Is your idea that, if I knew your brain's unique physical structures in all possible detail, I would be able to experience your experience? — Patterner

No. You would need to 'have my brain' (and other physiological details, such as sense organs) in order to 'experience my experience'. Clearly not a possibility, but it is not a problem for physicalism that we don't have the experiences that result from brains other than our own.

But physicalism can't explain the existence of the experiences in the first place. Why are what amounts to hugely complex physical interactions of physical particles not merely physical events? How are they also events that are not described by the knowledge of any degree of detail regarding the physical events?

Even if one assumes that physicalism is right, you need to explain how it is so. Generally, physicalists assume that the 'physical' is what can be, in principle, known by science.

And here we have the problem. All what we know via science can be known by any subject, not a particular one. However, 'experience(s)' have a degree of 'privateness' that has no analogy in whatever physical property we can think of.

I believe that the problem of 'physicalist' answers to the 'hard problem' is that they either try to make 'consciousness' a fiction (because nothing is truly 'private' for them) or that they subtly extend the neaning of 'physical' to include something that is commonly referred to as 'mental'. This unfortunately equivocates the language used and makes such a 'physicalism' questionable (IIRC this is referred to as Hempel's dilemma among comtemporary philosophers of mind).


As I said in my previous post, however, the 'hard problem' IMO is a part of a more general problem of all views that reduce entities to how they relate to other entites, i.e. a denial that entities are more than their relations. For instance, we can know that an electron *has a given value of mass* because it responds in a given way to a given context, but at the same time, it is debatable that our scientific knowledge gives us a complete knowledge of *what an electron is*.

But physicalism can't explain the existence of the experiences in the first place. — Patterner

It's not as if any other philosophy of mind can provide more than handwaving by way of explanation, so I'm not seeing how this amounts to more than advancing an argument from incredulity against physicalism.

The fact is, there is a lot of science explaining many aspects of our conscious experience.

For example consider the case of yourself listening to music in the sensory deprivation tank, as compared to an identica! version of you with the exception of a heightened cannabinoid level in your blood. The two versions of you would have different experiences, and this is most parsimoniously explained by the difference in physical constitution of stoned you vs unstoned you.

The fact that there is no comprehensive scientific explanation for your consciousness is hardly surprising, given the fact that it's not currently technologically feasible to gather more than a tiny subset of the physical facts about your brain.

Why are what amounts to hugely complex physical interactions of physical particles not merely physical events? How are they also events that are not described by the knowledge of any degree of detail regarding the physical events? — Patterner

Again, no one has a large degree of detail about the physical events occurring in our brains. Even if it were technologically feasible to acquire all of the significant details, human minds aren't up to the task of understanding the significance of such a mountain of physical details.

It's not as if any other philosophy of mind can provide more than handwaving by way of explanation, so I'm not seeing how this amounts to more than advancing an argument from incredulity against physicalism. — wonderer1

That's all any theory of consciousness is. And that's playing fast and loose with the definition of "theory". Who is making predictions with their theory, and testing them? Nobody has anything. But, imo, it's the most fascinating topic there is, so here I am :grin:

For example consider the case of yourself listening to music in the sensory deprivation tank, as compared to an identica! version of you with the exception of a heightened cannabinoid level in your blood. The two versions of you would have different experiences, and this is most parsimoniously explained by the difference in physical constitution of stoned you vs unstoned you. — wonderer1

But the question remains: Why does either stoned me or unstoned me have a subjective experience of our condition? Both experience their physically different statuses. But why aren't the physically different statuses simply physical?

But why aren't the physically different statuses simply physical? — Patterner

What's also interesting here imo is the the question of why something "simply physical" would exclaim things that to us sound like proclamations of consciousness and experience yet surely are produced solely by physical chains of events. I don't see a strong reason why a "simply physical" version of us wouldn't make those exact same kinds of claims as us insofar as they would have the same brains as us. And I don't think most biologists believe there is something fundamentally glaring about brains that would render them insufficient for producing the complex behaviors we are capable of.

i'm not sure if I'm reading you right. Are you talking about P zombies? In which case, I don't think they would make those exact same kinds of claims. I fon't see any reason to think beings that never had consciousness would ever fabricate the idea that they did. They'd be automatons. I suppose they could evolve to look like us, but they wouldn't have much in common with us.

