The hard problem also has to do with the fact that we are trying to understand the very thing we are using to understand anything in the first place. Consciousness is the very platform for our awareness, perception, and understanding, so this creates a twisted knot of epistemology. Indeed, the map gets mixed into the terrain too easily and people start thinking they know the hard problem when they keep looking at the map again! — schopenhauer1
The hard problem also has to do with the fact that we are trying to understand the very thing we are using to understand anything in the first place. Consciousness is the very platform for our awareness, perception, and understanding, so this creates a twisted knot of epistemology. Indeed, the map gets mixed into the terrain too easily and people start thinking they know the hard problem when they keep looking at the map again! — schopenhauer1
Yet again you don't understand what I'm saying. All we can do is talk about the physical stuff in question. Talk about it structurally, relationally etc. None of that ever seems like any of the properties we ascribe to it. Or if it does to anyone, it's simply because they're so used to making the association and not questioning it that they take it for granted. — Terrapin Station
Just as in the other thread I have no idea what point you are trying to make here. — Janus
It isn't so surprising that the hard problem is unsolvable when the capacity to give an account attempting to solve it apparently undermines any account. — fdrake
Is this a language can't express everything? More of a Witty what we can't speak of we must pass over in a silence, and the beetle in the box isn't a something but not nothing either? Also, it's not the things in the world that are mysterious, but the world itself.
Or to paraphrase that last thing in terms of your post, it's the essence of things themselves that we can't get at it and remains unspeakable. — Marchesk
What do you mean by "understand"? How do you understand something you use, if not by using it?The hard problem also has to do with the fact that we are trying to understand the very thing we are using to understand anything in the first place. — schopenhauer1
What do you mean by "map"? I can use the map to get around the world because the map is about the world. Also, the map is part of the world!Consciousness is the very platform for our awareness, perception, and understanding, so this creates a twisted knot of epistemology. Indeed, the map gets mixed into the terrain too easily and people start thinking they know the hard problem when they keep looking at the map again! — schopenhauer1
What do you mean by "use"? How can you use something without knowing, or understanding, anything about it? Could you use a pillow as a walnut cracker? Using a computer instead of a pillow for cracking walnuts says something about the nature of walnuts, pillows and computers, no?We cannot help it, as a species with language. Language itself is a form of secondary representation on the terrain. We largely think in and with language, so to get outside of that and then reintegrate it into a theory using language is damn near impossible. For example, let's take a computer. The very end result is some "use" we get out of a computer. The use is subjective though. Someone can use the computer as a walnut cracker, and it would still get use out of it. The users experience and use of the computer is what makes the computer the computer. Otherwise it is raw existence of a thing. A computer is nothing otherwise outside of its use to the user. — schopenhauer1
An analogy would be digitizing an analog signal. Our brains seem to compartmentalize the stream of information from the environment. The mental objectification of "external" processes and relationships makes it easier to think about the world to survive in it.Then, let's go down to the other end to its components. Computers are essentially electrical signals/waves moving through electrical wires- moving on/off signals. These electrical signals are just impulses of electricity through a wire. That is it. However, because we quantized and represented things into a MAP of 0 and 1, and further into logic gates that move information to make more quantified information, we now have a way of translating raw existing metaphysical "stuff" into epistemically represented information. Every time we look at any piece of raw stuff, we are always gleaning it informationally. — schopenhauer1
This is kind of what I was wanting to get at when talking about the monistic solutions. If the rest of reality is really made of the same "stuff" as the mind, then I don't see a mind-body problem. I don't see a reason to be using terms like "physical" and "mental" to refer to different kinds of "stuff", rather than different kinds of arrangements, processes, or states, of that "stuff". This is also saying that the experiential property isn't necessarily a defining property of the "stuff", rather a particular arrangement of that "stuff". So you can have objects without any experiential aspect to them. In other words, realism can still be the case and the world and mind still be made of the same "stuff".Some ways that try to answer the hard problem is to call consciousness raw "stuff" rather than information (panpsychism or some sort of psychism). It is a place holder for simply metaphysical "existing thing" that we then represent as "mind stuff" or "mentality" or "quale". Other than panpsychism, which is just a broad view of "mind stuff", there is not much else one can do to answer the hard problem, because it will ALWAYS have a MAP explanation of the terrain. What is an electrical signal if not simply represented as a mathematical equation, an on/off piece of data, a diagram, an output of usefulness (the use of a computer discussed earlier)? The raw stuff of existence can never be mined. The terrain is always hidden by the map. — schopenhauer1
