Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
Because folk bring their baggage with them. — Banno
↪bert1 I'll wait for you to state clearly your "concept" which you claim I and Banno lack and then I may further elaborate on what I've already written here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/771417 — 180 Proof
So? Again, I'm not seeing how that prevents us from being mistaken about it. Deities (of various sorts) were equally central at one point, we're clearly wrong about (at least some of) them. — Isaac
I don't even know what that means. What kind of experience is 'experiencing myself as being aware'. What would experiencing myself as being unaware consist of? — Isaac
If you are not able to be conscious of your own awareness, then that says something about you, not about others or humans in general. — Janus
Ah. Back to the "If you disagree with Chalmers you must have a brain defect" argument. I appreciate your concern, rest assured I will get the possibility checked out forthwith. — Isaac
Neuronal activity and 'objects of conversation' are in two different worlds. The latter is constrained by the former, but not dictated by it. — Isaac
"We" means a collection of "I"... It's telling that you couldn't express your idea here without using a personnal pronoun.
If one doubts that there is a self, who is doing the doubting? A doubt implies a person having it, a "mind" rejecting a belief. It can't be an independent doubt, free-floating in the universe. — Olivier5
All the bright and shinny feathers of all the birds in the world are composed of the same material as your hair and your nails: keratin — Olivier5
...the inverted spectrum argument... — Moliere
If consciousness is the capacity to analyse... — Banno
If all we needed to demonstrate the existence of some substantial self in the Cartesian sense was the fact that we speak of "I" and "we" and so on, then it would have been proven long ago and no longer controversial. — Janus
. It's not that all of our feels will be different, it's that it's possible, in a functional, physicalist sense, for them to be so. — Moliere
Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard? — Banno
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 (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. — David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Actually, this gets to why I'm somewhat suspicious now... notice how close that looks to ye olde ontological argument?) — Moliere
The point I was making is that folk are bringing their views on god, society, spirituality, ontology, and even politics into the discussion. That's what messes it up. — Banno
[Adorno] argues that social life in modern societies no longer coheres around a set of widely espoused moral truths and that modern societies lack a moral basis. What has replaced morality as the integrating ‘cement’ of social life are instrumental reasoning and the exposure of everyone to the capitalist market. According to Adorno, modern, capitalist societies are fundamentally nihilistic in character; opportunities for leading a morally good life and even philosophically identifying and defending the requisite conditions of a morally good life have been abandoned to instrumental reasoning and capitalism. Within a nihilistic world, moral beliefs and moral reasoning are held to have no ultimately rational authority: moral claims are conceived of as, at best, inherently subjective statements, expressing not an objective property of the world, but the individual’s own prejudices. Morality is presented as thereby lacking any objective, public basis. — Morality and Nihilism
I think you can argue for a general resemblance between Chalmer's argument and the earlier Cogito arguments of both Descartes and Augustine. — Wayfarer
Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.
This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function.
But as per your usual practice, you're seeking to steer the debate in a way that allows you to dismiss it, but without actually ever having indicated that you're addressing it. — Wayfarer
t's difficult to accomodate the basic fact of Chalmer's argument in the context of today's culture. Here's a snippet from an encylopedia article on Adorno's diagnosis of moral philosophy in capitalist culture: — Wayfarer
So while unconscious one "lacks the capacity to feel"?Consciousness is the capacity to feel. — bert1
My charitable reading of Chalmer's notion is, in my own words, 'the difficulty of scientifically demonstrating that human beings are n o t zombies'.What is the hard problem, in your own words?
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