No it hasn’t, and if you don’t see why, and why your explanation is incredibly simplistic and insufficient as an explanation of consciousness, you may not fully realise or understand the problem.
I don’t believe in life after death etc. and I believe consciousness is indeed manifested somewhere in the brain (and tied to those electrical impulses in some way), yet find your explanation utterly insufficient to address the “hard problem” of consciousness. It doesn’t explain qualia, or subjective experience.
Now obviously we do seem to have proved that consciousness is somehow related to such electrical impulses and other processes in the brain… but to say that we even begin to understand how actual subjective conscious experience arises from this is simply not true.
For starters: your logical steps from brain uses electricity -> consciousness is in the brain -> therefore consciousness is in the electrical impulses is a non-sequitur.
To illustrate: CPUs are made up of logic gates that utilise electricity to perform many operations. We know mathematical calculations are done in the CPU. Therefore mathematics is in the logic gates. Does that sound right to you? Is that in any way a satisfactory explanation of what maths is, or where mathemarical concepts exists or how marhs came to be? Does maths only exist in electrical logic gates?
Doesn’t seem at all right does it? Yet that’s precisely the same leap of logic you just used.
Now before you reply with “ah, but that’s totally different” carefully examine why you think it’s different for consciousness…
In addition, there are more than just electrical impulses going on in the brain. Why do you choose electrical or only electrical? Do you think all electrical systems are conscious? What about a computer? What about your house electrical system? Do you draw a distinction? If so, where is the distinction? Can you accurately describe what exactly about certain electrical systems and not others gives rise to direct subjective experience and qualia? What is the precise mechanism that leads to electrons providing a conscious subjective experience? Would a thinking simulation of a brain experience the same qualia?
If you really can’t see what I’m getting at with any of this, perhaps you might be a philosophical zombie… not actually conscious yourself. Just a chemical computer firing some impulses that perfectly simulates a conscious entity, just like an AI but in meat form. Carefully consider: how do you personally know if this is or isn’t true?
For starters: your logical steps from brain uses electricity -> consciousness is in the brain -> therefore consciousness is in the electrical impulses is a non-sequitur.
To illustrate: CPUs blah blah mathematics
Okay, fine. Consciousness is exclusively in the brain. Now your whole metaphor falls apart, because mathematics is not exclusively in the CPU. It is not subjective. It does not arise from the existence of the CPU. It is a concept separate from the CPU, or indeed any matter.
Now before you reply with “ah, but that’s totally different” carefully examine why you think it’s different for consciousness…
I thought about it, and my conclusion is “it’s because I’m not a fuckin moron” .
In addition, there are more than just electrical impulses going on in the brain.
Pedantry. “Electrical impulses” is a close enough phrase to describe a host of related but slightly different things.
All the rest of your questions are stupid ridiculous garbage based on some weird fixation you have with electricity. Like I said, it’s a phrase I used to avoid giving a 3 semester lecture on the minutiae of everything going on in the brain.
My comment just touched the tip of an iceberg that is an entire realm of philosophical and scientific debate that has occupied some of the brightest minds, across multiple disciplines, for decades. But sure, it’s just stupid ridiculous garbage 🙄
Philosophy, as a field, is full of idiots and I have no respect for it.
But also the premise dealt with the tip of the iceberg and nothing more. The extent of our conversation is (heh) just the tip.
“Consciousness is electrical impulses in the brain”. That’s it. The extent of our debate is whether this is true or not. Not how those impulses give rise to consciousness, which is what the greater debate (among those who are not idiots) is about.
Petroleum is what makes cars move, obviously. That’s it!
All those engineers and mechanics who waffle on about physics, laws of motion, and engines and stuff are all a bunch of idiots. I have no respect for them. I don’t need to know about that stuff to talk about how cars work!
You just put petrol in it, it burns and it moves. Burning petrol is what makes cars move. That’s all we’re talking about here! The extent of our debate is whether or not petrol makes cars move. Not how it makes cars go, that’s a wider debate for non-idiots.
(Electric cars? Nonsense. Where’s the gas tank?)
(Boats? No, they’re completely different. I mean yes you put the same fuel in them, but they’re clearly not cars, so it’s not the same.)
Instead of dismissing philosophers as idiots (which might be arguable!) why don’t you actually address the arguments raised? Explore it logically as a scientist.
Do you not see the point they’re making?
