The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
edwardfeser.blogspot.com
The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#2Total 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.
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#3Having 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?
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#4Having 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 experienc…
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
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#5Total 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 on…
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)
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#6Total 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 on…
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 expla…
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."
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#7Sorry 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.
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#8I 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?
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#9Having 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 experienc…
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
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).
Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
#10Having 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 experienc…
>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”?
you've definitely hit upon the problem, but you have it exactly backward. The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. Consciousness affects physical things (you think, plan, and put out your hand and move something). How does this happen? Saying "it's all physical laws" is handwaving away quite a bit of nonphysical phenomena, relying on "the science of the gaps".
it may very well turn out that orgasm feels like it does because that's a property of physics, but you can't just assert these sorts of things, you have to prove them.
my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.