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Scientific explanations usually involve some sort of relations between different things that can be written down through mathematics or other forms of language.
I’m not sure how one could even construct an explanation for how physical processes can generate a first person experience that by definition cannot be captured by words. Words can arguably never fully capture feelings.
If this is true, and an explanation is fundamentally impossible, how do we know that this is not a poor question in the first place?
Side note: About 30% of philosophers do not even accept that there is a hard problem of consciousness
Looking for challenging test cases, and then admitting to failure when one fails a test against them, is an essential feature of doing science or good philosophy. Searching for rationalization to pretend that one should not do such a test -- yes that is another option too... Not all worldviews are good philosophy, or consistent with methodological naturalism. Sure, go that route if you wish.
Whether the problem is good or bad remains to be seen, but going from "not sure how one could even construct an explanation" to "explanation is fundamentally impossible" is definitely a bad argument. Just as asking "how do we know that this is not a poor question?" while we are in the early stages of studying matters involved, is definitely a bad question.
@Conifold It’s not that the argument was purely that I’m unsure so you’re obviously misreading. The argument was that explanations are fundamentally third person and it thus seems impossible to capture first person experience
For centuries nobody had a clue of what life could be or what even constituted life? It was obvious what was alive and what not. It had a similar chasm between lifeless matter and living organisms as we now experience with the hard problem. Henri Bergson used the term élan vital or life force to distinguish the animate from the inanimate.
A belief known as vitalism stated:
living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things.
By 1931, vitalism was all but dead.
Of course we can not be sure that the Hard Problem will go the same way but I think the demise of vitalism is a warning to not give up so easily. Some philosphers, however, do think that the Hard Problem cannot be resolved by man. It is called mysterianism.
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As first described by Chalmers, the hard problem is not unanswerable. He described it as a fairly concrete and specific demand for a physics-like theory of consciousness.
Some people have interpreted the hard problem of consciousness as something that physically-based theories of consciousness will forever fail to resolve. They've taken it up as a shield against materialism; they say, "yes, maybe you can say HOW but you can never say WHY!" And what exactly would be the "why" to satisfy such people? Nothing would satisfy them! They will always allude mysteriously to something beyond science.
But Chalmers, who introduced the hard problem of consciousness, did not have that kind of unmeetable standard in mind. Chalmers was actually quite friendly to physically-based theories of consciousness.
Chalmers described the hard problem of consciousness as a problem of finding physics-like mathematical laws that describe the relationship between a physical system and the qualia produced by that system. These laws might be compared to the laws that describe the relationship between a set of moving charges and the electromagnetic forces produced on those charges. They're just formulas we could write on paper; writing those formulas, according to Chalmers, could be a potential solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
Here's a quote from Chalmers about the kind of theory that might qualify as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness:
There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory—its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws.
Considering there are tens of billions of neurons in the brain, and 100 trillion connections, one might question whether it's a similarly unfulfillable request to ask for consciousness to be written as formulas on paper. Somewhat similar to asking for formulas for how the universe works. We can describe various parts of the universe, and various parts of the brain. But it doesn't really make sense to ask for a succinct explanation of all of it. It's unclear whether there's still a part missing to cross some categorical difference of experience, or whether only incremental progress is left.
As Chalmers says, the "hard problem of consciousness" is not a theoretical problem. Our world could have been such that one or another of the neural or algorithmic Identity Theories, or property dualisms proposed by physicalists could have matched the properties of consciousness. The "problem" is that all of them fail one or another test -- consciousness is present when the identity says it should not be, or is not present when the identity sys it should be. Additionally, consciousness is causal, contrary to the assumptions of physicalism. Refusal to accept falsification is the "problem".
@Dcleve As for whether consciousness is causal, there are at least two views on this. One is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon which is not causal, but simply a reflection of the causal physical processes, like a mirror reflects people walking around in a room but does not cause them to walk. The other (which I favor) is that consciousness is indeed causal, and is also physical; i.e. qualia are patterns of physical things that can exert physical influences on other physical things. In the same way a rock is a pattern of atoms that can exert physical influences on other physical things.
Causative, if the hard problem were a theoretical problem, then it would be insoluble in principle. No new theories could address it. Chalmers calling for “new theories” is him calling for the speculative theory generation followed by testing and rejection or modification that is standard for an empirical rather than theoretical problem. Yes physicalists propose epiphenomenalism and identity theories. The “hard problem” is that all of them fail multiple test cases.
The mind-body problem is puzzling to us, but for all we know, its solution could be very simple. Remember Christopher Colombus' egg? The solution was objectively very simple, yet nobody at the Spanish Court could figure it out... I guess they might have called it "the hard problem of how to make an egg stand". Some of them might even have assumed that the problem was unsolvable, until Colombus showed them the solution.
As for your proposal to drop the question entirely, that is, in fact, what most people do. They can't find an answer to this question, so they move on; they stop thinking about it. And that's their prerogative.
