Are you suggesting that in the case of the hard problem, there may be some equivalent of the ‘flat earth’ assumption that the hard-problemists hold so tightly that they can’t even comprehend a ‘round earth’ explanation when it’s offered?
Yes. Dualism is deeply appealing because most humans, or at least most of humans who care about the Hard Problem, seem to experience themselves in dualistic ways (i.e. experience something like the self residing inside the body). So even if it becomes obvious that there’s no “consciousness sauce” per se, the argument is that the Problem seems to exist only because there are dualistic assumptions implicit in the worldview that thinks the Problem exists.
I’d go on to say that if we address the Meta Hard Problem like this in such a way that it shows the Hard Problem to be the result of confusion, then there’s nothing to say about the Hard Problem, just like there’s nothing interesting to say about why ships never sail off the edge of the Earth.
So you don’t believe there is such a thing as first-person phenomenal experiences, sort of like Brian Tomasik? Could you give an example or counterexample of what would or wouldn’t qualify as such an experience?
I think that there’s a process we can meaningfully point to and call qualia, and it includes all the things we think of as qualia, but qualia is not itself a thing per se but rather the reification of observations of mental processes that allows us to make sense of them.
I have theories of what these processes are and how they work and they mostly line up with the what’s pointed at by this book. In particular I think cybernetic models are sufficient to explain most of the interesting things going on with consciousness, and we can mostly think of qualia as the result of neurons in the brain hooked up in loops so that their inputs include information not only from other neurons but also from themselves, and these self-sensing loops provide the input stream of data that other neurons interpret as self-experience/qualia/consciousness.
but qualia is not itself a thing per se but rather the reification of observations of mental processes
I don’t see how that helps. We don’t have a reductive explanation of consciousness as a thing, and we don’t have a reductive explanation of consciousness as a process.
Yes. Dualism is deeply appealing because most humans, or at least most of humans who care about the Hard Problem, seem to experience themselves in dualistic ways (i.e. experience something like the self residing inside the body). So even if it becomes obvious that there’s no “consciousness sauce” per se, the argument is that the Problem seems to exist only because there are dualistic assumptions implicit in the worldview that thinks the Problem exists.
I’d go on to say that if we address the Meta Hard Problem like this in such a way that it shows the Hard Problem to be the result of confusion, then there’s nothing to say about the Hard Problem, just like there’s nothing interesting to say about why ships never sail off the edge of the Earth.
So you don’t believe there is such a thing as first-person phenomenal experiences, sort of like Brian Tomasik? Could you give an example or counterexample of what would or wouldn’t qualify as such an experience?
I think that there’s a process we can meaningfully point to and call qualia, and it includes all the things we think of as qualia, but qualia is not itself a thing per se but rather the reification of observations of mental processes that allows us to make sense of them.
I have theories of what these processes are and how they work and they mostly line up with the what’s pointed at by this book. In particular I think cybernetic models are sufficient to explain most of the interesting things going on with consciousness, and we can mostly think of qualia as the result of neurons in the brain hooked up in loops so that their inputs include information not only from other neurons but also from themselves, and these self-sensing loops provide the input stream of data that other neurons interpret as self-experience/qualia/consciousness.
I don’t see how that helps. We don’t have a reductive explanation of consciousness as a thing, and we don’t have a reductive explanation of consciousness as a process.