“Electrical impulses” isn’t an explanation of consciousness any more than gas (petrol) is the cause of locomotion of vehicles.
It’s involved, sure, but is it a complete explanation, a good explanation, or even necessary for locomotion to happen?
If you look in a brain and see electrical impulses are required for consciousness, is it any different to looking inside an engine and seeing that gas is necessary for it to move? Take them away and they both stop.
You can put petrol in a canister but the canister doesn’t move. Even if you set fire to it. You can put electrical impulses in a computer, but the computer isn’t conscious, even if you make it “think” with AI.
Or is it? How do you know? Does “electrical impulses” get you any closer to knowing?
Think a bit more deeply about what you are actually arguing. But watch out: you’re in danger of becoming a philosopher!
Instead of dismissing philosophers as idiots (which might be arguable!) why don’t you actually address the arguments raised?
Because philosophers love semantic traps, and the best counter to them is either a long, detailed explanation (for someone asking in good faith) or ridicule (for someone who would patiently read your long, detailed explanation and then just come up with another semantic trap that they demand you explain away).
“Electrical impulses” isn’t an explanation of consciousness any more than gas (petrol) is the cause of locomotion of vehicles.
For example. Gasoline is literally the cause of locomotion in vehicles. You put gas in, car go. It gets more complicated than that. Everything always gets more complicated, down to the quantum level. It is fallacious* to demand a specific level of complexity and declare that as “an explanation”. There is no such thing. It is all relative.
“Consciousness is electrical impulses in the brain” is a true statement. It’s just not detailed enough for these guys. But instead of saying “I want more detail”, they say “you are wrong”, because that’s the true point of modern philosophy. Being able to say, “hah, I am so much deeper and more intellectual than you”. Not finding solutions to problems. Science finds solutions to problems.
Anyway, to get back to semantic traps, in this case they decided that an arbitrary level of complexity is “correct” and everything else is “wrong” but they never stated or even defended that premise. And when confronted with it, they deflect. This is why philosophers are deserving of scorn: they play with the multiple interpretations of words to try to make their opponent look wrong or stupid. Note for example the first clumsy attempt, saying “if consciousness is electrical impulses, then electrical impulses are consciousness, so why isn’t a computer conscious?” Obviously middle school level reasoning, but they gloss over the second part (“then electrical impulses are consciousness”) so quickly and with such authority that if you’re not paying attention you don’t notice. But it’s patently ridiculous, and their whole premise rests on it. “Muslims are all people, therefore all people are Muslims”. Ridiculous. Not even worthy of going down that rabbit hole, because they’ll just pull another ridiculous thing out of their sleeve and dress it up in flowery language. It’s not worth the effort, just call them ignoramuses and let them know you can see through their bullshit.
*another semantic trap I see incoming: “aha! You used the word ‘fallacious’ but this doesn’t correspond to any of the explicitly listed 26 known fallacies! Haha so dumb.” Philosphers love defining things and then using their definitions against you, as if they were authoritative and not their own personal (sometimes wildly incorrect) definition
Look I understand you don’t like philosophy and philosophers, and you’ve been riled up by the other commenter.
I’m not trying to trap you with some philosophers bag of tricks. I just would like to explain what you are missing… and forget “philosophy”… let’s just look with cool and calm and scientific logic.
But it seems like atm you are reacting with anger and stubbornness, digging in your heels in and it is blinding you to some basic principles of science and an intriguing mystery.
Gasoline is literally the cause of locomotion in vehicles.
You said this is a true statement. You seem totally convinced and unwilling to accept any possible challenge to this. But please come back to this when you’re calmer and with and open mind and re-evaluate it.
Ask yourself: is it always true? Is it true if I don’t press the gas pedal? Is it true for electric vehicles? Do cars keep moving non-stop until they run out of gas? If gas is the cause – why not? If I put gas in an electric car will it go? If I put wheels on a gas canister and put gas in it, will it move?
This is just plain simple logical analysis. No traps. Just evaluate if the statement you said is true is really true.
Just because some vehicles won’t work without gas doesn’t mean gas is the cause of locomotion. Nor is it a very good explanation of what locomotion is. Locomotion can happen without it. Gas is not required at all for locomotion in general. It can be involved, sure. It can be needed for certain kinds of locomotion, sure. But is it the cause? Does it do anything to significantly explain how a car moves? Or would that require something else?
