Oct 23, 2023 05:36 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 23, 2023 05:47 PM by C C.)
Is the Hard Problem Really So Hard?
https://nautil.us/is-the-hard-problem-re...8018435227
EXCERPTS: They call it the hard problem of consciousness, but a better term might be the impossible problem of consciousness. The whole point is that the qualitative aspects of our conscious experience, or “qualia,” are inexplicable. They slip through the explanatory framework of science, which is reductive: It explains things by breaking them down into parts and describing how they fit together. Subjective experience has an intrinsic je ne sais quoi that can’t be decomposed into parts or explained by relating one thing to another. Qualia can’t be grasped intellectually. They can only be experienced firsthand.
For the past five years or so, I’ve been trying to untangle the cluster of theories that attempt to explain consciousness, traveling the world to interview neuroscientists, philosophers, artificial-intelligence researchers, and physicists—all of whom have something to say on the matter. Most duck the hard problem, either bracketing it until neuroscientists explain brain function more fully or accepting that consciousness has no deeper explanation and must be wired into the base level of reality.
[...] But there is a less dismissive position that strikes me as promising. It is advocated in various ways by philosopher Kristjan Loorits of the University of Helsinki, psychologist Nao Tsuchiya at Monash University, and others. They suggest that qualia feel intrinsic only because we don’t give them further thought. But we could probe deeper. Introspecting on our experience, we might see that what we take to be intrinsic is relational...
[...] This idea is still just an idea—it needs to be developed into a proper theory. But if qualia are relational from a first-person point of view, then they are directly amenable to the methods of science... (MORE - missing details)
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Sounds a little naive or overly optimistic. Phenomenology has been examining the content of consciousness from a first-person persepective for over a century, and produced no extra-philosophical, systematic scientific framework of explanation. And then, of course, there's Daniel Dennett's decades long activism and paper: "The Fantasy of First Person Science".
Even more to the point, Musser -- like many others -- is fixating on the specific content of mental experiences (qualia, etc) which is actually a secondary issue. The more fundamental one is general manifestation itself -- how there can be anything other than the (almost universal) non-conscious absence of such appearances and feelings? Due to physical dogma excluding such a capacity from matter a priori, attributing not even elemental properties/relationships for the complex experiences of the brain to arise or assemble from.
There are accordingly no pre-existing, rudimentary stages available to derive "sense and thought presentations" from, other than the claim of certain neural performances causing such to magically appear (and then that conjuring is confined wholly to first-person mode, no public access to or direct scrutiny of the product). It's ironically an obscured acceptance of dualism in materialism, since phenomenal experiences could as much be "summoned" by the electrochemical processes of the brain as the latter "magically creating" a radical new stratum of manifested representations from zero precursors.
https://nautil.us/is-the-hard-problem-re...8018435227
EXCERPTS: They call it the hard problem of consciousness, but a better term might be the impossible problem of consciousness. The whole point is that the qualitative aspects of our conscious experience, or “qualia,” are inexplicable. They slip through the explanatory framework of science, which is reductive: It explains things by breaking them down into parts and describing how they fit together. Subjective experience has an intrinsic je ne sais quoi that can’t be decomposed into parts or explained by relating one thing to another. Qualia can’t be grasped intellectually. They can only be experienced firsthand.
For the past five years or so, I’ve been trying to untangle the cluster of theories that attempt to explain consciousness, traveling the world to interview neuroscientists, philosophers, artificial-intelligence researchers, and physicists—all of whom have something to say on the matter. Most duck the hard problem, either bracketing it until neuroscientists explain brain function more fully or accepting that consciousness has no deeper explanation and must be wired into the base level of reality.
[...] But there is a less dismissive position that strikes me as promising. It is advocated in various ways by philosopher Kristjan Loorits of the University of Helsinki, psychologist Nao Tsuchiya at Monash University, and others. They suggest that qualia feel intrinsic only because we don’t give them further thought. But we could probe deeper. Introspecting on our experience, we might see that what we take to be intrinsic is relational...
[...] This idea is still just an idea—it needs to be developed into a proper theory. But if qualia are relational from a first-person point of view, then they are directly amenable to the methods of science... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Sounds a little naive or overly optimistic. Phenomenology has been examining the content of consciousness from a first-person persepective for over a century, and produced no extra-philosophical, systematic scientific framework of explanation. And then, of course, there's Daniel Dennett's decades long activism and paper: "The Fantasy of First Person Science".
Even more to the point, Musser -- like many others -- is fixating on the specific content of mental experiences (qualia, etc) which is actually a secondary issue. The more fundamental one is general manifestation itself -- how there can be anything other than the (almost universal) non-conscious absence of such appearances and feelings? Due to physical dogma excluding such a capacity from matter a priori, attributing not even elemental properties/relationships for the complex experiences of the brain to arise or assemble from.
There are accordingly no pre-existing, rudimentary stages available to derive "sense and thought presentations" from, other than the claim of certain neural performances causing such to magically appear (and then that conjuring is confined wholly to first-person mode, no public access to or direct scrutiny of the product). It's ironically an obscured acceptance of dualism in materialism, since phenomenal experiences could as much be "summoned" by the electrochemical processes of the brain as the latter "magically creating" a radical new stratum of manifested representations from zero precursors.
