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We should start with the question I posed, as this is the crux of the issue here, and without it, everything else here is moot. I will endeavor to set it out as

We should start with the question I posed, as this is the crux of the issue here, and without it, everything else here is moot. I will endeavor to set it out as clearly as I can. As you put great weight on the 'hard problem' being an insurmountable one for (and only for) materialism, I am sure you are well aware of the seminal importance, for that premise, of what has become known as the 'Knowledge Argument' from Frank Jackson's paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia", and in particular, a thought experiment from that paper which goes by several names (such as 'Mary the Neuroscientist'), and which was called, by the philosopher Philip Goff, "the greatest argument against materialism." This argument has several antecedents, including C. D. Broad's argument that chemistry cannot tell us what ammonia smells like, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, Russells aphorism "it is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." All these arguments are doing essentially the same thing: pumping the intuition that knowing what it is like to see colors (or have any other phenomenal experience) is not something that could ever be learned by studying the physical sciences (I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.) There is a certain amount of indirection at work here, in specifying only the physical sciences. We get an equally valid question by substituting other academic disciplines for the physical sciences, and in particular, of course, any philosophy of mind: they do not get a pass on this by being anti-materialist, and certainly any philosophy - such as idealism - which is premised first and foremost on the reality and significance of the hard problem, will have to confront this question (among many others) before it can be regarded as the solution to this problem and as providing an explanation of consciousness. Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism. I am interested in learning, then, what you - and, by extension, idealists - regard as convincing arguments for there being a hard problem for materialism, specifically.

mekoka 2y ago
> I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness. I don't see what's being pumped. As we know from the incompleteness theorem, some truths cannot be proven. The fact of our awareness is another that's often doubted by the same people that doubt the divide separating qualia and conceptual knowing. Has their difficulty to grasp at these intuitions somehow become the burden of those who access them as self-evident? The hard problem is a linchpin. For those who get it, materialism starts to unravel. Those who don't, think those who do are making stuff up, but they also can't give a single example to counter the argument, nor can they conceive for themselves an entirely novel experience purely out of thought. They can't imagine a new color, think a new taste, conceive of a new sense. > Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism. As I said, idealism is only a philosophy. It's mostly a process of elimination resting on conjectures such as the hard problem. As possibilities are removed, remaining candidates hint at the likeliest direction, but it's indeed not a final realization. There are some metaphysical speculations resting atop the foundations that reality is mind first. But I'm personally much less invested in speculations. I find the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of the sand of implausibility more of a concern. Depending how curious (and open-minded) you are about "knowledge" that get the "blind man to know what it is like to see", I'd suggest to look into practices that have this as their main goal. They're about engaging consciousness directly with immediate experience (the senses) and existential curiosity (I am aware that I am, but what am I?) to cultivate the seed of an eventual realization. They're known under the umbrella term "nonduality". As an introduction, I suggest this selection of texts spanning multiple nondual traditions aggregated and read by a Buddhist nun https://www.youtube.com/@SamaneriJayasara https://www.youtube.com/@SamaneriJayasara.
- mannykannot 2y ago
  You say you are concerned with the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of [what you perceive as] the sand of implausibility - well, in that case, I'm the sort of person whose concerns you should be addressing: I don't think the hard problem (if there is one in the form it is conceived of by its proponents) is any harder for materialism than it is for any of the alternatives, but I am willing to give all due consideration to arguments that it is (and by "due consideration", I mean outside of internet discussion threads, even though my wife has banned me playing audio books and podcasts on the topic over the speakers when we are in a car together.) Unfortunately, your responses in this thread are not making the sort of arguments that are called for by your stated goal. Here, your response continues the theme of reasserting how obvious it seems to you that there is a hard problem which rules out materialism. This is not an argument, it is a belief. You are, of course, entitled to your beliefs, and I am sure you hold them strongly and sincerely, but the fact that you do does not establish that our cultural head is stuck in the sands of implausibility. Repetition does not make them more argument-like, nor does calling them "self-evident", nor insinuating that you see more clearly than others, nor wrapping them in language that might be appropriate for something that has an obvious proof. It is not enough, for an argument, to state propositions that other people who already agree with you will also agree with; that's just preaching to the choir. For the same reason, your complaint that no counter-arguments are being made falls short: counter-arguments are made to arguments, not unargued opinions. At this point, I suspect you may be thinking that a commitment to materialism is also a belief - and I would agree! The simple fact is that no -ism has delivered an explanation of consciousness, and when someone tries to tell me it is a fact that that consciousness is just a computation (or a non-computable physical process, Searle and Penrose), I point out that no-one has explained it in those terms. Nevertheless, there is a counter-argument here, and it is in my previous post, where I argue that the knowledge argument - which is widely regarded as the strongest argument for there being a hard problem that only affects materialism - is exactly as problematic, for any other putative explanation of consciousness, as it is for materialism (which does not rule out it being an illusory problem for any of them.) I may not have been completely clear about what it is and why it matters here, so I will make another attempt. The 'hard problem' is the claim that phenomenal consciousness and its associated qualia present an insurmountable challenge to materialism. Many people feel - sometimes strongly - that this is obviously so, but philosophers and scientists alike (and on both sides of the fence) rightly expect more justification for accepting this claim than these feelings of incredulity towards materialism. From your own account here, the hard problem is a necessary prerequisite for idealism: it is, as you said, a linchpin, and it is so in this sense: all the other claims you have made about idealism rest on there being a hard problem to take materialism out of consideration. Furthermore, for idealism to prevail over materialism, the hard problem must only exist for materialism (or, at least, not present a challenge to idealism), or else idealism would be saddled with exactly the same problem as materialism - a problem that you insist is insurmountable. So, putting the previous three paragraphs together, the proponents of idealism need a justification for there being a hard problem that applies only to materialism and not to idealism. In the years of reading papers and other scholarly articles on the issue, I have been struck by how often such justifications ultimately rest on some form of the knowledge argument (at least in this sense, Goff is entirely justified in calling it "the greatest argument against materialism.") To recap, this is the argument which boils down to "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book." Does this satisfy idealism's need for justification for the premise that there's a hard problem for materialism that does not apply to idealism itself? It does not, as we can simply substitute 'idealism book' for 'physics book', and the knowledge argument itself gives us no reason to think that the outcome will be any different. In fact, in your first response to this issue, you affirmed that knowing all of a completed idealist philosophy would do no better, in this regard, than knowing all of completed physics. Furthermore - and this is important - we can see that the knowledge argument is equally applicable to any field of what Torin Alter calls 'discursively learnable' knowledge without making any assumptions about the truth of materialism. Therefore, in the account of and justification for idealism in what you have written so far, there is at least one piece (the linchpin, no less) missing: an acceptable justification for thinking that there is a hard problem that does not present an equal problem for idealism. You entered this thread in a very assertive manner (your first sentence was " Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of 'feelings'. But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths", and in your latest post, you adopted the mantle of someone who is pulling our collective heads from the sands of implausibility), but your responses have not, so far, lived up to this rhetoric.
mekoka 2y ago
I think that I (finally) understand your question (maybe). Are you asking why the hard problem would apply to materialism, but not to idealism? If that's indeed the question, the simplest answer is that if reality is fundamentally material, then by extension everything must be material, including consciousness. For reasons already stated (the mind-body problem, the hard problem, etc), the emergence of experiential consciousness as we know it from inert matter is opaque. We don't have a shred of evidence to support it, nor the sliver of a clue to go on. Conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness. Everything becomes a "figment". There's nothing actually "physical". This is conceivable in theory. One obvious example are our dreams where a reality is projected and interacted with by consciousness. This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness. Panpsychism and other dualisms just postpone the problems of materialism. But they resurface later, in addition to the new problem that this position requires to be granted at least two fundamental magic tricks to explain the rest.