Others, though, keep chewing on it. One way of doing just that is to rephrase the question, again and again until it becomes a "good question". To reframe the problem until it becomes solvable.
For instance, personally I would not speak of "how physical processes can generate a first person experience" but "how biological processes can generate a person's experience".
It seems important to me that the biological nature of cognition is recognized, because life is already a sort of cognition, using languages like DNA. To consider the mind-body problem as physical is IMO mistaken. It's a biology problem.
Note that I'm not talking of reduction of the mind to the brain, but of the production of an efficacious, causal mind by the brain. A candle can produce a flame, but the flame does not "reduce" to the candle. The flame is its own thing with its own causal power: it does things (light, heat) that the candle alone cannot do. Likewise, an orchestra is needed to produce Beethoven's 5th, but the symphony does not reduce to the orchestra.
Evidently, the problem of how the brain can produce the mind remains "hard", in the sense that it's yet to be solved and probably won't be solved anytime soon. But it's important to frame difficult problems as precisely as possible. In this case, it helps to frame it biologically for many reasons.
One reason I have already evoked in other posts is that, as a biological capacity, sentience must present some Darwinian advantage, or it wouldn't exist. Hence conscious thoughts must be causal, they must make a difference to our survival chances, or they would not exist.
Another reason it helps to cast this as a problem of biology, is that life is in itself already a form of logos, hence the concept of biosemiotics introduced by
American philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan. IMO, biosemantics (or semiotics) provide the most promissing current paradigm to frame research on the mind-body problem, far more promising than reductionism.
Life, even non-sentiant life, is already "familiar" with the power of symbols, eg molecules coding for something other than themselves: DNA coding for proteins; hormones coding for dispositions and transformations; qualia coding for light wavelengths (colors), for variations in air pressure (sounds) and for certain molecules in our food (taste).
In summary, life is already half-way between the physical and the mental. It's what bridges the two.
The failures in reducing psychology to biology have been even more thorough than the failures in reducing biology to chemistry or chemistry to physics. Recasting the hard problem as merely reducing psychology to biology rather than all the way to physics is not going to help. plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/#UnreIssu
You did not use the word, but what you are describing is emergence. We do not have an theory of emergence, and any eventual theory is definitively NOT going to be simple! Causation will also remain a problem for physicalism, as emergent minds are still causal, and break the causal closure assumption of physicalism.
@Dcleve Yes, emergence is the wider frame. Within the broader frame of life emerging from non life, and sentience emerging from life, biosemantics provides the best current paradigm to frame research, far more promising than reductionism.
@Dcleve The notion that ideas are causal does not break causal closure anymore than the causal power of hammers to drive nails in wood. If ideas are "natural", and I believe they are, then they have causal power like any other natural stuff out there.
Ideas are not physical, so yes, it breaks the causal closure of physicalism. Doing methodological naturalism with a pluralist ontology rather than a physicalist one works just fine, but is a rejection of physicalism.
It's not necessarily unanswerable nor worded badly, it is just very hard.
This kind of problem is not unique to the topic of consciousness, but exists in many areas. For example, in Computer Science we have the "P=NP?" question. It is obviously very hard to solve (witnessed by the fact that we have been chewing on it for decades now, with nothing to show) and also arguably/possibly very impactful (i.e. if the solution would turn out to be "yes, P=NP", this could lead, at least in principle, to world-shattering new solutions to CS problems).
In physics, they have the "grand unified theory of everything" question.
In maths, there are plenty of big unsolved problems, including ones where people offer millions for solutions.
Then we also have many questions which have been solved, but used to be very hard. The old greek paradoxons (i.e., Achilles' Turtle) waited thousands of years for solutions. Fermat's Last Theorem famously took over 300 years, and not for the lack of trying. Etc.
Both Fermat's Last Theorem and the modularity theorem were believed to be impossible to prove using previous knowledge by almost all living mathematicians at the time.
Unfortunately, getting back to the hard problem of consciousness, it is a problem, at least partly, of Philosophy and not one of the exact sciences, and that means there is a lot of opinions involved. As usual in Philosophy, much depends of the nuances of what people understand when they use all the terms; their upbringing and convictions (i.e. their own religions/spiritual stances and so on and forth). So I'm afraid even if there eventually should be a correct solution, at least 50% of people will not accept it anyways, and we will be discussing the matter in all eternity...
That said, the hardness of this question (which according to Wikipedia is "to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience") is maybe increased by the fact that everybody does not even agree on the simplest parts of it (e.g., "what is consciousness?") in the first place, so in that regard you could of course argue that any question about consciousness is a bad question until we solve that one.
Perhaps we should take it out of philosophy and try to solve it elsewhere? Gravity wasn't solved in the realm of religion, nor infectious diseases. Maybe the hardness of the question results from the hardness of our heads?
