I think things are not so bad. If our talking of consciousness leads to a satisfactory functional theory, we might conclude that we have solved the hard problem (at least the “how” part). Not everyone will be satisfied, but it will be hard to make an argument that we should care about the hard problem of consciousness more than we currently care about the hard problem of gravity.
I haven’t read Nagel’s paper but from what I have read _about_ it, it seems like his main point is that it’s impossible to fully explain subjective experience by just talking about physical processes in the brain. It seems to me that we do get closer to such explanation by thinking about analogies between conscious minds and AIs. Whether we’ll be able to get all the way there is hard to predict but it seems plausible that at some point our theories of consciousness would be “good enough”.
I think things are not so bad. If our talking of consciousness leads to a satisfactory functional theory, we might conclude that we have solved the hard problem (at least the “how” part). Not everyone will be satisfied, but it will be hard to make an argument that we should care about the hard problem of consciousness more than we currently care about the hard problem of gravity.
I haven’t read Nagel’s paper but from what I have read _about_ it, it seems like his main point is that it’s impossible to fully explain subjective experience by just talking about physical processes in the brain. It seems to me that we do get closer to such explanation by thinking about analogies between conscious minds and AIs. Whether we’ll be able to get all the way there is hard to predict but it seems plausible that at some point our theories of consciousness would be “good enough”.