To me, they would if they had exactly the same brains as us but just devoid of any "lights on" inside. My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle.

To me, they would if they had exactly the same brains as us but just devoid of any "lights on" inside. My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle. — Apustimelogist

So then you don't think consciousness has any bearing on anything? It is epiphenomenal?

↪Patterner
To me, they would if they had exactly the same brains as us but just devoid of any "lights on" inside. My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle. — Apustimelogist

There is another, perhaps more important, issue at play here. It’s not just a matter of providing an explanation. It’s recognizing that there are a multiplicity of explanations to choose from, differing accounts each with their own strengths and weaknesses. In dealing with the non-living world, we make use of accounts which are quite useful to us in building workable technologies. But these same accounts, when applied to living organisms and parts of organisms, like brains, show their limits.

We may want a reductive explanation of brain activity for certain purposes, like studying individual neurons or clusters of neurons. But if we want a model to describe perceptual-motor processes and their relation to cognitive-affective behaviors, and the relation between individual cognitive-affective processes and intersubjective and ecological interactions, and we need to show the inseparability of these phenomena, including the inseparability of brain, body and environment, and emotion and cognition, we will want an account which does not isolate something we call ‘brain’ from this larger ecology, and then reduce its functioning to a causal ‘mechanics’.

We will need a model which understands consciousness as a kind of functional unification and integration of these inseparable processes. Applying a non- linear complex systems approach can be a good start, but even here we have to be careful not to make this too reductive.

It seems that people are talking about many different issues.
Q1: What is the subjective experience of red? More to the point, what is something else's subjective experience of red? What is that like?
Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science.
Q3 Why is there subjective experience at all? Why is there something it is like to be something? (per proponents: apparently not anything, but just some things)

Q1 is illustrated by Mary's room. She knows Q2 and Q3. She's somehow a total expert on how it works, and she has subjective experience, just not of red. So she doesn't know what it's like to experience red until the experience actually occurs. She cannot, but others seem to assert otherwise.

'The hard problem' as described by Chalmers seems to be Q3, but I don't find that one hard at all. Call it being flippant if you want, but nobody, including Chalmers, seems capable of demonstrating what the actual problem is. The point of this topic is to have somebody inform me what I'm missing, what is so mysterious.

I purely want to understand how the brain does what it does, and when it comes to experiencing "green" or whatever, it's the most unfathomable of brain processes right now. — Mijin

OK, but that seems to be a Q2 problem, a very hard problem indeed, but not the hard problem.

Pain is a loaded word. Something far from being human (a tree?) might experience pain very differently than does a mammal. Should the same word still be used? Depends how it's defined I guess.

If I make an AI how can I know if it feels pain or not? And so on.

'AI' implies intelligence, and most would agree that significant intelligence isn't required to experience pain. So how does a frog experience it? That must be a simpler problem, but it also might be a significantly different experience compared to us.

AI pain is different to human pain. I mean, probably, sure, but there's no model or deeper breakdown that that supposition is coming from.

Quite right. Q2 is hard indeed. And said definition is needed.

2) Just shrug that it couldn't be any other way e.g. About whether we can know what another person experiences.

Wrong problem again. That's Q1, and what I'm shrugging off is Q3 because I need to see an actual problem before I can answer better than with a dismissal.

Back in the late 80's we gave this robot (a repurposed automotive welding robot, bolted to the floor) some eyes and the vision processor that our company sold. It was hardly AI. We got the thing to catch balls thrown at it. It can't do that without experience, but it very much can do it without intelligence. AI was a long way off back then. To the robot (the moving parts, plus the cameras and processors, off to the side), if that experience wasn't first person, what was it?

In a way, the 'hard problem' is IMO a form of a more general problem that arises when it is assumed that one can have a complete knowledge of anything by purely empirical means. — boundless

While (almost?) everybody agrees that such knowledge cannot be had by any means, I don't think that makes it an actual problem. Certainly nobody has a solution that yields that knowledge. If it (Q1) is declared to be a problem, then nobody claims that any view would solve it.

In the case of consciousness, there is the direct experience of 'privateness' of one's own experience that instead seems a 'undeniable fact' common to all instances of subjective experiences. Its presence doesn't seem to depend on the content of a given experience, but this 'privateness' seems a precondition to any experience.

