In addition to compression, we might call things explanations if they’re non-compressive generative models (“This sequence starts 01 because it’s counting all the integers in order”), if they assert but don’t contain the information needed to predict more data (“This sequence starts 01 because it’s copying the sequence from page 239 of Magical Munging”), if they put our data in a social context (“This sequence starts 01 because the Prime Minister ordered it to be so”) and many other things both sensical (like Aristotle’s four causes) and nonsensical (“A witch did it”).
Yes. In particular , explanations decrease arbitrariness and increase predictability. That allows us to put a more concrete interpretation on “we can’t explain qualia”: we can’t predict qualia from their neural correlates.
But allowing for more diverse explanations re-raises the question of why people have a hard time explaining qualia. First I should not that actually, they don’t: “I see red because I’m looking at something red” is a great explanation. It’s not the qualia themselves that aren’t explained, it’s some mysterious overarching pattern (some sort of “why qualia at all?” in some specific hoped-for sense) that’s the issue
It’s not quite the latter either: it’s why qualia given physicalism.
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so successful in other areas.
By analogy [with libertarian free will], you can now figure out where I’m going with qualia. Some people think they have/want/need “Cartesian qualia
It’s not really analogous with LFW, because denial of libertarian free will isn’t directly self contradictory...but illusionism, the claim “nothing seems to you in any particular way, it only seems to be so” is.
Yes. In particular , explanations decrease arbitrariness and increase predictability. That allows us to put a more concrete interpretation on “we can’t explain qualia”: we can’t predict qualia from their neural correlates.
It’s not quite the latter either: it’s why qualia given physicalism.
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so successful in other areas.
It’s not really analogous with LFW, because denial of libertarian free will isn’t directly self contradictory...but illusionism, the claim “nothing seems to you in any particular way, it only seems to be so” is.