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The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

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Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#21

Post by tbrownaw »

fsckboy wrote: post #10
chaboud wrote: post #3

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 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 th…

> The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical.

That sounds an awful like you're taking as axiomatic that consciousness is non-physical i.e. magic.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#22

Post by fsckboy »

tbrownaw wrote: post #21
fsckboy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. That sounds an awful like you're taking as axiomatic that consciousness is non-physical i.e. magic.

you are asserting you know what consciousness is. I'm saying I don't know.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#23

Post by fsckboy »

yibg wrote: post #18
fsckboy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

You seem to be overloading the word "physical"? Information and computation are physical manifestations of e.g. electrons and physical bits. Information are stored (as far as we know) on physical things like memory or the brain. e.g. you damage the brain and memory goes away.

my comment said that I don't believe "physical bits" exist, or at least not as physical bits, so you using the term physical bits is ignoring what I said. When you and I meet and shake hands, we don't actually touch, rather our electrons repel each other, quite firmly. I'm saying that they don't need to be physical to do that.

I'm saying "we live in a simulation", except it's not (necessarily) a simulation, all we know is that it's all there is that we know about.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#24

Post by chaboud »

fsckboy wrote: post #10
chaboud wrote: post #3

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 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 th…

So, in the absence of fully bearing out the complete pathways of experience (effectively, mapping, at the atomic, and possibly quantum level, everything in a person), we’re going to assert that some non-physical phenomena are afoot? That seems like we’re fishing in deeper and darker corners for the soul because we decided to ascribe significance to perception and experience.

It’s still not clear to me why qualia are anything more than the enshrinement of labels. Replace “description” with neuro-interfaced simulation, and the whole argument dissolves.

By asking someone to prove that consciousness is not a product of something outside of physics, you’re demanding that they prove a negative.

Let’s put it more simply: we have no evidence to indicate that human thought or experience require anything beyond the elements and nature of the physical universe.

Otherwise, we’re just trying to explain complexity not yet understood with religious attribution, and we should hang up our science spurs right now.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#25

Post by fsckboy »

rini17 wrote: post #11
fsckboy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Even if it's all computation, it might be worth it to distinguish sentient and not sentient computations. I think trying to arrive to it by examining particles is a detour at best.

if sentient computation exists as a subset of a computational structure (our universe) it must be said that the computational structure is sentient.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#26

Post by fsckboy »

chaboud wrote: post #24
fsckboy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

So, in the absence of fully bearing out the complete pathways of experience (effectively, mapping, at the atomic, and possibly quantum level, everything in a person), we’re going to assert that some non-physical phenomena are afoot? That seems like we’re fishing in deeper and darker corners for the soul because we decided to ascribe significance to perception and experience. It’s still not clear to me why qualia are…

you're mixing two things I'm saying, that we already know enough to realize that the hunter gatherer intuition of physical things becomes quite inadequate at the nano scale, so it's time to abandon it; despite that physics and physical share the same etymology, I'm not saying to abandon physics. And that consciousness and our imagination of things that don't exist do not require physical existence of things (using that intuition) so how can we say that we know what imagination is?

saying "but I believe in the materialist interpretation of modern science because I run from religion, that fusty old thing I fear, so I insist that consciousness be explainable by physical laws" is not a proof. I am an atheist, but our consciousnesses have created religion, so it exists as much as our other thoughts. What we see with our eyes we also are convinced exists, but in our heads, thinking about it, it has the same nature as our other thoughts, and imaginings.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#27

Post by canjobear »

chaboud wrote: post #3

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 experienc…

The nonphysicality of consciousness isn't taken as axiomatic, there are arguments for it. Consider the argument from knowledge, summarized in TFA:

> A related argument known as the “knowledge argument” was famously put forward by Frank Jackson. Imagine Mary, a scientist of the future who, for whatever reason, has spent her entire life in a black and white room, never having experiences of colors. She has, nevertheless, through her studies come to learn all the physical facts there are to know about the physics and physiology of color perception. For example, she knows down to the last detail what is going on in the surface of a red apple, and in the eyes and nervous system, when someone sees the apple. Suppose she leaves the room and finally comes to learn for herself what it is like to see red. In other words, she comes for the first time to have the qualia associated with the conscious experience of seeing a red apple. Surely she has learned something new. But since, by hypothesis, she already knew all the physical facts there were to know about the situation, her new knowledge of the qualia in question must be knowledge of something over and above the physical facts.

In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. The version of this that I learned first was "what is it like to be a bat?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

Another one that I can recall offhand, from Descartes: Physical things have extension in space. One way to test whether something has extension in space is whether you can cut it in half. But your consciousness can't be cut in half, you can't even conceive of what this would mean. So it's not physical.

Make of the arguments what you may. I wrote term papers against both of the above in undergrad. But it's definitely something people have thought carefully about, not just an ideological assertion that consciousness Must Be Different.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#28

Post by chaboud »

fsckboy wrote: post #23
yibg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be overloading the word "physical"? Information and computation are physical manifestations of e.g. electrons and physical bits. Information are stored (as far as we know) on physical things like memory or the brain. e.g. you damage the brain and memory goes away.

my comment said that I don't believe "physical bits" exist, or at least not as physical bits, so you using the term physical bits is ignoring what I said. When you and I meet and shake hands, we don't actually touch, rather our electrons repel each other, quite firmly. I'm saying that they don't need to be physical to do that. I'm saying "we live in a simulation", except it's not (necessarily) a simulation, all we kn…

That becomes a bit of a silly argument, in that it ends up making no real assertion.

Similar arguments were tried in the early days of the telescope in the 17th century, asserting that what was being observed could not be trusted due to the mediation of the lenses (early telescopes were generally refractive). While imperfections can limit and govern the information available via telescopes, there is no reason to believe that said information is false or somehow governed by anything other than physical phenomenon. It was, and is, the height of sophistry to make such an assertion.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#29

Post by Vecr »

nickelpro wrote: post #2

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 on…

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.

Re: The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

#30

Post by chaboud »

fsckboy wrote: post #26
chaboud wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in the absence of fully bearing out the complete pathways of experience (effectively, mapping, at the atomic, and possibly quantum level, everything in a person), we’re going to assert that some non-physical phenomena are afoot? That seems like we’re fishing in deeper and darker corners for the soul because we decided to ascribe significance to perception and experience. It’s still not clear to me why qualia are…

you're mixing two things I'm saying, that we already know enough to realize that the hunter gatherer intuition of physical things becomes quite inadequate at the nano scale, so it's time to abandon it; despite that physics and physical share the same etymology, I'm not saying to abandon physics. And that consciousness and our imagination of things that don't exist do not require physical existence of things (using th…

Okay. That I’m partly down with. Naming of objects is convenient, but very few objects that we name and count are, in fact, single things. That said, the categorization and grouping are awfully convenient for day to day living.

- that’s a long edit, but I’ll reply with a short one:

I’m not running from religion. I’m suggesting that enshrining consciousness as something ineffable and then demanding that it be fully mapped out by physics to not otherwise be a symptom of the preternatural is a sophistic argument.

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