mekoka 2y ago

> I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness. I don't see what's being pumped. As we know from the incompleteness theorem, some truths cannot be proven. The fact of our awareness is another that's often doubted by the same people that doubt the divide separating qualia and conceptual knowing. Has their difficulty to grasp at these intuitions somehow become the burden of those who access them as self-evident? The hard problem is a linchpin. For those who get it, materialism starts to unravel. Those who don't, think those who do are making stuff up, but they also can't give a single example to counter the argument, nor can they conceive for themselves an entirely novel experience purely out of thought. They can't imagine a new color, think a new taste, conceive of a new sense. > Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism. As I said, idealism is only a philosophy. It's mostly a process of elimination resting on conjectures such as the hard problem. As possibilities are removed, remaining candidates hint at the likeliest direction, but it's indeed not a final realization. There are some metaphysical speculations resting atop the foundations that reality is mind first. But I'm personally much less invested in speculations. I find the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of the sand of implausibility more of a concern. Depending how curious (and open-minded) you are about "knowledge" that get the "blind man to know what it is like to see", I'd suggest to look into practices that have this as their main goal. They're about engaging consciousness directly with immediate experience (the senses) and existential curiosity (I am aware that I am, but what am I?) to cultivate the seed of an eventual realization. They're known under the umbrella term "nonduality". As an introduction, I suggest this selection of texts spanning multiple nondual traditions aggregated and read by a Buddhist nun https://www.youtube.com/@SamaneriJayasara https://www.youtube.com/@SamaneriJayasara.

