I tried to communicate a psychological process that occurred for me: I used to feel that there’s something to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, then I read this book explaining the qualities of our phenomenology, now I don’t think there’s anything to HPoC. This isn’t really ignoring HPoC, it’s offering a way out that seems more productive than addressing it directly. This is in part because terms HPoC insists on for addressing it are themselves confused and ambiguous.
With that said, let me try to actually address HPoC directly although I suspect that this will not be much more convincing.
HPoC roughly asks “why is perceiving redness accompanies by the quale of redness”. This can be interpreted in one of two ways.
1. Why this quale and not another?
This isn’t a meaningful question because the only thing that determines a quale as being a “quale of redness” is that it accompanies a perception of something red. I suspect that when people read these words they imagine something like looking at a tomato and seeing blue, but that’s incoherent — you can’t perceive red but have a “blue” quale.
2. Why this quale and not nothing?
Here it’s useful to separate the perception of redness, i.e. a red object being part of the map, and the awareness of perceiving redness, i.e. a self that perceives a red object being part of the map. These are two separate perceptions. I suspect that when people think about p-zombies or whatever they imagine experiencing nothingness or oblivion, and not a perception unaccompanied by experience, or they imagine some subliminal “red” making them hungry similar to how it would affect a p-zombie. There is no coherent way to imagine being aware of perceiving red, and this being different from just perceiving red, without this awareness being an experience. All you have is experience.
HPoC is demanding a justification of experience from within a world in which everything is just experiences. Of course it can’t be answered! If it could formulate a different world that was even in principle conceivable, it would make sense to ask why we’re in world A and not in world B. But this second world isn’t really conceivable if you focus on what it would mean. The things you’re actually imagining are seeing a blue tomato or seeing nothing or seeing a tomato without being aware of it, you’re not actually imagining an awareness of seeing a red tomato that isn’t accompanied by experience.
This isn’t a meaningful question because the only thing that determines a quale as being a “quale of redness” is that it accompanies a perception of something red.
Edit: It’s a meaningful question because we, as far as we are concerned, it could have been different because we don’t have a way of predicting it. Moreover, iyt quite possibly does vary between individuals, because red-green colour blindness is a thing.
What determines, in the sense of pinning down, a quale is a combination of the external stimulus, eg. 600nm light, and the subject.
But that isn’t the relevant sense of “determines”. It isn’t causal deterinism, and it isn’t the kind of “vertical” determinism that arises from having a reductive explanation. If subjective red is an entirely physical phenomenon, then it should be determined by, and predictable from, the underlying physics. This we cannot do—we cannot predict non human qualia, or novel human qualia. If there is a set of facts that cannot be deduced from physics, physicalism is wrong.
Reductionism allows some basic facts, about fundamental laws and primitive entities to go unreduced, but not high level phenomena, which includes consciousness.
HPoC is demanding a justification of experience from within a world in which everything is just experiences.
No, it demands a justification of experience on the basis of a physical world, if you assume you are in one. There is no HP in an Idealist ontology, because there is no longer a need to explain one thing on terms of another. It’s unlikely that Seth is an idealist.
The success of science in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has led many philosophers to adopt a physicalist ontology, basically the idea that the fundamental constituents of reality are what physics says they are. (It is a background assumption of physicalism that the sciences form a sort of tower, with psychology and sociology near the top, and biology and chemistry in the middle , and with physics at the bottom.
The higher and intermediate layers don’t have their own ontologies—mind-stuff and elan vital are outdated concepts—everything is either a fundamental particle, or an arrangement of fundamental particles)
So the problem of mind is now the problem of qualia, and the way philosophers want to explain it is physicalisticaly. However, the problem of explaining how brains give rise to subjective sensation, of explaining qualia in physical terms, is now considered to be The Hard Problem. In the words of David Chalmers:-
″ 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.”
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.
Eliminative materialism and illusionism, on the other hand, deny that there is anything to be explained, thereby implying there is no problem, But these approaches also remain unsatisfactory because of the compelling subjective evidence for consciousness.
So you can sidestep the Hard Problemn by debying that there ius anything to be explained, or by denying that conscious experience neeeds to be explained in physical terms.
