the hard problem of consciousness claims that mental activity can not be reduced to physicality — Hermeticus
physical systems in the human body — Brock Harding
Perhaps your opinion is that we only need to solve the 'easy' problem of consciousness, and that we don't need to take the 'hard' problem seriously. I don't mind that. It sounds pragmatic. — pfirefry
"Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does."
The critical common trait among these easy problems is that they all concern how a cognitive or behavioral function is performed. All are ultimately questions about how the brain carries out some task-how it discriminates stimuli, integrates information, produces reports and so on. Once neurobiology specifies appropriate neural mechanisms, showing how the functions are performed, the easy problems are solved. The hard problem of consciousness, in contrast, goes beyond problems about how functions are performed. Even if every behavioral and cognitive function related to consciousness were explained, there would still remain a further mystery: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by conscious experience? It is this additional conundrum that makes the hard problem hard.
This doesn't explain why I don't see the experience itself when looking at your brain. Instead I can only have the experience itself of looking at your brain. Your brain is not my experience of it (I hope, or else solipsism is the case and your brain doesn't exist when I don't think about it), nor is my brain my experience. My experience is a point of view.These functions are experience in itself. — Hermeticus
In my opinion, the hard problem of consciousness simply doesn't exist. — Hermeticus
This doesn't explain why I don't see the experience itself when looking at your brain. — Harry Hindu
What we perceive, feel, and think is experienced from a unique internal perspective. According to the ‘hard problem of consciousness' some of these mental states are separate to and not reducible to physical systems in the human body — Brock Harding
can you give me an example of how any perception/feeling/thought could be reduced to a particular physical system?
What things, besides us, are conscious? — RogueAI
What things, besides us, are conscious?
As far as the complex processes of the body that spark a consciousness go, I suspect that activated matrices of neurons and electromagnetic (EM) fields play a part in activating dispersed areas of the brain to form coherent qualitative conscious responses.
This would somewhat explain our preoccupation with consciousness being an ethereal non-physical thing, as EM fields are essentially invisible to human perception. — Brock Harding
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (What is it Like to be a Bat,1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. — David Chalmers
we'd have to precisely know what consciousness is — Hermeticus
According to my description of consciousness: "I believe that the concurrent experience of these two perspectives (inner/external) is what we experience as consciousness. Our internal quasi-perceptual awareness combined with what we are able to perceive directly" I guess that any thing that can do this is conscious. — Brock Harding
I think the continued failure of science to say whether machine x is conscious or not is catastrophic to the question of whether science will ultimately explain how unconscious matter can produce conscious states. — RogueAI
the hard problem of consciousness simply doesn't exist. — Hermeticus
what do can we mean by 'conscious experience' ? — ajar
We can see this most readily in microorganisms. They possess no brain, no cognitive abilities, no central nervous system - and yet most of them are capable of receiving sensory stimuli in some forms and accordingly react to their environment. These are simple chemical and electrical mechanisms - but these simple mechanisms are enough to make a microorganism come to "life", starting to act and react in all kinds of ways - sustaining itself, avoiding threats, reproducing. — Hermeticus
The physical sciences as they have developed since [the 17th c] describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.
We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all. — Thomas Nagel, the Core of Mind and Cosmos
That is the background to many of those questions about how 'matter' can produce 'conscious states'. In those expressions, both 'matter' and 'conscious state' are abstractions, theoretical models which inherit all of these intractable problems - intractable, because of the way the model is set up. But that model dictates how sensible, scientific folk are supposed to think about the world. That is the deep contradiction inherent in the secular-scientific mindset. — Wayfarer
The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. — Thomas Nagel, the Core of Mind and Cosmos
yet insisting that the existence of such an entity is beyond question. (If philosophers do question it, they are monsters who can't be serious.) — ajar
What was missed in all of that is that mind (consciousness, being) is never an object of consciousness, because we're never outside of or apart from it. It is always only the subject of experience, but you can't 'objectify' it, for reasons which ought to be obvious on reflection. — Wayfarer
But that also means that it can't be accomodated by the 'objective sciences', due to their constitution being oriented exclusively around what is objectively the case (which is why the eliminative materialists wish to eliminate it, as there is literally no conceptual space on their map for it). — Wayfarer
The odd thing is asserting there's something 'logically' hidden (so no yet-to-be-invented machine will find it either) and yet insisting that the existence of such an entity is beyond question. (If philosophers do question it, they are monsters who can't be serious.) — ajar
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