If you had never seen a plane before and you asked me “how does it fly?” would you be satisfied with my explanation of “aviation fuel causes it to fly”?
I’m happy to have a calm discussion about this when you’ve cooled down and explain calmly and logically why. It’s a super interesting line of thought. No philosophers semantic traps, I promise.
You are wading in with extreme arrogance in an area you clearly know very little about.
Many of the most prominent ideas in the field of consciousness are from physicists, biologists, and other scientific fields. The issues are in some cases fundamental to the philosophy of science itself. This is the very bleeding edge of science, where hard physics and metaphysics collide.
Why do you think consciousness remains known as the “hard problem”, and still a considered contentious mystery to modern science, if your simplistic ideas can so easily explain it?
Do you think your naive ideas have not already been thoroughly debated and explored by scientists and philosophers over years of debate and research? The extremely simplistic and basic points you have raised (even ignoring the fallacious ones) are easily invalidated by anyone with even a basic grasp of this field (or indeed basic logic or scientific methodology).
Besides the above, you have clearly not understood the main point of my comment, not engaged in any actual logical debate or analysis of the issues raised (indeed you don’t even to comprehend or recognise what these are) and demonstrated a near total ignorance of modern theories of consciousness.
You had a chance to open your eyes to a whole realm of knowledge and discovery in a fascinating field at the cutting edge of modern science and reason and you just utterly failed to engage with it, handwaving it away with ignorance and stupidity.
The issues are in some cases fundamental to the philosophy of science itself.[…]your simplistic ideas[…]your naive ideas[…]modern theories of consciousness[…]You had a chance to open your eyes to a whole realm of knowledge
Who’s the arrogant one? Piss off, blowhard. I respect scientists. Not people like you, who pretend to be one.
Why do you think consciousness remains known as the “hard problem”, and still a considered contentious mystery to modern science, if your simplistic ideas can so easily explain it?
You people really need to stop pretending like because one guy published a paper calling it the “hard problem” that it’s somehow a deep impossible to solve scientific question. It’s just intellectual dishonesty, trying to paint it as if it’s equivalent to solving the problem of making nuclear fusion work or something.
It’s not. And yes, philosophy is full of idiots who never justify any of their premises. David Chalmers in his paper where he calls it the “hard problem” quotes Thomas Nagel’s paper as “proof” that experience is something subjective, and then just goes forward with his argument as if it’s “proven,” but Nagel’s paper is complete garbage, and so nothing Chalmers argues beyond that holds any water, but is just something a lot of philosophers blindly accept even though it is nonsensical.
Nagel claims that the physical sciences don’t incorporate point-of-view, and that therefore point-of-view must be a unique property of mammals, and that experience is point-of-view dependent, so experience too must come from mammals, and therefore science has to explain the origin of experience.
But his paper was wildly outdated when he wrote it. By then, we already had general relativity for decades, which is a heavily point-of-view dependent theory as there is no absolute space or time but its properties depend upon your point of view. Relational quantum mechanics also interprets quantum mechanics in a way that gets rid of all the weirdness and makes it incredibly intuitive and simple just with the singular assumption that the properties of particles depends upon point-of-view not that much different than general relativity with the nature of space and time, and so there is no absolute state of a system anymore.
Both general relativity and relational quantum mechanics not only treat reality as point-of-view dependent but tie itself back directly to experience: they tell you what you actually expect to observe in measurements. In quantum mechanics they are literally called observables, entities identifiable by their experiential properties.
Nagel is just an example of am armchair philosopher who does not engage with the sciences so he thinks they are all still Newtonian with some sort of absolute world independent of point-of-view. If the natural world is point-of-view dependent all the way down, then none of Nagel’s arguments follow. There is no reason to believe point-of-view is unique to mammals, and then there is further no reason to think the point-of-view dependence of experience makes it inherently mammalian, and thus there is no reason to call experience “subjective.”
Although I prefer the term “context” rather than “point-of-view” as it is more clear what it means, but it means the same thing. The physical world is just point-of-view dependent all the way down, or that is to say, context-dependent. We just so happen to be objects and thus like any other, exist in a particular context, and thus experience reality from that context. Our experiences are not created by our brains, experience is just objective reality from the context we occupy. What our brain does is think about and reflect upon experience (reality). It formulates experience into concepts like “red,” “tree,” “atom,” etc. But it does not create experience.
