If the brain is aware of itself, and the brain is matter and energy, then matter and energy in the right circumstances can be aware of itself. How is this inadequate? Is there evidence of some existence that is not matter and energy that is aware of itself that we know of?
— Philosophim

Because you could never arrive at an understanding of it through physics and chemistry, which is the analysis of matter and energy.
— Wayfarer

Isn't the physics of a note an air vibration against a metal Tuba? Have we not made Bach's first symphony over the radio, which is essentially a physical radio wave that interacts with a radio, vibrations, and can be calculated through physics? This broad claim is not good enough Wayfarer, and doesn't actually answer the question. Not answering the question is the same as saying, "No". You need to demonstrate why example's I've given of matter and energy being aware of itself are false. I gave you three to tackle. If you choose not to tackle them, that's your call. — Philosophim

Against better judgement, I will tackle some of these arguments.

Firstly, your response begs the question of whether and in what sense physical matter is conscious, or alternatively whether conscious beings are physical. You're assuming that a self-aware being can (1) be reduced to 'a brain', and (2) comprises only matter and energy. But whether these are true are the very things that need to be explained, hence, begging the question.

As for the brain being aware of itself, that is another contested claim. Brains themselves aren't aware of anything unless they're embodied in a conscious being. Certainly conscious self-aware beings have brains (although there are some strange anomalies) but saying that 'brains are aware' is described in The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience as 'the mereological fallacy', that is, attributing to an anatomical part something that can only be rightly attributed to the whole being.

As to ' physics of a note an air vibration against a metal Tuba?', why only tubas, of all the instruments in the world? And so what? What does that prove? The fact that Bach’s music is transmitted through the radio also has precisely zero bearing. Yes, sound waves are physical, but your hearing of the music as music is not physical, for reasons outlined in Facing Up to the Probem of Consciousness, which you don't recognize.

I have been more than fair in presenting what would be needed to help your point gain footing. — Philosophim

And I have answered them.

I am wondering if the empty suitcase is actually methodological naturalism. Who needs it? Not the naturalist. — Leontiskos

I don't think anyone needs to say they're a methodological naturalist. It's basically an assumption, an implicit principle of natural science. For the natural scientist, most often, and aside from some borderline subject areas like psychosomatic medicine or parapsychology, all naturalism means is a commitment to the kinds of explanations that can be subject to third-party scrutiny and empirical validation. Where methodological naturalism needs to be made explicit is when it appears in the guise of a metaphysic - which happens most often in the attempt to subject philosophical problems to scientific scrutiny. To scientism, in other words. That's when it becomes metaphysical, as distinct from methodological, naturalism.

Surely methodological naturalism - the setting aside of purportedly supernatural or occult explanations - was one of the hallmarks of the emergence of modern science proper, wasn't it? I think that book I mentioned, Metaphysical Origins of Modern Science, E A Burtt, is relevant:

Published in 1924, Burtt's work explores how the shift to a scientific worldview in the 17th century was underpinned by (often unstated) metaphysical assumptions. He argues that the major figures of the Scientific Revolution—such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton—operated within a novel metaphysical framework that emphasized the mechanistic view of nature, displacing older Aristotelian and theological cosmologies.

Burtt’s book is especially insightful in showing how modern science was not merely the result of empirical discoveries but was also driven by philosophical commitments. These commitments included the belief in a mathematically structured universe and the idea that nature operates according to impersonal, mechanistic laws—concepts central to metaphysical naturalism.

Burtt emphasizes that the scientific revolution didn’t eliminate metaphysics but rather replaced one set of metaphysical assumptions with another. Burtt’s analysis makes it clear that scientific progress was bound up with this broader transformation in how reality was conceived. It’s a classic in the history and philosophy of science, often cited for its depth in tracing how metaphysical ideas shaped the development of modern scientific thought.

I think it's regarded as a little outdated nowadays but still covers some valuable ground.

