That seems to be within the domain of neuroscience (for what physiologically is going on in “itchy” and how “itchy” sensations are distinguished in the nervous system from “painful” or “red” ones) and possibly neurolinguistics (for how we acquire the category “itchy” and learn to refer to it when we describe our sensations to ourselves or others).
There might be a sideline of some other branch of psychology for why people get so damn defensive about the idea that their ego is a Real Thing that Really Has Real Experiences as opposed to a cogno-intellectual process running on a symbiotic ape brain.
Neuroscience can match off known neural activity to known sensations on aposteriori evidence, but it cannot provide a principled and predictive explanation of why a particular neural event should feel a particular way.
How we verbally categorise phenomenal feels is also not the hard problem.
The ego is also not the hard problem. You might want to say that egos don’t exist, but it seems to us thatvwe have them, or we feel we have them. That is a dissolution of the ego, not of qualia.
We can explain how to build solidity and liquidity out of atoms.
If you want to argue for CTM, it would help explain how Red and Painful and Itchy are built out of bits and bytes.
That seems to be within the domain of neuroscience (for what physiologically is going on in “itchy” and how “itchy” sensations are distinguished in the nervous system from “painful” or “red” ones) and possibly neurolinguistics (for how we acquire the category “itchy” and learn to refer to it when we describe our sensations to ourselves or others).
There might be a sideline of some other branch of psychology for why people get so damn defensive about the idea that their ego is a Real Thing that Really Has Real Experiences as opposed to a cogno-intellectual process running on a symbiotic ape brain.
Neuroscience can match off known neural activity to known sensations on aposteriori evidence, but it cannot provide a principled and predictive explanation of why a particular neural event should feel a particular way.
How we verbally categorise phenomenal feels is also not the hard problem.
The ego is also not the hard problem. You might want to say that egos don’t exist, but it seems to us thatvwe have them, or we feel we have them. That is a dissolution of the ego, not of qualia.