The entire “hard” problem is based on a faulty premise based on science that was outdated when it was written.
If experience just is reality from a particular context then it makes no sense to ask to “derive” it as Chalmers and Nagel have done. You cannot derive reality, you describe it. Reality just is what it is, it just exists. Humans describe reality with their scientific theories, but their theories cannot create reality. That doesn’t even make sense. All modern “theories of consciousness” are just nonsense as they all are based on the false premise that experience is not reality but some illusion created by the mammalian brain and that “true” reality is some invisible metaphysical entity that lies beyond all possible experience, and thus they demand we somehow need a scientific theory to show how this invisible reality gives rise to the visible realm of experience. The premise is just silly. Reality is not invisible. That is the nonsensical point of view.
I wasn’t arguing from a non-scientific point view at all. Reality is there. That doesn’t make the problem any less “hard”. But I think it is “hard”, not “impossible”.
And as any modern physicist will tell you: most of reality is indeed invisible to us. Most of the universe is seemingly comprised of an unknown substance, and filled with an unknown energy. Most of the universe that we can see more directly follows rules that are unintuitive and uses processes we can’t see. Not only can’t we see them, our own physics tells is it is literally impossible to measure all of them consistently.
Yet despite this, physics works. We can use our minds and tools to reveal the invisible truth. That’s why I believe in the scientific method, and why I think consciousness is not necessarily an impossible problem (unlike Nagel).
But subjective consciousness and qualia fit nowhere in our modern model of physics. It’s potentially “nature of reality”-level stuff – and I don’t mean hippy quasi-scientific mumbo jumbo by this, I mean it seems to reach right down deep into the fundamentals of what physics is and seeks to achieve, to a level that we have not yet uncovered.
I don’t think it’s impossible to explain consciousness. It is part of the universe and the universe is there for us to study. But we are not ready to answer the question. We don’t even fully understand what the question is really asking. It sidesteps our current model of physics. Obviously it is intimately connected to processes in the brain somehow… but that somehow is, currently, an absolute mystery.
I don’t subscribe to Nagel’s belief that it is impossible to solve, but I do understand how the points he raises are legitimate points that illustrate how consciousness does not fit into our current scientific model of the universe.
If I had to choose anyone I’d say my thoughts on the subject are closest to Roger Penrose’s line of thinking, with a dash of David Chalmers.
I think if anyone doesn’t see why consciousness is “hard” then there are two possibilities: 1) they haven’t understood the question and its scientific ramifications 2) they’re not conscious.
No it hasn’t, and if you don’t see why, and why your explanation is incredibly simplistic and insufficient as an explanation of consciousness, you may not fully realise or understand the problem.
I don’t believe in life after death etc. and I believe consciousness is indeed manifested somewhere in the brain (and tied to those electrical impulses in some way), yet find your explanation utterly insufficient to address the “hard problem” of consciousness. It doesn’t explain qualia, or subjective experience.
Now obviously we do seem to have proved that consciousness is somehow related to such electrical impulses and other processes in the brain… but to say that we even begin to understand how actual subjective conscious experience arises from this is simply not true.
For starters: your logical steps from brain uses electricity -> consciousness is in the brain -> therefore consciousness is in the electrical impulses is a non-sequitur.
To illustrate: CPUs are made up of logic gates that utilise electricity to perform many operations. We know mathematical calculations are done in the CPU. Therefore mathematics is in the logic gates. Does that sound right to you? Is that in any way a satisfactory explanation of what maths is, or where mathemarical concepts exists or how marhs came to be? Does maths only exist in electrical logic gates?
Doesn’t seem at all right does it? Yet that’s precisely the same leap of logic you just used.
Now before you reply with “ah, but that’s totally different” carefully examine why you think it’s different for consciousness…
In addition, there are more than just electrical impulses going on in the brain. Why do you choose electrical or only electrical? Do you think all electrical systems are conscious? What about a computer? What about your house electrical system? Do you draw a distinction? If so, where is the distinction? Can you accurately describe what exactly about certain electrical systems and not others gives rise to direct subjective experience and qualia? What is the precise mechanism that leads to electrons providing a conscious subjective experience? Would a thinking simulation of a brain experience the same qualia?
If you really can’t see what I’m getting at with any of this, perhaps you might be a philosophical zombie… not actually conscious yourself. Just a chemical computer firing some impulses that perfectly simulates a conscious entity, just like an AI but in meat form. Carefully consider: how do you personally know if this is or isn’t true?