There are plenty of valid scientific interpretations that are non-deterministic, notably Copenhagen interpretation of QM. — noAxioms

The 'Copenhagen interpretation' is not a scientific theory per se. It comprises philosophical reflections on what can and can't be said on the implications of quantum physics.

there are good arguments for the involvement of us humans in the establishment of reality, — T Clark

Such as?

The only point I will add, is that this claim from your first post:

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

Is factually incorrect. Chalmer’s argument is directed at the inadequacy of physical accounts to accurately capture first-person experience, yours or anyone else’s. You may not accept it, but it is what ‘the hard problem’ argument says, so your paraphrase of it is incorrect.

If the brain is aware of itself, and the brain is matter and energy, then matter and energy in the right circumstances can be aware of itself. How is this inadequate? Is there evidence of some existence that is not matter and energy that is aware of itself that we know of? — Philosophim

Because you could never arrive at an understanding of it through physics and chemistry, which is the analysis of matter and enegy. You do understand that all you're arguing for - in fact, pretty well all you ever argue for - is what is called 'physicalist reductionism', don't you? Physicalist reductionism is the view that everything that exists, including complex phenomena like consciousness and life, can ultimately be explained in terms of physical entities, such as matter and energy, and their interactions. It holds that all higher-level properties (such as mental states or biological functions) are reducible to, and can be fully understood by, the underlying physical processes described by the laws of physics and chemistry. In this framework, there is no need to posit non-physical substances or properties. That's basically your view, and you can stick with it, I'm done with debating it.

Spot on.

And further to which, FEMA workers are being threatened by MAGA conspiracy theorists who believe the guv'mint is 'controlling the weather', as per the idiotic Marjorie Taylor Greene.

...the questionable assumption that methodological naturalism was born metaphysics-free — Leontiskos

You can trace the lineage of metaphysical naturalism through the Scholastic tradition in books such as Burtt's 'Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science'. I think it's indisputable that the founders of early modern science - Galileo, Descartes and Newton being the most prominent - all sought to disentangle science from scholastic metaphysics. (In Galileo's case it was crucial, as Aristotle's physics was thoroughly archaic and joined at the hip with Ptolmaic cosmology.) The main point being that the Enlightenment project was to pursue 'natural philosophy' on the basis of what was empirically observable. There was a clause in the foundation documents of the Royal Society that fellows are to avoid 'consideration of metaphysics' as this was deemed 'the province of the Churchmen' which made it politically fraught in those days of religiously-motivated wars. Combine that with Descartes' division of mind and matter, and the roots of physicalist naturalism are pretty clear, I would have thought.

Of course, Newton himself, and to an extent Galileo, observed a kind of deism, acknowledging the Divine Intellect as the source of the Universe, but which was now seen as a kind of self-running machine, from which God was generally absent.

A printed page is just physical pattern.
Brains are involved encoding and decoding. — Mark Nyquist

No kidding. But the judgement that is involved in making that argument is not physical. If you want to arrive at any understanding of what 'physical' actually means, you need to exercise judgement - if this, then that; this must mean that; and so on. None of that is part of the curriculum or subject matter of physics as such. If you want to look for how brains encode those simple logical steps in neurophysiological terms, well, good luck with that. Because you'll already be using the very faculty that you're wanting to explain.

Methodological naturalism stands as a respectable framework for the employment of the scientific method. It has nothing necessarily to say about whether the universe contains supernatural elements or not, only that it may be investigated as if it were entirely natural. — Baden

That's the nub of the issue - methodological naturalism is taken to be a metaphysics, which it actually is not. This is how science comes to be seen as the umpire of what is real, and anything not demonstrable in scientific terms is dismissed. In liberal cultures, we do of course enjoy freedom of conscience, meaning that we can entertain any ideas we like, but if they can't be validated scientifically in some way, then they're essentially subjective or social in nature.

