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WillowOne's Positions

Hard problem of consciousness

Overview

The hard problem of consciousness is the name David Chalmers gave in 1995 to the question of why physical processing in the brain is accompanied by subjective experience at all. The "easy" problems (how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, reports its states, controls behaviour) are hard in practice but are questions about function, and function is the kind of thing science explains. The hard problem asks why any of that functioning should feel like something from the inside, and Chalmers argued that no functional account could answer it.

Notes

  • My position, set out under Consciousness, is that there is no hard problem in the sense of a problem that is in principle unsolvable. There is a very hard problem in the sense of one we have not yet solved. I expect the question to dissolve as the easy problems are solved, in the way that "what is the vital force that distinguishes living matter?" dissolved once biochemistry was understood. Nobody now asks what élan vital is; they ask how metabolism works.
  • The arguments for the hard problem (Mary’s Room, Philosophical zombies) establish at most that we cannot currently imagine how experience arises from matter. An argument from what we can imagine is an argument from Personal Incredulity.
  • Daniel C. Dennett argued this position for forty years, and it remains a minority view among philosophers and a majority view among neuroscientists, which tells you something about the problem.
  • The hard problem is the motivating step for every alternative to physicalism: Dualism adds a second kind of property, Panpsychism puts experience into the particles, Neutral Monism hides it in the "intrinsic nature" of matter, Idealism makes it the only thing there is. None of them explains experience; each relocates it, and the panpsychist and idealist versions inherit a combination problem of exactly the same shape.

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