Damn homie, you’re way more patient with people who are confidently wrong than I am.
Good looks 😎
Oh god you’re a philosopher. I don’t know if I have the energy for the level of bullshit about to be thrown my way.
Okay, I’ll give it a shot.
Okay, fine. Consciousness is exclusively in the brain. Now your whole metaphor falls apart, because mathematics is not exclusively in the CPU. It is not subjective. It does not arise from the existence of the CPU. It is a concept separate from the CPU, or indeed any matter.
I thought about it, and my conclusion is “it’s because I’m not a fuckin moron” .
Pedantry. “Electrical impulses” is a close enough phrase to describe a host of related but slightly different things.
All the rest of your questions are stupid ridiculous garbage based on some weird fixation you have with electricity. Like I said, it’s a phrase I used to avoid giving a 3 semester lecture on the minutiae of everything going on in the brain.
My comment just touched the tip of an iceberg that is an entire realm of philosophical and scientific debate that has occupied some of the brightest minds, across multiple disciplines, for decades. But sure, it’s just stupid ridiculous garbage 🙄
You probably think you sounded really clever.
Philosophy, as a field, is full of idiots and I have no respect for it.
But also the premise dealt with the tip of the iceberg and nothing more. The extent of our conversation is (heh) just the tip.
“Consciousness is electrical impulses in the brain”. That’s it. The extent of our debate is whether this is true or not. Not how those impulses give rise to consciousness, which is what the greater debate (among those who are not idiots) is about.
Petroleum is what makes cars move, obviously. That’s it!
All those engineers and mechanics who waffle on about physics, laws of motion, and engines and stuff are all a bunch of idiots. I have no respect for them. I don’t need to know about that stuff to talk about how cars work!
You just put petrol in it, it burns and it moves. Burning petrol is what makes cars move. That’s all we’re talking about here! The extent of our debate is whether or not petrol makes cars move. Not how it makes cars go, that’s a wider debate for non-idiots.
(Electric cars? Nonsense. Where’s the gas tank?)
(Boats? No, they’re completely different. I mean yes you put the same fuel in them, but they’re clearly not cars, so it’s not the same.)
I specifically called out philosophy as being full of idiots rather than literally any other field for a reason.
For example, your post.
Instead of dismissing philosophers as idiots (which might be arguable!) why don’t you actually address the arguments raised? Explore it logically as a scientist.
Do you not see the point they’re making?
“Electrical impulses” isn’t an explanation of consciousness any more than gas (petrol) is the cause of locomotion of vehicles.
It’s involved, sure, but is it a complete explanation, a good explanation, or even necessary for locomotion to happen?
If you look in a brain and see electrical impulses are required for consciousness, is it any different to looking inside an engine and seeing that gas is necessary for it to move? Take them away and they both stop.
You can put petrol in a canister but the canister doesn’t move. Even if you set fire to it. You can put electrical impulses in a computer, but the computer isn’t conscious, even if you make it “think” with AI.
Or is it? How do you know? Does “electrical impulses” get you any closer to knowing?
Think a bit more deeply about what you are actually arguing. But watch out: you’re in danger of becoming a philosopher!
Because philosophers love semantic traps, and the best counter to them is either a long, detailed explanation (for someone asking in good faith) or ridicule (for someone who would patiently read your long, detailed explanation and then just come up with another semantic trap that they demand you explain away).
For example. Gasoline is literally the cause of locomotion in vehicles. You put gas in, car go. It gets more complicated than that. Everything always gets more complicated, down to the quantum level. It is fallacious* to demand a specific level of complexity and declare that as “an explanation”. There is no such thing. It is all relative.
“Consciousness is electrical impulses in the brain” is a true statement. It’s just not detailed enough for these guys. But instead of saying “I want more detail”, they say “you are wrong”, because that’s the true point of modern philosophy. Being able to say, “hah, I am so much deeper and more intellectual than you”. Not finding solutions to problems. Science finds solutions to problems.