What is the real barrier to doing so? — Baden

I posted an OP about five years ago on the Blind Spot of Science linked to an Aeon essay by Evan Thompson, Adam Frank and Marcello Gleiser on that topic (now a book). They draw on phenomenology to critique the prevailing naturalism, which prioritizes objective, measurable phenomena while 'bracketing out' the subjects who make the measurements and generate the theories. The authors argue that minds, emotions, and cognitive functionality - including decisions about what is worth studying! - are fundamental to our engagement with the world and cannot be fully explained in objective terms, as they've been omitted from the initial methodological step. By overlooking lived experience, science omits a foundational aspect of reality, leading to an incomplete understanding of the universe and our place in it.

So the real barrier is cultural and social. Modern science - that is, science since Galileo - pre-determines certain parameters, foremost of which is that the object of analysis be objectively measurable and empirically intelligible, which is what is generally meant by the umbrella term 'physical'.

Evan Thompson and his co-authors are part of a real sea change in Western cuture that are questioning this. David Chalmers is another. So too John Vervaeke. Something in common to all of them is self-awareness, which has been forced on science by various compelling factors. All of which in some real sense, is a return to the Socratic origins of the Western philosophical tradition, and the commandment, 'know thyself'.

If it is not a soul, what is it? — Philosophim

A form of existence that is aware of itself.

Knowledge only exists expressed in some medium to be interpreted by something else — Philosophim

Well, for a start that is not true, because we all know many things that are never expressed.

If you take a piece of information, be it a formula, a story, a recipe, or whatever, it can be translated between different media such as binary data, handwritten, engraved in brass and so on. The information remains the same while the material form is completely different. So the information is not material.

Its an identity distinction, and there is nothing in the application of this distinction that notes that our functional autonomy is not physical. — Philosophim

Nothing that can be described only in terms of physics exhibits those atttributes. Taking all of the known laws of physics, there is no way you could arrive at a functional description of an organism.

Your challenge is to demonstrate the existence of something that is not matter and energy. — Philosophim

Your arguments, tendentious though they may be.

nobody claimed a chatbot has goals of leading a human life. None of those steps is a requirement for 'understanding'. — noAxioms

Notice the scare quotes.

It's all so tiresome. — Baden

Well, true, but I still think calling it out serves a purpose. I’m trying to get the point across that why it seems so obvious that only the physical can be real, is because of the way the problem has been set up in our culture. It is why when the question is asked ‘what alternative is there?’ the expectation is that the answer must necessarily entail something spooky. That’s why the task is to show how we got here. And actually I think that is very much what Chalmer’s essay was about in the first place.

Splendid unicorn analogy, by the way. :up:

Quite!

I posted a response yesterday:

There is no soul, or other essence as neuroscience has shown repeatedly. — Philosophim

To say that mind is not reducible to physical constituents, is not to posit some ethereal substance or 'ghost in the machine' (if that is what 'soul' means to you). That view is grounded in Cartesian dualism, which posited body as extended but mindless substance and mind (res cogitans) as non-extended pure intelligence. Cartesian dualism is written deeply into the fabric of modern philosophy and science. In general terms, in the following centuries, science tended to regard res cogitans as an incoherent idea, and to concentrate on material causes, res extensa, as the ground of explanation in natural science. And I think that is in the back of your mind whenever we get into this topic. That is why for you it is axiomatic that the mind has to be understood in terms of physical (or neurological) causation. It's because the alternative seems to be a 'thinking substance', which to you makes no sense. When physicalism is questioned, this is what you think is being proposed. I think your approach is very much influenced by that.

The physical world is matter and energy. To have something non-physical, you would need something that does not fit in the category of matter and energy. — Philosophim

Information would be a good candidate in our scientific age. 'Information is information, not matter or energy', said one of founders of computer science. 'No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.' And information is clearly separate from matter. Why? Because the same information can be encoded in completely different material forms, and yet still retain its meaning.