mannykannot 2y ago
You say you are concerned with the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of [what you perceive as] the sand of implausibility - well, in that case, I'm the sort of person whose concerns you should be addressing: I don't think the hard problem (if there is one in the form it is conceived of by its proponents) is any harder for materialism than it is for any of the alternatives, but I am willing to give all due consideration to arguments that it is (and by "due consideration", I mean outside of internet discussion threads, even though my wife has banned me playing audio books and podcasts on the topic over the speakers when we are in a car together.) Unfortunately, your responses in this thread are not making the sort of arguments that are called for by your stated goal. Here, your response continues the theme of reasserting how obvious it seems to you that there is a hard problem which rules out materialism. This is not an argument, it is a belief. You are, of course, entitled to your beliefs, and I am sure you hold them strongly and sincerely, but the fact that you do does not establish that our cultural head is stuck in the sands of implausibility. Repetition does not make them more argument-like, nor does calling them "self-evident", nor insinuating that you see more clearly than others, nor wrapping them in language that might be appropriate for something that has an obvious proof. It is not enough, for an argument, to state propositions that other people who already agree with you will also agree with; that's just preaching to the choir. For the same reason, your complaint that no counter-arguments are being made falls short: counter-arguments are made to arguments, not unargued opinions. At this point, I suspect you may be thinking that a commitment to materialism is also a belief - and I would agree! The simple fact is that no -ism has delivered an explanation of consciousness, and when someone tries to tell me it is a fact that that consciousness is just a computation (or a non-computable physical process, Searle and Penrose), I point out that no-one has explained it in those terms. Nevertheless, there is a counter-argument here, and it is in my previous post, where I argue that the knowledge argument - which is widely regarded as the strongest argument for there being a hard problem that only affects materialism - is exactly as problematic, for any other putative explanation of consciousness, as it is for materialism (which does not rule out it being an illusory problem for any of them.) I may not have been completely clear about what it is and why it matters here, so I will make another attempt. The 'hard problem' is the claim that phenomenal consciousness and its associated qualia present an insurmountable challenge to materialism. Many people feel - sometimes strongly - that this is obviously so, but philosophers and scientists alike (and on both sides of the fence) rightly expect more justification for accepting this claim than these feelings of incredulity towards materialism. From your own account here, the hard problem is a necessary prerequisite for idealism: it is, as you said, a linchpin, and it is so in this sense: all the other claims you have made about idealism rest on there being a hard problem to take materialism out of consideration. Furthermore, for idealism to prevail over materialism, the hard problem must only exist for materialism (or, at least, not present a challenge to idealism), or else idealism would be saddled with exactly the same problem as materialism - a problem that you insist is insurmountable. So, putting the previous three paragraphs together, the proponents of idealism need a justification for there being a hard problem that applies only to materialism and not to idealism. In the years of reading papers and other scholarly articles on the issue, I have been struck by how often such justifications ultimately rest on some form of the knowledge argument (at least in this sense, Goff is entirely justified in calling it "the greatest argument against materialism.") To recap, this is the argument which boils down to "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book." Does this satisfy idealism's need for justification for the premise that there's a hard problem for materialism that does not apply to idealism itself? It does not, as we can simply substitute 'idealism book' for 'physics book', and the knowledge argument itself gives us no reason to think that the outcome will be any different. In fact, in your first response to this issue, you affirmed that knowing all of a completed idealist philosophy would do no better, in this regard, than knowing all of completed physics. Furthermore - and this is important - we can see that the knowledge argument is equally applicable to any field of what Torin Alter calls 'discursively learnable' knowledge without making any assumptions about the truth of materialism. Therefore, in the account of and justification for idealism in what you have written so far, there is at least one piece (the linchpin, no less) missing: an acceptable justification for thinking that there is a hard problem that does not present an equal problem for idealism. You entered this thread in a very assertive manner (your first sentence was " Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of 'feelings'. But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths", and in your latest post, you adopted the mantle of someone who is pulling our collective heads from the sands of implausibility), but your responses have not, so far, lived up to this rhetoric.

mekoka 2y ago

I think that I (finally) understand your question (maybe). Are you asking why the hard problem would apply to materialism, but not to idealism? If that's indeed the question, the simplest answer is that if reality is fundamentally material, then by extension everything must be material, including consciousness. For reasons already stated (the mind-body problem, the hard problem, etc), the emergence of experiential consciousness as we know it from inert matter is opaque. We don't have a shred of evidence to support it, nor the sliver of a clue to go on. Conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness. Everything becomes a "figment". There's nothing actually "physical". This is conceivable in theory. One obvious example are our dreams where a reality is projected and interacted with by consciousness. This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness. Panpsychism and other dualisms just postpone the problems of materialism. But they resurface later, in addition to the new problem that this position requires to be granted at least two fundamental magic tricks to explain the rest.