Anyway, to get back to semantic traps, in this case they decided that an arbitrary level of complexity is “correct” and everything else is “wrong” but they never stated or even defended that premise. And when confronted with it, they deflect. This is why philosophers are deserving of scorn: they play with the multiple interpretations of words to try to make their opponent look wrong or stupid. Note for example the first clumsy attempt, saying “if consciousness is electrical impulses, then electrical impulses are consciousness, so why isn’t a computer conscious?” Obviously middle school level reasoning, but they gloss over the second part (“then electrical impulses are consciousness”) so quickly and with such authority that if you’re not paying attention you don’t notice. But it’s patently ridiculous, and their whole premise rests on it. “Muslims are all people, therefore all people are Muslims”. Ridiculous. Not even worthy of going down that rabbit hole, because they’ll just pull another ridiculous thing out of their sleeve and dress it up in flowery language. It’s not worth the effort, just call them ignoramuses and let them know you can see through their bullshit.
*another semantic trap I see incoming: “aha! You used the word ‘fallacious’ but this doesn’t correspond to any of the explicitly listed 26 known fallacies! Haha so dumb.” Philosphers love defining things and then using their definitions against you, as if they were authoritative and not their own personal (sometimes wildly incorrect) definition
Look I understand you don’t like philosophy and philosophers, and you’ve been riled up by the other commenter.
I’m not trying to trap you with some philosophers bag of tricks. I just would like to explain what you are missing… and forget “philosophy”… let’s just look with cool and calm and scientific logic.
But it seems like atm you are reacting with anger and stubbornness, digging in your heels in and it is blinding you to some basic principles of science and an intriguing mystery.
You said this is a true statement. You seem totally convinced and unwilling to accept any possible challenge to this. But please come back to this when you’re calmer and with and open mind and re-evaluate it.
Ask yourself: is it always true? Is it true if I don’t press the gas pedal? Is it true for electric vehicles? Do cars keep moving non-stop until they run out of gas? If gas is the cause – why not? If I put gas in an electric car will it go? If I put wheels on a gas canister and put gas in it, will it move?
This is just plain simple logical analysis. No traps. Just evaluate if the statement you said is true is really true.
Just because some vehicles won’t work without gas doesn’t mean gas is the cause of locomotion. Nor is it a very good explanation of what locomotion is. Locomotion can happen without it. Gas is not required at all for locomotion in general. It can be involved, sure. It can be needed for certain kinds of locomotion, sure. But is it the cause? Does it do anything to significantly explain how a car moves? Or would that require something else?
If you had never seen a plane before and you asked me “how does it fly?” would you be satisfied with my explanation of “aviation fuel causes it to fly”?
I’m happy to have a calm discussion about this when you’ve cooled down and explain calmly and logically why. It’s a super interesting line of thought. No philosophers semantic traps, I promise.
You are wading in with extreme arrogance in an area you clearly know very little about.
Many of the most prominent ideas in the field of consciousness are from physicists, biologists, and other scientific fields. The issues are in some cases fundamental to the philosophy of science itself. This is the very bleeding edge of science, where hard physics and metaphysics collide.
Why do you think consciousness remains known as the “hard problem”, and still a considered contentious mystery to modern science, if your simplistic ideas can so easily explain it?
Do you think your naive ideas have not already been thoroughly debated and explored by scientists and philosophers over years of debate and research? The extremely simplistic and basic points you have raised (even ignoring the fallacious ones) are easily invalidated by anyone with even a basic grasp of this field (or indeed basic logic or scientific methodology).
Besides the above, you have clearly not understood the main point of my comment, not engaged in any actual logical debate or analysis of the issues raised (indeed you don’t even to comprehend or recognise what these are) and demonstrated a near total ignorance of modern theories of consciousness.
You had a chance to open your eyes to a whole realm of knowledge and discovery in a fascinating field at the cutting edge of modern science and reason and you just utterly failed to engage with it, handwaving it away with ignorance and stupidity.
Who’s the arrogant one? Piss off, blowhard. I respect scientists. Not people like you, who pretend to be one.
You respect scientists? Yet you reject science and scientific thinking when it hits you in the face.
You people really need to stop pretending like because one guy published a paper calling it the “hard problem” that it’s somehow a deep impossible to solve scientific question. It’s just intellectual dishonesty, trying to paint it as if it’s equivalent to solving the problem of making nuclear fusion work or something.
It’s not. And yes, philosophy is full of idiots who never justify any of their premises. David Chalmers in his paper where he calls it the “hard problem” quotes Thomas Nagel’s paper as “proof” that experience is something subjective, and then just goes forward with his argument as if it’s “proven,” but Nagel’s paper is complete garbage, and so nothing Chalmers argues beyond that holds any water, but is just something a lot of philosophers blindly accept even though it is nonsensical.