When you say living organisms display attributes and characteristics that cannot be extracted from the laws of chemistry and physics alone, could you give some examples? — Philosophim

When I say that living organisms display attributes and characteristics that cannot be extracted from the laws of chemistry and physics alone, I'm pointing to the fact that organisms are fundamentally different from machines. Unlike machines, which serve purposes imposed on them from the outside, living organisms exhibit intrinsic agency and functional autonomy. They actively maintain themselves through processes like homeostasis which enables them to differentiate themselves from their surroundings, unlike minerals or other non-organic materials. This self-maintenance and self-regulation give organisms an internal purpose—a drive to persist, adapt, and flourish—that is entirely absent in the purely extrinsic purposes of machines. This fundamental distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic purpose is key to understanding why organisms cannot be reduced to mere physical or chemical mechanisms. The whole system and its environment are deeply intertwined, making living systems more than just the sum of their parts.

I don't think I follow any conventional dualism. — Mark Nyquist

Sure you do. It's implied in everthing you write. Whatever is being forced on you, is doing so by virtue of your prior commitment to the sole reality of the physical.

the question is in what form do non-physical things exist? If physical matter isn't involved there is no physical form. — Mark Nyquist

Forms are not just the shapes of physical things; they are the essential principles that particular things must conform to in order to exist. For instance, the concept of 'wings'—a structure for flight—has emerged independently across insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals. The form of a wing is determined by the function of flight. This form, understood as an abstract principle, pre-exists physical wings. It represents the necessary conditions that must be realized for flight, rather than being derived from physical matter.

a concept a non-physical always is mental content so is physically contained. — Mark Nyquist

While concepts such as wings or circles are grasped by the mind, they are not merely products of the mind. They exist as forms independently of their physical manifestations. The mind may indeed correlate with brain activity, but the claim that the mind 'is the product of' the brain is precisely what the hard problem of consciousness calls into question. The relationship between brain and mind remains a mystery, and it is worth considering that the brain might enable conscious acts might actually drive evolutionary processes. Greater intelligence provides greater possibilities for the organism, suggesting that the brain is a product of the mind’s ability to conceptualize and act within the world, as much as a cause.

This does not posit 'non-material' things or forces, but constraints, which are top-down rather than simply bottom-up. Living things, generally, are shaped by both of those factors, not simply by physical (bottom up) causation. Most of what you and @Philosophim are saying, is a consequence of the 'Cartesian duality', with it's artificial model of matter and 'non-material substance', as explained in this earlier post. It seems natural to you, because it is deeply embedded in our way of seeing things.

I looked at the link provided, and he comes across more as an idealist, — noAxioms

If you mean, Bernardo Kastrup, then yes, he describes himself as an 'analytical idealist'. (I suspect he includes 'analytical' to align his approach with analytical philosophy more widely.) But note the reason I introduced him, and Federico Faggin, is because they are both computer scientists who have deep experience with early AI, but they are also philosophers.

I have issue with not using 'understanding' since it would seem impossible to pass a high school exam on a subject without any understanding of the subject, and yet gemini could do so. — noAxioms

But it wouldn't understand that it had! It wouldn't, then, get ready for college, decide on a subject, move out of home, and, you know, get a life :-)

Even if we can study our brain and associate phenomena with consciousness, our understanding of it is made through consciousness, through this subjective notion in our mind. And breaking down consciousness is impossible: it's always there as a whole, at least if we consider the whole to be the experience of the subject (you could study altered states of consciousness to learn more about the missing elements in these experiences). — Skalidris

Phenomenology is grounded on that awareness. The phenomenological method is grounded in awareness of the nature of first-person experience, but not from an objective or 'outside' stance but by attention to the quality of experience in a moment-by-moment basis. It is related to ancient philosophical skepticism, which 'withholds judgement about that which is not evident'.

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etcetera. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. — Key Ideas in Phenomenology

David Chalmers recognises that phenomenology must be 'absolutely central' to a properly-constituted science of conciousness.

As a footnote to the above, what really is 'physical'? Is the brain physical? Living organisms? I question these assumptions, because living organisms generally display attributes and characteristics that can't be extracted from the laws of physics or chemistry alone. They don't violate physical laws, but adapt to them in ways that physical things like minerals or gases do not. As for the brain, it can be considered as a physical object, but in its context, embodied in a living organism, it is certainly much more than that.