Not sure about that. One can put on one of those neuralink hats and your thoughts become public to a point. The privateness is frequently a property of, but not a necessity of consciousness.

In the case of Dennett, his misunderstanding is evident when he believes that Mary the colour scientist can learn the meaning of red through a purely theoretical understanding. — sime

What the heck is the meaning of red? This wording suggests something other than the experience of red, which is what Mary is about.
Dennett is perhaps why I put the word 'almost?' up above.

In the case of Chalmer, (or perhaps we should say "the early Chalmer"), his misunderstanding is evident in his belief in a hard problem. Chalmers was correct to understand that first-person awareness isn't reducible to physical concepts, but wrong to think of this as a problem.

This all sounds a lot like you're agreeing with me.

These distinct uses of the same flag (i.e uses of the same lexicon) are not reducible to each other and the resulting linguistic activities are incommmensurable yet correlated in a non-public way that varies with each language user. This dual usage of language gives rise to predicate dualism, which the hard problem mistakes for a substance or property dualism.

And this analogy is helpful, thanks.

So it seems difficult to see how any system, if it experiences at all, can experience anything but itself. That makes first-person experience not mysterious at all. — noAxioms

The mystery is how it experiences at all. — Patterner

OK, but experience seems almost by definition first person, so my comment stands.

Why should bioelectric activity traveling aling neurons, neurotransmitters jumping synapses, etc., be conscious?

You're attempting to ask the correct question. Few are doing that, so I appreciate this. Is it the activity that is conscious, or the system implementing the activity that is? I think the latter. 'why should ...'? Because it was a more fit arrangement than otherwise.
The ball-catching robot described above is an example with orders of magnitude less complexity. There are those that say that such a system cannot be conscious since it is implemented with logic gates and such, but 1) so are you, and 2) it can't do what it does without it, unless one defines 'conscious' in some athropomorphic biased way. That example illustrates why I find the problem not hard at all. I don't have that bias baggage.

Regarding 1st and 3rd person, there is no amount of information and knowledge that can make me have your experience. Even if we experience the exact same event, at the exact same time, from the exact same view (impossible for some events, though something like a sound introduced into identical sense-depravation tanks might be as good as), I cannot have your experience. Because there's something about subjective experience other than all the physical facts.

Agree with all that. This relates to Q1 above, not the hard problem (Q3).

Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel?

I find that impossible. It's like asking how processing can go on without the processing. The question makes sense if there's two things, the processor and the experiencer (of probably the process, but not necessarily), but not even property dualism presumes that.

And in The Conscious Mind, [Chalmers] writes:
Why should there be conscious experience at all?

For one, it makes finding food a lot easier than a lack of it, but then Chalmers presumes something lacking it can still somehow do that, which I find contradictory. The reasoning falls apart if it isn't circular.

Why should it be that consciousness seems to be so tightly correlated with activity that is utterly different in nature than conscious experience? — Donald Hoffman

Different in language used to describe it. I see no evidence of actual difference in nature.

Thanks for the quotes. I didn't want to comment on them all.

It seems that people are talking about many different issues.
Q1: What is the subjective experience of red? More to the point, what is something else's subjective experience of red? What is that like?
Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science — noAxioms

Third person questions imply objective answers . Objectivity implies flattening subjective experience so as to produce concepts which are self-identical over time and across individual perspectives. Such temporally and spatially self-identical objects do not have an independent existence out there in the world. They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others, and ignoring everything about what each of us experiences form our own unique temporal and spatial vantage that we can’t force into the model of the ‘identical for all’ third person thing or fact. The abstracting activity we call third person objectivity is quite useful, but it is far from our primordial access to the world and how it is given to us.

There can be first person as well as third person science. The first person science doesnt abstract away what is genuine, idiosyncratic and unique to the perceiver in the moment of perceiving, and doesn’t pretend to be a fundamental route of access to what is real.

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are. They are about how things show up for one, their modes of givenness. They explain what third person science takes for granted, that the objectivity of objects is constructed as much as discovered.

First-person is a euphemism for self…
— Mww

I'm not using it that way. — noAxioms

To what else could first-person perspective belong?
————-

I personally cannot find a self-consistent definition of self that doesn't contradict modern science. — noAxioms

I don’t find a contradiction; a self-consistent definition of self isn’t within the purview of typical modern science to begin with. The so-called “hard” sciences anyway.

