So I agree that "....the hard problem of consciousness is impossible to solve", but I don't see the logical proof because it seems we are talking about two different things both referred to as consciousness. — Carlo Roosen
Dreams, hallucinations and imagination don't fit easily into discussions on consciousness, do they? — kazan
Let's first assume that the hard problem of consciousness is not the lack of scientific knowledge in that domain but the paradox it creates when thinking of consciousness as an object in the world. — Skalidris
Well, I'm also talking about the " first person experience", and people who explore the hard problem of consciousness are also talking about this, aren't they? — Skalidris
With our current understanding of science, we can't. — Philosophim
What or where could anything be but in the world? — jkop
Wayfarer yesterday jumped from intelligence to consciousness as if it is the same thing. — Carlo Roosen
"How can we objectively measure and explore the purely subjective experience of being conscious?" With our current understanding of science, we can't. — Philosophim
I believe this is the point Skalidris is making: it is not about the advances in science. Even defining consciousness leads to problems. — Carlo Roosen
Any thought experiment you try will fail on me, because you are not talking about the sense of being conscious, but about the content of that consciousness. — Carlo Roosen
Any thoughts we would have about it implies our consciousness, not someone else's, so it's impossible to know. — Skalidris
"How can we objectively measure and explore the purely subjective experience of being conscious?" With our current understanding of science, we can't.
— Philosophim
Well we can't, however advanced sciences become, that's what this "logical proof" is about. — Skalidris
The hard problem is, "Will we ever know what it is like to BE a conscious individual that isn't ourselves". — Philosophim
Just for the record, that isn't the standard way of stating the problem, and it isn't David Chalmers' way (he coined the phrase). You can listen to Chalmers describe it here: He defines the problem as "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences in the mind." When we solve this problem (I do believe it's when, not if) we may or may not know "what it's like" to be someone else. That's a separate, though perhaps related, issue. — J
:up:The hard problem is, "Will we ever know what it is like to BE a conscious individual that isn't ourselves".
— Philosophim
Just for the record, that isn't the standard way of stating the problem, and it isn't David Chalmers' way (he coined the phrase). You can listen to Chalmers describe it here: He defines the problem as "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences in the mind." When we solve this problem (I do believe it's when, not if) we may or may not know "what it's like" to be someone else. That's a separate, though perhaps related, issue. — J
Rather, an interesting dilemma would follow from the idea of "experiencing what X [someone else] experiences," if it was possible to experience what X experiences. I don't suspect that will ever be possible, regardless off what the solution to the Hard Problem turns out to be.An interesting dilemma follows from the idea of "experiencing what X [someone else] experiences." — J
Let's first assume that the hard problem of consciousness is not the lack of scientific knowledge in that domain but the paradox it creates when thinking of consciousness as an object in the world. — Skalidris
Just for the record, that isn't the standard way of stating the problem, and it isn't David Chalmers' way (he coined the phrase). You can listen to Chalmers describe it here: He defines the problem as "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences in the mind." — J
Never say never! Yes, this seems impossible today. But science is full of 'making the impossible possible'. Did we conceive that cell phones would exist 300 years ago? That mankind would ever be able to travel to the moon? Judging what is possible in the future based on what we know today has a history of throwing egg on the face of our collective human race. :)
This is why it is viable to call it 'the hard problem' instead of 'the impossible problem'. — Philosophim
your argument is a bit like saying it's logically impossible to prove the existence of time because it's an object in the world and we can't perceive it as such because each act of perception is a static measurement that never captures its flow. — Baden
First, lets clarify what 'the hard problem is'. Is it that we're conscious? No. Is it that the brain causes consciousness? No. The idea that consciousness is caused by our physical brains is the easy problem. The hard problem is, "Will we ever know what it is like to BE a conscious individual that isn't ourselves". — Philosophim
The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
* the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
* the integration of information by a cognitive system;
* the reportability of mental states;
* the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
* the focus of attention;
* the deliberate control of behavior;
* the difference between wakefulness and sleep. ...
There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically.... If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. — Chalmers
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.
I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.
Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. A nonreductive theory of experience will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explain familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities, we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and other entities.
In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge. — Chalmers
The idea that consciousness is caused by our physical brains is the easy problem. — Philosophim
That is your particular intepretation of the problem. David Chalmer’s original paper doesn’t say that. — Wayfarer
He never says that the problem is what it is like to be a conscious individual that isn’t ourselves. — Wayfarer
Which he proposes as a 'naturalistic dualism'. The key point being the emphasis on 'experience' which is by nature first-person. — Wayfarer
he's not implying that subjective consciousness isn't physical — Philosophim
We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation.
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. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. ...
For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.
There is no soul, or other essence as neuroscience has shown repeatedly. — Philosophim
We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation.
That 'extra ingredient' is missing from physical explanations: — Wayfarer
I don't think Chalmers is trying to suggest that there is a soul or essence in that sense. I'm certainly not trying to resurrect a Cartesian soul. But I also think that the physicalist picture that arises from denying the reality of consciousness (in effect) is also mistaken, because it's grounded in faulty premisses from the outset. — Wayfarer
Yes, and that extra ingredient is the inability to objectively grasp other subjective experiences. Again, this does not mean there is some actual essence we're missing. It means we are at a limitation of what we can evaluate objectively: the personal subjective experience. This does not mean subjective experiences aren't physical. We can evaluate a brain objectively and state, "According to what we know of behavior, this brain is in pain." We just can't objectively state 'how that brain is personally experiencing pain'. — Philosophim
If we want philosophy to stay relevant, we need to follow the discoveries that are being made today, or find some way to push science into areas we want to explore like 'personal experiences'. — Philosophim
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