What I think is meant by 'physical' simply means 'objective' - what can be sensed, measured, analysed by objective methods and instruments. Yet at the bottom of 'physical matter' we nowadays find abstractions, and indeed the whole model of particle physics is grounded in mathematical abstractions.

The noting of the current limitations of science being able to objectively capture personal experience are just that, a limit. — Philosophim

They're not that. There are limitations to scientific method in this respect as a matter of principle, which you're not seeing. It requires a different kind of approach to what has been up until now understood as scientific method.

is philosophy trying to find something that isn't there, disguising wishes and fantasy as word play to keep some hope alive of a mortal shell that isn't shackled to physical reality? The former is what propels civilizations, while the latter keeps us in the dark ages. — Philosophim

:roll:

Well it’s a big part of it for sure. But it’s well known in philosophy that the more general a term, the harder it is to define.

They have some level of intelligence — Carlo Roosen

I think that can be questioned. 'Intelligence' is the term we use but whether artificial intelligence is actually intelligent is questionable. I put it to ChatGPT, which you can review below:



I don't think you understand the implications of the question you pose in the OP:

To me, it’s clear that if computers had their own language, one they could develop for themselves, they would form a worldview independent from ours. Once we implement this language in a neural network, it will be flexible enough to learn things we can’t even imagine. — Carlo Roosen

I think that what you're proposing is actually creating a novel form of being, to all intents and purposes. After all, 'a worldview' of the kinds that humans have has literally been thousands of years in the making (or millions, if you include our whole evolutionary history.) Humans are biological beings with existential concerns, which culture and society has developed ways to address over the millenia. So what would be the overall aim of the network you're proposing? What would imbue it with the will to exist or evolve? Of course, many people are asking these questions now, seeing as AI has suddenly exploded in power, but they're big questions. I don't expect any AI systems to have the answers.

To make (intelligence) truely defined and measurable, yes there is a challenge, but I don't see why it would be impossible. We've done it for humans and animals. — Carlo Roosen

But have we? I believe that humans are more intelligent than animals, although there's a lot of people here that call that into question. What is intelligence? The word is actually derived from 'inter-legere' meaning 'to read between'. So in essence, it implies judgement. And judgement requires knowledge of context, a grasp of meaning, and an overall sense of what matters. They too are very deep questions.

But isn't the burden of proof on you, to prove that intelligence and consciousness are connected, as you say? — Carlo Roosen

But aren’t they always connected? Can you provide an example of where they’re not?

And can intelligence really be defined and measured? I suppose it can be in some respects, but there are different modes of intelligence. A subject may have high intelligence in a particular skill and be deficient in other areas.

So what ‘human level intelligence’ means is still an open question (let alone ‘superhuman’).

To me, it’s clear that if computers had their own language, one they could develop for themselves, they would form a worldview independent from ours. Once we implement this language in a neural network, it will be flexible enough to learn things we can’t even imagine. — Carlo Roosen

You’re assuming a lot there! Have a look at this dialogue from a few days back

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

You're still not seeing the point, though. There is some ability to infer some obvious physiological correlations like pain or epilepsy from neuroscience, but you still fall back on the assumption that subjective experiences are still ultimately physical, without addressing the real crux of the issue: the first-person, qualitative aspect of experience that resists explanation by objective, third-person descriptions. Even if we can identify some neural correlates—like specific brain states that accompany pain, color perception, or emotions—these correlations don’t explain why or how those states are accompanied by conscious experience, and there's no actual theory that does so. The subjective feel of pain, or what it is like to experience red, is not part of the objective description. That is the explanatory gap that you're explaining away by equating the subjective with the merely personal.

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

So to paraphrase, your response is, 'It's true that objective science can't capture personal experience, but it doesn't really matter. From brain science, we know that experience is basically physical in nature, let's hope philosophy catches up with that one day.'