Nagel claims that the physical sciences don’t incorporate point-of-view, and that therefore point-of-view must be a unique property of mammals, and that experience is point-of-view dependent, so experience too must come from mammals, and therefore science has to explain the origin of experience.
But his paper was wildly outdated when he wrote it. By then, we already had general relativity for decades, which is a heavily point-of-view dependent theory as there is no absolute space or time but its properties depend upon your point of view. Relational quantum mechanics also interprets quantum mechanics in a way that gets rid of all the weirdness and makes it incredibly intuitive and simple just with the singular assumption that the properties of particles depends upon point-of-view not that much different than general relativity with the nature of space and time, and so there is no absolute state of a system anymore.
Both general relativity and relational quantum mechanics not only treat reality as point-of-view dependent but tie itself back directly to experience: they tell you what you actually expect to observe in measurements. In quantum mechanics they are literally called observables, entities identifiable by their experiential properties.
Nagel is just an example of am armchair philosopher who does not engage with the sciences so he thinks they are all still Newtonian with some sort of absolute world independent of point-of-view. If the natural world is point-of-view dependent all the way down, then none of Nagel’s arguments follow. There is no reason to believe point-of-view is unique to mammals, and then there is further no reason to think the point-of-view dependence of experience makes it inherently mammalian, and thus there is no reason to call experience “subjective.”
Although I prefer the term “context” rather than “point-of-view” as it is more clear what it means, but it means the same thing. The physical world is just point-of-view dependent all the way down, or that is to say, context-dependent. We just so happen to be objects and thus like any other, exist in a particular context, and thus experience reality from that context. Our experiences are not created by our brains, experience is just objective reality from the context we occupy. What our brain does is think about and reflect upon experience (reality). It formulates experience into concepts like “red,” “tree,” “atom,” etc. But it does not create experience.
The entire “hard” problem is based on a faulty premise based on science that was outdated when it was written.
If experience just is reality from a particular context then it makes no sense to ask to “derive” it as Chalmers and Nagel have done. You cannot derive reality, you describe it. Reality just is what it is, it just exists. Humans describe reality with their scientific theories, but their theories cannot create reality. That doesn’t even make sense. All modern “theories of consciousness” are just nonsense as they all are based on the false premise that experience is not reality but some illusion created by the mammalian brain and that “true” reality is some invisible metaphysical entity that lies beyond all possible experience, and thus they demand we somehow need a scientific theory to show how this invisible reality gives rise to the visible realm of experience. The premise is just silly. Reality is not invisible. That is the nonsensical point of view.
I wasn’t arguing from a non-scientific point view at all. Reality is there. That doesn’t make the problem any less “hard”. But I think it is “hard”, not “impossible”.
And as any modern physicist will tell you: most of reality is indeed invisible to us. Most of the universe is seemingly comprised of an unknown substance, and filled with an unknown energy. Most of the universe that we can see more directly follows rules that are unintuitive and uses processes we can’t see. Not only can’t we see them, our own physics tells is it is literally impossible to measure all of them consistently.
Yet despite this, physics works. We can use our minds and tools to reveal the invisible truth. That’s why I believe in the scientific method, and why I think consciousness is not necessarily an impossible problem (unlike Nagel).
But subjective consciousness and qualia fit nowhere in our modern model of physics. It’s potentially “nature of reality”-level stuff – and I don’t mean hippy quasi-scientific mumbo jumbo by this, I mean it seems to reach right down deep into the fundamentals of what physics is and seeks to achieve, to a level that we have not yet uncovered.
I don’t think it’s impossible to explain consciousness. It is part of the universe and the universe is there for us to study. But we are not ready to answer the question. We don’t even fully understand what the question is really asking. It sidesteps our current model of physics. Obviously it is intimately connected to processes in the brain somehow… but that somehow is, currently, an absolute mystery.
I don’t subscribe to Nagel’s belief that it is impossible to solve, but I do understand how the points he raises are legitimate points that illustrate how consciousness does not fit into our current scientific model of the universe.
If I had to choose anyone I’d say my thoughts on the subject are closest to Roger Penrose’s line of thinking, with a dash of David Chalmers.
I think if anyone doesn’t see why consciousness is “hard” then there are two possibilities: 1) they haven’t understood the question and its scientific ramifications 2) they’re not conscious.