But you’re right to ask: where's the mystery? I don’t know why there should be one.

Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science. — noAxioms

Sure, but let's be very clear here. The question is how the brain can have experiences at all, and right now we don't have any model for that.

The danger that some slip into, and I think from later in your response you do somewhat fall into this, is of assuming a third person description means just finding things correlated with experience. But that's a comparatively trivial problem. If you put your hand on a hot stove, we already understand very well which nerves get activated, which pain centers of the brain light up etc.
What we don't understand is where the unpleasant feeling comes from. Or any feelings at all.

'The hard problem' as described by Chalmers seems to be Q3, but I don't find that one hard at all. Call it being flippant if you want, but nobody, including Chalmers, seems capable of demonstrating what the actual problem is. — noAxioms

Not only have you acknowledged many unsolved questions in your post, but you asked several of your own.

Now, in my view, subjective experience is a hard problem because it doesn't even appear as though an explanation is possible. What I mean by that, is not that I believe any supernatural element or whatever, merely that it is a kind of phenomenon that does not seem amenable to the normal way we reduce and explain phenomena.
Before we knew what the immune system was we could still describe disease. But since we can't even describe the experience of red it looks very difficult to know where to start.
Not impossible; we have no reason to suppose that. But a different class of problem to those that science has previously deconstructed.

But you don't need to agree with that view. Just the fact that you are acknowledging many open questions, that are pretty fundamental to what the phenomenon is, already puts it in a special bracket.
Frankly, I think you're acknowledging that it is a difficult problem, but are reluctant to use the word "hard" because you don't want to climb down.

And here we have the problem. All what we know via science can be known by any subject, not a particular one. However, 'experience(s)' have a degree of 'privateness' that has no analogy in whatever physical property we can think of. — boundless

I'm not grasping what you see as a problem for physicalism here.

My neurons are not interconnected with your neurons, so what experience the activity of your neurons results in for you is not something neurally accessible within my brain. Thus privacy. What am I missing?

And here we have the problem. All what we know via science can be known by any subject, not a particular one. However, 'experience(s)' have a degree of 'privateness' that has no analogy in whatever physical property we can think of.
— boundless

I'm not grasping what you see as a problem for physicalism here.

My neurons are not interconnected with your neurons, so what experience the activity of your neurons results in for you is not something neurally accessible within my brain. Thus privacy. What am I missing? — wonderer1

You’re missing the sleight of hand trick we perform called ‘objectivation’. The starting point of subjective experience is flowingly changing, never identically repeating events, out of which we can notice patterns of similarity, consonances and correlations. The trick of physicalism arises from comparing one person’s contingent and subjective patterns of similarity with many other persons, and then forcing these similarities into conceptual abstractions, like ‘same identical object for all’.

Not does this flatten and ignore the differences of sense of meaning between individual experiences of the ‘same’ object (private experience), but more importantly, it ignores the subtle but continuous changes in sense within the same individual. It is not only that I can never see the identical object you see, but I can never see the identical object from one moment to the next on my own, becuase the concept of identical object is our own invention, not an independent fact of the world. The mathematical underpinnings of physical science depend on the sleight of hand of turning self-similar experience into self-identical objects.

It’s not a bad trick, and allows us to do many useful things, but buried within objective third person concepts like quarks and neutrons and laws of nature are more fundamental, richer processes of experience which are crushed when we pretend that the first person is just a perspectivally private version of the third person vantage. We can keep our third person science, but we must recognize that it is empty of meaning without a grounding in the creative generating process of first person awareness.

I recommend Evan Thompson’s book ‘The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience’

“Science, by design, objectifies the world and excludes the subjectivity of lived experience, but this exclusion means science cannot fully explain consciousness or account for its own foundations.Science depends on conscious subjects (scientists observing, measuring, reasoning), yet its methods treat subjectivity as something to be explained away.

Consciousness is not just another object in the world; it is the background condition that makes any objective inquiry possible.To overcome this blind spot, science needs to integrate first-person experience with third-person methods, rather than reduce or ignore it.”

https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience

While (almost?) everybody agrees that such knowledge cannot be had by any means, I don't think that makes it an actual problem. Certainly nobody has a solution that yields that knowledge. If it (Q1) is declared to be a problem, then nobody claims that any view would solve it. — noAxioms

Ok but notice that in most forms of physicalism that I am aware of, there is a tendency to reduce all reality to the 'physical' and the 'physical' is taken to mean "what can be know, in principle, by science" (IIRC in another discussion we preferred 'materialism' to denote such views).
If your metaphysical model denies such an assumption then, yes, my objection is questionable.