There is no soul, or other essence as neuroscience has shown repeatedly. — Philosophim

I might as well try and spell this out, as it's been a bone of contention between us in many debates. There is a deep philosophical problem here. To say that mind is not reducible to physical constituents, is not to posit some ethereal substance or 'ghost in the machine' (if that is what 'soul' means to you). That view is grounded in Cartesian dualism, which posited body as extended but mindless substance and mind (res cogitans) as non-extended pure intelligence. Cartesian dualism is written deeply into the fabric of modern philosophy and science. In general terms, in the following centuries, science tended to res cogitans as an incoherent idea, and to concentrate on material causes, res extensa, as the ground of explanation in natural science. And I think that is in the back of your mind whenever we get into this topic. That is why for you, and for many others, it is axiomatic that the mind has to be understood in terms of physical (or neurological) causation.

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, on an artifical distinction between abstractions. Rather, the whole picture of Cartesian dualism, and the physical reductionism that descended from it, has to be called into question. That is the philosophical background as I see it.

he's not implying that subjective consciousness isn't physical — Philosophim

He jolly well is!

Chalmers asks:

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:

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.

So he's explicitly rejecting physical reductionism.

My suggestion was to ignore the topic of consciousness here, but maybe that doesn't work. Especially not if one, like Wayfarer, equates consciousness with intelligence. — Carlo Roosen

You have yet to explain how intelligence can be dissociated from consciousness. You might say that AI does this, but as noted above, AI systems don't actually know anything, so the question must be asked if you think they are capable of 'human-level intelligence' in light of that lack. So my objection may appear off topic to you, but maybe that's because you're not seeing the problem. It might be that you have a false picture of what AI is and can do.

// I was reading yesterday that IBM's Deep Blue, which famously beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1996, doesn't actually know what 'chess' is, doesn't know what 'a game' is, and doesn't know what 'winning' means. It simply performs calculations so as to derive an outcome.//

I struggle with the idea that causation is always indirect. As I type this, my keystrokes cause the appropriate symbols to appear on the screen. I understand this is mediated by thousands of sub-processes on my computer and the servers but nonetheless if I were to press Z and see X, I would have to think there was some cause for that. (Although even as I write that, I recall an old friend who had a near-fatal neural aneurism, the first symptom of which is that he couldn't type, and thought he had a faulty keyboard.....so I guess I've just shot myself in the foot....)

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

That is your particular intepretation of the problem. David Chalmer’s original paper doesn’t say that. He says that understanding the specific functional aspects of consciousness and their correlation with neural processes are comparatively easy:

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

Compare with:

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.

He surveys a number of proposed causal links between brain and conscious experience and finds them wanting. Further on he says:

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

Which he proposes as a 'naturalistic dualism'. He never states that the problem is what it is like to be a conscious individual that isn’t ourselves. His key point is the emphasis on 'experience' which is by nature first-person. That could be intepreted as saying that 'we can't directly know the experience of another person', but he doesn't directly state it.

The stumbling block for the objective sciences - the actual problem that has to be faced up to - is that experience is not objective, as the OP kind of says. Consciousness is the property of the subject to whom the experience occurs, so the exclusive emphasis on objective, third-party measurement which is the backbone of modern scientific method can't accomodate it. Which is why elminativism wants to eliminate it.

The idea that consciousness is caused by our physical brains is the easy problem. — Philosophim

But the nature of that causal relationship is the very heart of the issue. Physicalism assumes that it possess an in-principle explanation, but that is what is being called into question.

His critique of materialism isn't hard to agree with. Materialism does posit, ultimately, mathematical abstractions at the bottom of everything and ignores consciousness. But Kastrup's idealism--as expressed in that article--fares no better in that it posits consciousness as fundamental as a solution to ignoring it, but with no real insight into how it interacts with or why it's necessary to interact with matter in order to produce human experience. Or why human experience, which is the origin of the concept of "consciousness", is so special such that this concept turns out to the most fundamental map of the big picture. So, we're left without the only pieces of the puzzle that actually matter. — Baden

Hey, thanks for that feedback! As has been pointed out already, that abstract that you're reacting to was AI generated, for the purpose of criticism of one of the claims in the OP, namely, that we will soon produce 'human-level intelligence' (or even superhuman, whatever that's supposed to mean.) So it's very cursory. Kastrup does address those points you raise in great detail in his various books, articles and lectures. He has found that his idealist philosophy is convergent in many respects with Schopenhauer's (hence his book on that), and from my reading, he has produced a comprehensive idealist metaphysics, although I won't try and respond to all of your points in a single post. If you're interested, he has a free course on it.