Unlike everything else we try to understand, with consciousness, it is investigating the phenomena that allows for other things to have understanding. A computer is only in relation to how the use perceives it- or what the user is conscious of about the computer. A computer may not be a computer in and of itself without a consciousness. The thing itself is perhaps unknowable outside of a human consciousness and is certainly defined by it epistemically.What do you mean by "understand"? How do you understand something you use, if not by using it? — Harry Hindu
The map is the secondary layer we create to make meaning of the world, it is not necessarily the world as it is in itself. It is a representation of what's going on, but not what is going on. We conceptualize and quantize what is going on, but it would be a mistake to say the conceptualization and the quantization is the metaphysical thing itself. It is just something we do to make epistemic sense to us, perhaps because we are a natural linguistic species. It is was also my claim that we can never get past an epistemic sense.What do you mean by "map"? I can use the map to get around the world because the map is about the world. Also, the map is part of the world! — Harry Hindu
I don't see a reason to be using terms like "physical" and "mental" to refer to different kinds of "stuff", rather than different kinds of arrangements, processes, or states, of that "stuff". This is also saying that the experiential property isn't necessarily a defining property of the "stuff", rather a particular arrangement of that "stuff". So you can have objects without any experiential aspect to them. In other words, realism can still be the case and the world and mind still be made of the same "stuff". — Harry Hindu
That makes a major difference though. It is a pretty big philosophical leap to suggest that most forms of matter or processes have an experiential aspect to it. That is what panpsychism believes.The only difference is what they call the "stuff" - "physical" or "mental". — Harry Hindu
Mappings are useful. But no amount of Mapping gets us any closer to solving the Hard Problem. More Mapping does not chip away at the Hard Problem. This is all just more Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Science has known for a hundred years that Neural Activity leads to Conscious Activity. This is nothing new. The question is: How is Neural Activity Mapped to the Conscious Experience? There is a huge Explanatory Gap involved in any kind of Mapping or measurement of Neural Correlates.Neuroscientist Anil Seth discusses what he calls the real problem of consciousness in this Philosophy Bites podcast: https://philosophybites.com/2017/07/anil-seth-on-the-real-problem-of-consciousness.html
He defines the real problem as building explanatory bridges between brain mechanisms and phenemonal descriptions. Neurophenomenology is this mapping between rich conscious descriptions and brain processes. It allows for a chipping away at the explanatory gap between the hard problem and neuroscience, which may end up suggesting the cause and not just an in-depth correlation.
— Marchesk
The question is: How is Neural Activity Mapped to the Conscious Experience? There is a huge Explanatory Gap involved in any kind of Mapping or measurement of Neural Correlates. — SteveKlinko
There is, but better mapping/measurements could lead us to clues and reduce the explanatory gap. — Marchesk
The "hard problem" arises due to a combination of (a) a bias against seeing mentality as something physical and (b) bad analysis of what explanations are and what they can and can't do in the first place, and (c) sundry other ontological misconceptions. — Terrapin Station
Mentality cannot be seen as "something physical", — Janus
The "hard problem" arises due to a combination of (a) a bias against seeing mentality as something physical and (b) — Terrapin Station
The problem is that identifying the mental with the physical is a category error, since they are are two different domains. — Marchesk
it doesn't explain — Marchesk
If you're talking about different conventional ways to talk about things, surely you're not suggesting that ontology (or more importantly what ontology is about) in some way hinges on how people normally talk about things, are you? — Terrapin Station
The problem is that it's not a category error. The mistake is thinking that they're "two different domains." — Terrapin Station
"bad analysis of what explanations are and what they can and can't do in the first place" — Terrapin Station
I'm saying our making ontological arguments does. — Marchesk
They're not conceptually the same sort of "things" at all. — Marchesk
not being able to say whether some physical system different from our biology is conscious. — Marchesk
How do you understand something you use, if not by using it? — Harry Hindu
You're saying that what ontology is about, what it's addressing, somehow hinges on the conventional language used in the ontological arguments we make? — Terrapin Station
I'm saying that your ability to make an identity claim of consciousness to brain states is based on ontological talk. — Marchesk
What's being claimed, however, is in no way based on talk. It's based on what the world is like. Talk is secondary to that. — Terrapin Station
I can say the world is like a square circle, and you can rightfully tell me that's a contradiction. — Marchesk
Ohhhhkay . . . and? — Terrapin Station
If it wasn't, there wouldn't be a hard problem, — Marchesk
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