Neutral monism does sound like a good direction to probe further.
I doubt we’ll ever know.
If we survive long enough, we might live to see a convincing solution for the “Hard Problem”.
If we don’t solve this ourselves, then I expect that advanced AIs will get very curious about what is this thing (“subjective experience”, “qualia”) those humans are talking about and they will get very curious about finding ways to experience those things themselves. And being very smart, they might have better chances to solve this.
But groups of humans might also try to organize to solve this themselves (I think not nearly enough is done at present, both theoretically and empirically; for example, people often tend to assume that Neuralink-style interfaces are absolutely necessary to explore hybrid consciousness between biological entities and electronics, but I strongly suspect that a lot can be done with non-invasive interfaces (which is much cheaper/easier/quicker to accomplish and also somewhat safer (although still not quite safe) for participating biological entities))...
That’s for experiments. For theory, we just need to demand what we usually demand of novel physics: non-trivial novel experimental predictions of subjectively observable effects. Some highly non-standard ways to obtain strange qualia or to synchronize two minds, something like that. Something we don’t expect, and which a new candidate theory predicts, and which turns out to be correct… That’s how we’ll know that a particular candidate theory in question is more than just a philosophical take...
Neutral monism does sound like a good direction to probe further.
If we survive long enough, we might live to see a convincing solution for the “Hard Problem”.
If we don’t solve this ourselves, then I expect that advanced AIs will get very curious about what is this thing (“subjective experience”, “qualia”) those humans are talking about and they will get very curious about finding ways to experience those things themselves. And being very smart, they might have better chances to solve this.
But groups of humans might also try to organize to solve this themselves (I think not nearly enough is done at present, both theoretically and empirically; for example, people often tend to assume that Neuralink-style interfaces are absolutely necessary to explore hybrid consciousness between biological entities and electronics, but I strongly suspect that a lot can be done with non-invasive interfaces (which is much cheaper/easier/quicker to accomplish and also somewhat safer (although still not quite safe) for participating biological entities))...
That’s for experiments. For theory, we just need to demand what we usually demand of novel physics: non-trivial novel experimental predictions of subjectively observable effects. Some highly non-standard ways to obtain strange qualia or to synchronize two minds, something like that. Something we don’t expect, and which a new candidate theory predicts, and which turns out to be correct… That’s how we’ll know that a particular candidate theory in question is more than just a philosophical take...