Take them or leave them, materialism and idealism boil down to the same thing, fruitless stories aimed at elevating their storytellers into something they're not nor ever can be, i.e. vessels of wisdom that point to anything of actual significance beyond scientific progress and lived human experience. — Baden

I have more confidence in philosophy as a vehicle for truth.

I assume every species has thoughts... — Vera Mont

Don't you think there might be just a smidgen of anthropomorphic projection there?

I think we have good reasons to believe, e.g., that electrons exist. — Bob Ross

They only have a tendency to exist. We know they don't have any determinate existence until they're measured. That is an implication of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. We also know that sub-atomic phenomena can behave as both waves and particles, and so are not really either one or the other, as those two forms of existence are incommensurable.

Thank you Banno, means a lot. I don't claim that it conveys anything particularly earth-shattering but I was pleased with the writing style and with what I think is the novel idea in the title.

I have no idea why other people think this is remarkable, when we all not only have a sense of time, but can witness every living thing around us respond to the passage of time. — Vera Mont

There's a well-known - some might say notorious - case which was recounted in a popular book of the 1970's, Supernature, and again in a more recent work, The Human Cosmos, Jo Marchant.

In February 1954 , a US biologist named Frank Brown discovered something so remarkable, so inexplicable, that his peers essentially wrote it out of history. Brown had dredged a batch of Atlantic oysters from the seabed off New Haven, Connecticut, and shipped them hundreds of miles inland to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Then he put them into pans of brine inside a sealed darkroom, shielded from any changes in temperature, pressure, water currents, or light. Normally, these oysters feed with the tides. They open their shells to filter plankton and algae from the seawater, with rest periods in between when their shells are closed. Brown had already established that they are most active at high tide, which arrives roughly twice a day. He was interested in how the mollusks time this behavior, so he devised the experiment to test what they would do when kept far from the sea and deprived of any information about the tides. Would their normal feeding rhythm persist?

For the first two weeks, it did. Their feeding activity continued to peak 50 minutes later each day, in time with the tides on the oysters’ home beach in New Haven. That in itself was an impressive result, suggesting that the shellfish could keep accurate time. But then something unexpected happened, which changed Brown’s life forever.

The oysters gradually shifted their feeding times later and later. After two more weeks, a stable cycle reappeared, but it now lagged three hours behind the New Haven tides. Brown was mystified, until he checked an astronomical almanac. High tides occur each day when the moon is highest in the sky or lowest below the horizon. Brown realized that the oysters had corrected their activity according to the local state of the moon; they were feeding when Evanston—if it had been by the sea—would experience high tide. He had isolated these organisms from every obvious environmental cue. And yet, somehow, they were following the moon.

The second of those two books recounts how Frank Brown was essentially ostracized by the scientific mainstream for the claim that the oysters somehow responded to changes in lunar gravitation. Nevertheless his findings still stand as far as I know.

//I should add, I don't think molluscs are conscious, and these actions are not rational, but that it is very interesting that this behaviour can be regulated in this manner.//

Why thank you :pray:

Perfectly clear to me, but apparently something others do not see.

Perhaps it would have better to say something like "In the early 20th century a split in methods and interests occurred within philosophy, and Husserl was a bellwether." — J

Have a look at How the premature death of Collingwood changed philosophy

Paul Kneirem had a rather good little essay on the topic on the old forum which I think I saved somewhere. Also God does not exist, although you’ll say you knew that already.

It sounds like, then, you believe that numbers are real a priori? Either way, they exist and are real. That's confused and muddied language to make a distinction between what is real and what exists. — Bob Ross

I can understand why you would say that, as it seems a strange distinction to make, but the distinction between what is real and what exists is nevertheless a valid one. But I won't take it further at this point.