Still, however, I believe that any view in which 'consciousness' emerges from something else has a conceptual gap in explaining how consciousness 'came into being' in the first place. It seems that knowing how 'something' came into being gives us a lot information about the nature of that 'something' and if we knew the nature of consciosuness then it would be also possible to understand how to answer Q3.
Notice that this point applies to all views in which 'consciousness' is seen as ontologically dependent on something else, not just to physicalist views.

Not sure about that. One can put on one of those neuralink hats and your thoughts become public to a point. The privateness is frequently a property of, but not a necessity of consciousness. — noAxioms

The content of my thoughts perhaps can become public. But my experience of thinking those thoughts remains private. For instance, if I know that you are thinking about your favourite meal and that this thought provokes pleasant feelings to you doesn't imply that I can know how you experience these things.

My neurons are not interconnected with your neurons, so what experience the activity of your neurons results in for you is not something neurally accessible within my brain. Thus privacy. What am I missing? — wonderer1

'Privacy' perhaps isn't the right word. There is a difference in the way we have access to the content of my experiece even if you knew what I am experiencing right now. That 'difference' is, indeed, the 'privacy' I am thinking about.

And here is the thing. While scientific knowledge seems about the relations between physical objects - and, ultimately, it is about what we (individually and collectively) have known via empirical means about physical objects... so, how physical objects relate to us (individually and collectively*) - 'subjective experience' doesn't seem to be about a relation between different objects. And, also, it seems to be what makes empirical knowledge possible in the first place.

*This doesn't imply IMO a 'relativism' or an 'anti-realism'. It is simply an acknowledgment that all empirical knowledge ultimately is based on interactions and this means that, perhaps, we can never have a 'full knowledge' of a given object. Something about them remains inaccessible to us if we can't detect it.

So it seems difficult to see how any system, if it experiences at all, can experience anything but itself. That makes first-person experience not mysterious at all. — noAxioms

The mystery is how it experiences at all.
— Patterner

OK, but experience seems almost by definition first person, so my comment stands. — noAxioms

The "first person" part is not a mystery, as you say. It's the "experience" part that is the mystery.

It seems to meet you are saying brain states and conscious events are the same thing. So the arrangements of all the particles of the brain, which are constantly changing, and can only change according to the laws of physics that govern their interactions, ARE my experience of seeing red; feeling pain; thinking of something that doesn't exist, and going through everything to make it come into being; thinking of something that can't exist; on and on. It is even the case that the progressions of brain states are the very thoughts of thinking about themselves.

Is that how you see things?

There is another, perhaps more important, issue at play here. It’s not just a matter of providing an explanation. It’s recognizing that there are a multiplicity of explanations to choose from, differing accounts each with their own strengths and weaknesses. — Joshs

I don't really find this that interesting in the context of the problem of consciousness. Its almost a triviality of science that different problems, different descriptions utilize different models or explanations. Given that any plurality of explanations need to be mutually self-consistent, at least in principle, this isn't interesting. Ofcourse, there are actual scientific models that are not actually mutually consistent, but most people don't recognize that kind of thing as somehow alluding to a reality with inherent mutual inconsistencies. Possibly the only real exception is in foundations of physics albeit there is no consensus position there.



Or maybe the dualism of physical and mental is illusory with regard to fundamental metaphysics.

Or maybe the dualism of physical and mental is illusory with regard to fundamental metaphysics. — Apustimelogist

Can you elaborate?

I don't really find this that interesting in the context of the problem of consciousness. It’s almost a triviality of science that different problems, different descriptions utilize different models or explanations. Given that any plurality of explanations need to be mutually self-consistent, at least in principle, this isn't interesting. — Apustimelogist

My point isn’t simply that different accounts of nature can co-exist, it’s that when you say “My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle”, I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics. As to differing accounts being ‘compatible’ , I’m not sure what this means if they are drawing from different frames of interpretation. According to Kuhn, when paradigms change, the accounts they express inhabit slightly different worlds.