds are just a thing that hydrogen atoms do, if you give them billions of years to do it. But he never came out as a Strict Materialist. He also liked to poke holes in religion but never came out as an Atheist. Yes, he was being clever and cute about it. But I don't think that makes him wrong, just that he was onto something more subtle about the nature of what we are. Human beings are a way for the universe to know itself.

telmo 6y ago

I have a first person experience of the world. You probably do too. Everything that I know, including all of the science I have learned, all of the books I have read, all the music I have listed too, all of the people I loved and even this post that you wrote and me replying to it exist for me purely within my first person experience of reality. My subjective experience of reality is the only thing I have direct knowledge of. Everything else I must doubt. If you think about it, I am sure you will come to the same conclusion. My paycheck says that I am a scientific researcher, and I have a deep appreciation for science. It provides me with models that go all the way from the subatomic world to societies, that expose regularities in reality, that allow me to understand how many things fit together, and to make predictions. But these are the things that are "just words" or, better yet, symbols. My conscious experience is the thing that I DO KNOW. Maybe it's all a dream. Maybe I'm a brain in a jar. Maybe I was created one nanosecond ago, and I am just a random fluctuation in some process and all of my memories are part of that. And yet, and yet, the most fundamental phenomena of them all, the thing that I have experience of, is not predicted by any of the scientific models. There is no reason why a bunch of atoms should "become conscious" once their interactions are complex enough. There is no way to build a scientific instrument that measures consciousness. Sure, you can build a scientific instrument that detects brain states that we assume to be correlated with consciousness, but this is just crude analogy. Firstly we can never be sure, and secondly we don't know where the boundaries of the phenomenon are. Is a star conscious? Is the universe? Are the individual cells in your body? How do you know? How could you tell? That is the mystery. I find that the people who deny the mystery have something equivalent to a religious belief, and that they are not necessarily aware of it . Believing that matter -> ??? -> consciousness is not so different from believing in creationism. A comforting story that makes reality seem intelligible, but that has no basis other than one's wishful thinking and group think. It certainly has nothing to do with science or rationality, at least so far.

morpheos137 6y ago
>I have a first person experience of the world. What is that composed of? I would say thoughts, feelings (somatic, sensory, psychological, psycho-motor state) and memories. Ok so - now supposedly fundamental atomic "consciousness" is actually composed of reducible parts. At least three, thoughts, feelings, memories. Which of these is scientifically unexplainable in principle? Thoughts are models of something, like an equation, image, or a program. Feelings are the product of sensory-thought integration. Memories are simulations of past thoughts and feelings. I think subjectivity is an illusion. Probably in a minority here though. With a sufficiently powerful scanning tool i.e. super fMRI you could measure the neurocorrelates of thoughts and feelings. Consciousness is a word. Subjectivity is an illusion existing in living people. Obviously past historical figures are not subjectively conscious because they are dead. So where did this supposedly existing thing "consciouness" go? Wouldn't a simpler, more scientific explanation be that it never existed to begin with. You say denying consciousness as a real extant thing is akin to religious belief but then you agree there is no possible mechanism for how it could arise materialistically. Isn't it simpler just to say it doesn't exist as something separate from the ensemble of functions of a living brain after all?