7 ms·

The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

23 points by KqAmJQ7 2y ago

nickelpro 2y ago
Total claptrap There are various intelligible rejections of the hard problem; Anil Seth's "Beast Machines", Colin McGinn's "Mysternianism", and Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory", all come to mind. None are completely satisfying or widely held, all are try to strike a balance between the problems of effective materialism and the more woo-woo frames of idealism and panpsychism (or, commonly, go hard to one end of the scale). None, not a single one, not from the people who think a billet of 304 stainless steel has feelings or the ones who think the human mind isn't meaningfully differentiated from that billet in its cold unfeeling nature, tries to so fully reject our materialist knowledge of the physical world and regress into this literally medieval understanding. The author may be experiencing an unbalancing of the humours.
- empath75 2y ago
  Yeah, his resolution to the problem is him saying "nuh-uh" in a very long winded way. Sure if you just completely abandon any attempt to explain or understand things, a lot of difficult problems evaporate. But you're not "contributing" by doing that, you've just declared that you aren't interested. And also, he rather coyly avoids stating what his actual beliefs are -- he's a traditional catholic, so his actual explanation is going to be something like a soul. (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html)
  - nickelpro 2y ago
    I got as much from his sidebar, but even without it's obvious from the way he writes about the hard problem. Only the faithful bring up Descartes and dualism with a straight face (not so much as a knowingly raised eyebrow for the audience), or make arguments like "this is how things are naturally phrased in English, therefore that must be how they literally, ontologically, are."
- Vecr 2y ago
  In your (apparently well researched) opinion, is this post more or less intelligible than R. S. Bakker's "The Last Magic Show"/Blind Brain Theory? This one has less wacky diagrams, and also is more vague and thus less easily falsifiable. On the other hand apparently there's a soul involved.
  - nickelpro 2y ago
    Bakker's concepts, insomuch as they can be defined and I have an understanding of what he tried to define, represent the conclusions of Daniel Dennett's "user illusion" via the mechanisms of Hofstadter's strange loop. Both ideas are better discussed by their original authors than Bakker's strange bootleg. This post's philosophical soup is somehow even less convincing and coherent than Bakker.
chaboud 2y ago
Having not gone deep into this problem, I’m a bit confused. It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter. Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”? Is it not possible that our experiences, our recognition of color, our smell of moth balls, our hearing of clarinets are, in fact, just aggregate functions of those parts that make us up? Am I missing some greater argument here? Is this just humanity’s need to feel special on navel-gazing display, or is there a stronger crux here lost in the haze of the article?
- mxkopy 2y ago
  The hard problem of consciousness is the same as the problem of describing to someone a color they’ve never seen before (i.e. the problem of qualia). Personally I think the information contained in qualia is finite and therefore physical but who knows
  - aklein 2y ago
    TBH, I don’t really understand why this is a problem. An explanation is not an experience; it cannot provide to the human brain the same information. Suppose you neurologically induced an experience of seeing that new color without “really” seeing it - surely this would be sufficient to communicate qualia? (And if not, surely it’s just a matter of adjusting the inducement to some degree).
    - chaps 2y ago
      This sort of philosophical question becomes more important when you think of second-order-and-beyond. Think of, in this case, that color is just a manifestation of experience. But that manifestation of experience applies to, for example, the beautiful smells that a rose throws out into the world. To a degree, the redness has an affectation on the world, which is separate to each person. my theory is that these things are just questions of resolutions of varying latencies.
    - 2y ago
huitzitziltzin 2y ago
Sorry but ed feser is regarded as a lunatic by most professional philosophers. He is a man of strange opinions. Not necessarily about this problem but his average opinion on an average topic is on the lunatic fringe.
dartharva 2y ago
I read this article once and it felt like it.. went nowhere? Is it just this author's way of writing or is all philosophy like this?
pcwalton 2y ago
To provide some context: It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher. His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area, which most users here (including me) don't. If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.
- lambdaphagy 2y ago
  I find it odd how often people feel obliged to make these kinds of disclaimers about Catholic philosophers (one can find more downthread), as though we ought to handle their work with mental ice tongs or something. When I first studied philosophy, I expected that there would be sober, serious, fat-free answers to philosophical questions, all of which would be clearly distinguished from mystical woo. Having studied philosophy, I now can’t help but notice: - Philosophy doesn’t solve philosophical problems (even as judged by the very lenient criterion of whether a majority of philosophers even agree that the problem has been solved!) - In many cases, including some very simple ones like “what is knowledge?” the closest thing to a respectable consensus view requires an appeal to counterfactuals, which are way spookier / mystical / wooey than the things they’re invoked to explain. The most worked out systematic account of counterfactuals—- by David Lewis, one of the most cited Anglophone philosophers of 20C so hardly a cherry-picked example—- is so infamously out there that his colleagues refused to believe that he actually believed it. - The above point is quite generic: systematic commitment to essentially any philosophical position will eventually require you to bite some bullet that will make you sound completely insane. Lewis thought that all possible worlds were real, Fodor thought the mind had 50k innate concepts and no more, the Churchlands thought consciousness is an illusion. As far as I could tell, that is just the way it is. By contrast, much of Thomistic philosophy is a lot more reasonable than might be supposed. Take his doctrine of the soul, for example. Modern people tend to think souls are nonsense because they’re thinking, consciously or not, of a more or less Cartesian doctrine of the soul, a spooky mental substance somehow connected to the body, perhaps through the pineal gland. But for Aquinas, the soul is just the pattern of the body, the information required to arrange matter into a particular organism rather than pink mist. So far so naturalistic, but what’s with the immortality of the soul? This is just Aquinas’s solution to the problem of universals: if human beings can have knowledge of a priori truths like math, then that can only be because a part of the soul is already there in a realm of perfect unchanging necessary truths, hence immortal. Now you can take this argument or leave it, but I can assure you that by prevailing standards in philosophy of math it’s actually quite tame, because there are no non-spooky options in that field.
ergonaught 2y ago
This sort of sloppy, shoddy, “I don’t like how I feel about it therefore it must be false” type of thinking has fallen to analysis and the scientific method every single time they meet. The sloppy retreats to another bastion but it merely delays the inevitable. That materialistic, mechanical, “mathematically reductionist” brains might produce the particular qualia isn’t a hard problem. We alter the brain and the qualia of experience are altered: it is unavoidable that the brain is involved in generating the experience. The actually hard problem is how (or whether) chemistry can generate awareness, into/onto which the qualia of experience arise.
samatman 2y ago
This is the exact point where I always get off the hard problem p-zombie train: > It is possible at least in principle, he says, for there to be a world physically identical to our own down to the last particle, but where there are none of the qualia of conscious experience. No. I don't consider this possible even in principle. Imaginable, yes, possible? No. One example is enough to dispose of any contradiction, so here's one: in this contrafactual world, a person says "I feel the sun warming my skin". Since qualia do not exist in the contrafactual, in that world, the person is a liar. In this world, he is not. That is a difference: QED. Ah, but you may say: this is not a physical difference. No, perhaps not. But it most rapidly results in one. Liars and honest men are not the same. Especially when they lie about having any and every experience of existence. This is a difference which must perforce produce change: it beggars the imagination to picture such a world careening forwards identical to our own. This is not physics. It is fantasy.

