HPoC is demanding a justification of experience from within a world in which everything is just experiences. Of course it can’t be answered!
I think I see what you’re saying and I do suspect that experience might be too fundamentally subjective to have a clear objective explanation, but I also think it’s premature to give up on the question until we’ve further investigated and explained the objective correlates of consciousness or lack thereof—like blindsight, pain asymbolia, or the fact that we’re talking about it right now.
And does “everything is just experiences” mean that a rock has experiences? Does it have an infinite number of different ones? Is your red, like, the same as my red, dude? Being able to convincingly answer questions like these is part of what it would mean to me to solve the Hard Problem.
By “everything is just experiences” I mean that all I have of the rock are experiences: its color, its apparent physical realness, etc. As for the rock itself, I highly doubt that it experiences anything.
As for your red being my red, we can compare the real phenomenology of it: does your red feel closer to purple or orange? Does it make you hungry or horny? But there’s no intersubjective realm in which the qualia themselves of my red and your red can be compared, and no causal effect of the qualia themselves that can be measured or even discussed.
I feel that understanding that “is your red the same as my red” is a question-like sentence that doesn’t actually point to any meaningful question is equivalent to understanding that HPoC is a confusion, and it’s perhaps easier to start with this.
Here’s a koan: WHO is seeing two “different” blues in the picture below?
In general how can you know whether and how much something has experiences?
I think with things like the nature of perception you could say there’s a natural incomparability because you couldn’t (seemingly) experience someone else’s perceptions without translating them into structures your brain can parse. But I’m not very sure on this.
I think I see what you’re saying and I do suspect that experience might be too fundamentally subjective to have a clear objective explanation, but I also think it’s premature to give up on the question until we’ve further investigated and explained the objective correlates of consciousness or lack thereof—like blindsight, pain asymbolia, or the fact that we’re talking about it right now.
And does “everything is just experiences” mean that a rock has experiences? Does it have an infinite number of different ones? Is your red, like, the same as my red, dude? Being able to convincingly answer questions like these is part of what it would mean to me to solve the Hard Problem.
By “everything is just experiences” I mean that all I have of the rock are experiences: its color, its apparent physical realness, etc. As for the rock itself, I highly doubt that it experiences anything.
As for your red being my red, we can compare the real phenomenology of it: does your red feel closer to purple or orange? Does it make you hungry or horny? But there’s no intersubjective realm in which the qualia themselves of my red and your red can be compared, and no causal effect of the qualia themselves that can be measured or even discussed.
I feel that understanding that “is your red the same as my red” is a question-like sentence that doesn’t actually point to any meaningful question is equivalent to understanding that HPoC is a confusion, and it’s perhaps easier to start with this.
Here’s a koan: WHO is seeing two “different” blues in the picture below?
Presumably you mean all you have epistemically...in your other comments,it doesn’t sound like you are solving the HP with idealism.
In general how can you know whether and how much something has experiences?
I think with things like the nature of perception you could say there’s a natural incomparability because you couldn’t (seemingly) experience someone else’s perceptions without translating them into structures your brain can parse. But I’m not very sure on this.