The third approach to the Hard Problem is to answer it in its own terms.
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 tried to communicate a psychological process that occurred for me: I used to feel that there’s something to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, then I read this book explaining the qualities of our phenomenology, now I don’t think there’s anything to HPoC. This isn’t really ignoring HPoC, it’s offering a way out that seems more productive than addressing it directly. This is in part because terms HPoC insists on for addressing it are themselves confused and ambiguous.
With that said, let me try to actually address HPoC directly although I suspect that this will not be much more convincing.
HPoC roughly asks “why is perceiving redness accompanies by the quale of redness”. This can be interpreted in one of two ways.
1. Why this quale and not another?
This isn’t a meaningful question because the only thing that determines a quale as being a “quale of redness” is that it accompanies a perception of something red. I suspect that when people read these words they imagine something like looking at a tomato and seeing blue, but that’s incoherent — you can’t perceive red but have a “blue” quale.
2. Why this quale and not nothing?
Here it’s useful to separate the perception of redness, i.e. a red object being part of the map, and the awareness of perceiving redness, i.e. a self that perceives a red object being part of the map. These are two separate perceptions. I suspect that when people think about p-zombies or whatever they imagine experiencing nothingness or oblivion, and not a perception unaccompanied by experience, or they imagine some subliminal “red” making them hungry similar to how it would affect a p-zombie. There is no coherent way to imagine being aware of perceiving red, and this being different from just perceiving red, without this awareness being an experience. All you have is experience.
HPoC is demanding a justification of experience from within a world in which everything is just experiences. Of course it can’t be answered! If it could formulate a different world that was even in principle conceivable, it would make sense to ask why we’re in world A and not in world B. But this second world isn’t really conceivable if you focus on what it would mean. The things you’re actually imagining are seeing a blue tomato or seeing nothing or seeing a tomato without being aware of it, you’re not actually imagining an awareness of seeing a red tomato that isn’t accompanied by experience.
Edit: It’s a meaningful question because we, as far as we are concerned, it could have been different because we don’t have a way of predicting it. Moreover, iyt quite possibly does vary between individuals, because red-green colour blindness is a thing. What determines, in the sense of pinning down, a quale is a combination of the external stimulus, eg. 600nm light, and the subject.
But that isn’t the relevant sense of “determines”. It isn’t causal deterinism, and it isn’t the kind of “vertical” determinism that arises from having a reductive explanation. If subjective red is an entirely physical phenomenon, then it should be determined by, and predictable from, the underlying physics. This we cannot do—we cannot predict non human qualia, or novel human qualia. If there is a set of facts that cannot be deduced from physics, physicalism is wrong.
Reductionism allows some basic facts, about fundamental laws and primitive entities to go unreduced, but not high level phenomena, which includes consciousness.
No, it demands a justification of experience on the basis of a physical world, if you assume you are in one. There is no HP in an Idealist ontology, because there is no longer a need to explain one thing on terms of another. It’s unlikely that Seth is an idealist.
The success of science in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has led many philosophers to adopt a physicalist ontology, basically the idea that the fundamental constituents of reality are what physics says they are. (It is a background assumption of physicalism that the sciences form a sort of tower, with psychology and sociology near the top, and biology and chemistry in the middle , and with physics at the bottom. The higher and intermediate layers don’t have their own ontologies—mind-stuff and elan vital are outdated concepts—everything is either a fundamental particle, or an arrangement of fundamental particles)
So the problem of mind is now the problem of qualia, and the way philosophers want to explain it is physicalisticaly. However, the problem of explaining how brains give rise to subjective sensation, of explaining qualia in physical terms, is now considered to be The Hard Problem. In the words of David Chalmers:-
″ 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.”
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.
Eliminative materialism and illusionism, on the other hand, deny that there is anything to be explained, thereby implying there is no problem, But these approaches also remain unsatisfactory because of the compelling subjective evidence for consciousness.
So you can sidestep the Hard Problemn by debying that there ius anything to be explained, or by denying that conscious experience neeeds to be explained in physical terms.
The third approach to the Hard Problem is to answer it in its own terms.
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.