23 points by KqAmJQ7 2y ago

Total claptrap There are various intelligible rejections of the hard problem; Anil Seth's "Beast Machines", Colin McGinn's "Mysternianism", and Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory", all come to mind. None are completely satisfying or widely held, all are try to strike a balance between the problems of effective materialism and the more woo-woo frames of idealism and panpsychism (or, commonly, go hard to one end of the scale). None, not a single one, not from the people who think a billet of 304 stainless steel has feelings or the ones who think the human mind isn't meaningfully differentiated from that billet in its cold unfeeling nature, tries to so fully reject our materialist knowledge of the physical world and regress into this literally medieval understanding. The author may be experiencing an unbalancing of the humours.

empath75 2y ago
Yeah, his resolution to the problem is him saying "nuh-uh" in a very long winded way. Sure if you just completely abandon any attempt to explain or understand things, a lot of difficult problems evaporate. But you're not "contributing" by doing that, you've just declared that you aren't interested. And also, he rather coyly avoids stating what his actual beliefs are -- he's a traditional catholic, so his actual explanation is going to be something like a soul. (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html)
- nickelpro 2y ago
  I got as much from his sidebar, but even without it's obvious from the way he writes about the hard problem. Only the faithful bring up Descartes and dualism with a straight face (not so much as a knowingly raised eyebrow for the audience), or make arguments like "this is how things are naturally phrased in English, therefore that must be how they literally, ontologically, are."
Vecr 2y ago
In your (apparently well researched) opinion, is this post more or less intelligible than R. S. Bakker's "The Last Magic Show"/Blind Brain Theory? This one has less wacky diagrams, and also is more vague and thus less easily falsifiable. On the other hand apparently there's a soul involved.
- nickelpro 2y ago
  Bakker's concepts, insomuch as they can be defined and I have an understanding of what he tried to define, represent the conclusions of Daniel Dennett's "user illusion" via the mechanisms of Hofstadter's strange loop. Both ideas are better discussed by their original authors than Bakker's strange bootleg. This post's philosophical soup is somehow even less convincing and coherent than Bakker.

chaboud 2y ago

Having not gone deep into this problem, I’m a bit confused. It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter. Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”? Is it not possible that our experiences, our recognition of color, our smell of moth balls, our hearing of clarinets are, in fact, just aggregate functions of those parts that make us up? Am I missing some greater argument here? Is this just humanity’s need to feel special on navel-gazing display, or is there a stronger crux here lost in the haze of the article?