One does not need to speculate about the state of the hard problem of consciousness. If it is the question
How does an organism benefit from the development that some of his mental processes are conscious?
then the hard problem of consciousness is the legitime question for the biological function of a specific capability developed during the biological evolution.
Yes, the evolution of the functions of consciousness is a perfectly legitimate question. The "problem" is that physicalism assumes the causal closure of the physical, and if consciousness evolves, then mental is causal. William James, and Karl Popper both spelled out how the evolutionary test case refutes epiphenomenalism and identity theories.
@AnoE How do you understand the hard problem of consciousness? - My formulation above is not a quote. It says: If that's the hard problem of consciousness then my answer is ...
I find the wording from Wikipedia matches what I think it means, i.e. to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience, and I believe the "how" is the hard(er) part. I think your formulation is too limited on the other side (i.e. on the benefits or the "why"), and thus becomes "too easy" ;). Or in other words, I'm strictly in the physical/evolutionary camp myself - I have no trouble assuming that consciousness evolved like everything else, but the other part (how does it actually work) seems still very hard. ;)
@AnoE That‘s interesting. Because I consider just the how-question to be accessible by neuroscience and indeed already under research (Tomoni, Koch, et al.). But I have no clue why to experience certain mental processes as conscious mental processes is a benefit for the organism. Conscious mental processes are those which broadcast local information globally. But why is the corresponding experience a benefit and developed during evolution?
@Rushi can we say that the physical body persists physically and the mental body persists when in awareness? The word 'you' conflates these, but it is a plural word. My computer is both transistors, and software running on it, yes?
@Rushi try referring to yourself as 'we' in a conversation:-) Yet, it is accurate, nobody is just this one singular ego. Or any one part of their body. So, yeah, semantics should reflect reality. And knowledge. If they can't co-occur in one statement, oh well.
Why does subjectivity exist in a world whose operation we can describe perfectly fine objectively
It is a great question, albeit an uncomfortable one for physicalists. To be fair, dualists and property dualists don't fare much better IMO.
If consciousness "does something" why cannot that something be done unconsciously. If it "does nothing" then why the heck is it here?
Both horns of the dilemma are themselves tough.
What we need is a way to show that subjective experience is a necessary consequence of how our world operates.
Unlike Elan Vital, Ether, etc we are not actually focused on functional aspects but subjective/experiential aspects. Earlier "ghost in the machine" theories were trying to explain observable things like life and light propagation. But trying to explain the existence of inner experience in terms of objective things seems like trying to explain colors in terms of smells. They are just categorically different things.
Blatant Speculation
My tentative bets are on a variant of neutral monism - outside and inside, subject and object are expressions of a more fundamental monad that is neither objective nor subjective.
Bertrand Russell's version is probably the most complete at this point. The main issue is how to define this neutral component in a coherent way.
I am particularly interested in the information-theoretic approaches, since information appears to be a very nice candidate for something not quite mental nor physical but bridging both
The "Hard Problem of Consciousness" is that consciousness is real and functional, and all efforts to explain this under physicalism have failed.
The problem is that physicalism asserts as dogma that consciousness cannot be causal on matter. Yet the only way to explain the evolutionarily tuned nature of consciousness is to admit to its causal efficacy.
The Hard Problem stands in the same relation to physicalism as the similarly intractable Problem of Evil stands relative to an omni-deity. Another name for a "hard problem" is a refuting test case.
The nature of consciousness that we have discovered thru methodological naturalism, is incompatible with physicalism. This is only a problem if one is a dogmatist, and refuses to reject theories when they are refuted.
If someone who's strongly opposed to physicalism says "physicalism asserts", it's always a good idea to see if that aligns with what actual physicalists say and believe (it doesn't, even if we ignore the dogma accusations, but these discussions never go well, and I wouldn't be surprised if I pointed out this exact same claim in the past, so I'll just say that).
@NotThatGuy -- Ad hominem -- rejection of a claim based on attacking the author's other views, is a fallacy. If you think that physicalists do not hold that consciousness is a-causal, the way to improve the answer is to provide a link supporting your claim.
While your link argues for "non-physical" by appealing to ignorance, I would suggest taking some inspiration from that in terms of addressing various possibilities, instead of just asserting physicalism is one possibility, which may be the possibility physicalists are least likely to accept. "the way to improve the answer is to provide a link supporting your claim" - that is a good suggestion for the claim you made in your answer, rather than shifting the burden of proof onto others to refute your claim (but as a vocal physicalist, I'm at least some evidence for my claim about physicalists).
is that consciousness is real and functional, and all efforts to explain this under physicalism have failed. that no explanations have been found so far does not matter - a lot of questions took a very long time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years, to get answered. physicalism asserts as dogma that consciousness cannot be causal on matter I admit I'm only a lay person in this matter, but I did read a lot about the topic. I cannot recall this as the central dogma of physicalism, but maybe it was worded differently. Could you provide a explanation?