mxkopy 2y ago
The hard problem of consciousness is the same as the problem of describing to someone a color they’ve never seen before (i.e. the problem of qualia). Personally I think the information contained in qualia is finite and therefore physical but who knows
- aklein 2y ago
  TBH, I don’t really understand why this is a problem. An explanation is not an experience; it cannot provide to the human brain the same information. Suppose you neurologically induced an experience of seeing that new color without “really” seeing it - surely this would be sufficient to communicate qualia? (And if not, surely it’s just a matter of adjusting the inducement to some degree).
  - chaps 2y ago
    This sort of philosophical question becomes more important when you think of second-order-and-beyond. Think of, in this case, that color is just a manifestation of experience. But that manifestation of experience applies to, for example, the beautiful smells that a rose throws out into the world. To a degree, the redness has an affectation on the world, which is separate to each person. my theory is that these things are just questions of resolutions of varying latencies.
  - 2y ago

huitzitziltzin 2y ago

Sorry but ed feser is regarded as a lunatic by most professional philosophers. He is a man of strange opinions. Not necessarily about this problem but his average opinion on an average topic is on the lunatic fringe.

dartharva 2y ago

I read this article once and it felt like it.. went nowhere? Is it just this author's way of writing or is all philosophy like this?

pcwalton 2y ago

To provide some context: It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher. His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area, which most users here (including me) don't. If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.

lambdaphagy 2y ago
I find it odd how often people feel obliged to make these kinds of disclaimers about Catholic philosophers (one can find more downthread), as though we ought to handle their work with mental ice tongs or something. When I first studied philosophy, I expected that there would be sober, serious, fat-free answers to philosophical questions, all of which would be clearly distinguished from mystical woo. Having studied philosophy, I now can’t help but notice: - Philosophy doesn’t solve philosophical problems (even as judged by the very lenient criterion of whether a majority of philosophers even agree that the problem has been solved!) - In many cases, including some very simple ones like “what is knowledge?” the closest thing to a respectable consensus view requires an appeal to counterfactuals, which are way spookier / mystical / wooey than the things they’re invoked to explain. The most worked out systematic account of counterfactuals—- by David Lewis, one of the most cited Anglophone philosophers of 20C so hardly a cherry-picked example—- is so infamously out there that his colleagues refused to believe that he actually believed it. - The above point is quite generic: systematic commitment to essentially any philosophical position will eventually require you to bite some bullet that will make you sound completely insane. Lewis thought that all possible worlds were real, Fodor thought the mind had 50k innate concepts and no more, the Churchlands thought consciousness is an illusion. As far as I could tell, that is just the way it is. By contrast, much of Thomistic philosophy is a lot more reasonable than might be supposed. Take his doctrine of the soul, for example. Modern people tend to think souls are nonsense because they’re thinking, consciously or not, of a more or less Cartesian doctrine of the soul, a spooky mental substance somehow connected to the body, perhaps through the pineal gland. But for Aquinas, the soul is just the pattern of the body, the information required to arrange matter into a particular organism rather than pink mist. So far so naturalistic, but what’s with the immortality of the soul? This is just Aquinas’s solution to the problem of universals: if human beings can have knowledge of a priori truths like math, then that can only be because a part of the soul is already there in a realm of perfect unchanging necessary truths, hence immortal. Now you can take this argument or leave it, but I can assure you that by prevailing standards in philosophy of math it’s actually quite tame, because there are no non-spooky options in that field.

ergonaught 2y ago

This sort of sloppy, shoddy, “I don’t like how I feel about it therefore it must be false” type of thinking has fallen to analysis and the scientific method every single time they meet. The sloppy retreats to another bastion but it merely delays the inevitable. That materialistic, mechanical, “mathematically reductionist” brains might produce the particular qualia isn’t a hard problem. We alter the brain and the qualia of experience are altered: it is unavoidable that the brain is involved in generating the experience. The actually hard problem is how (or whether) chemistry can generate awareness, into/onto which the qualia of experience arise.

samatman 2y ago

This is the exact point where I always get off the hard problem p-zombie train: > It is possible at least in principle, he says, for there to be a world physically identical to our own down to the last particle, but where there are none of the qualia of conscious experience. No. I don't consider this possible even in principle. Imaginable, yes, possible? No. One example is enough to dispose of any contradiction, so here's one: in this contrafactual world, a person says "I feel the sun warming my skin". Since qualia do not exist in the contrafactual, in that world, the person is a liar. In this world, he is not. That is a difference: QED. Ah, but you may say: this is not a physical difference. No, perhaps not. But it most rapidly results in one. Liars and honest men are not the same. Especially when they lie about having any and every experience of existence. This is a difference which must perforce produce change: it beggars the imagination to picture such a world careening forwards identical to our own. This is not physics. It is fantasy.