Have you read these
dlorde? Do you think you properly understand what "
The Hard Problem of Consciousness" is truly about (even if you don't agree it's actually a hard problem) or is it more that you just can't quite "see" what the fuss is really about to start with?
Yes, I understand what the Hard Problem of Consciousness is, and yes, I've read Chalmers' articles.
I'd like to know which category you think describes your point of view best in Chalmers' second paper (unfortunately quite long).
I think Chalmers provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of the issues and approaches - although he doesn't cover one that, for a while, I thought might be interesting - Emergence:
[
Jeffrey Goldstein on emergence:
"the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems"
"The common characteristics are:
(1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems);
(2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time);
(3) A global or macro "level" (i.e. there is some property of "wholeness");
(4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and
(5) it is "ostensive" (it can be perceived)."
See Emergence & Creativity for an interesting read.]
However, I'm not quite so enthusiastic about the emergence hypothesis these days, for various reasons, although I think emergence may be useful conceptually in bridging the subjective-objective gap.
Basically, Chalmers hits the nail on the head quite early on, when he says:
"
The hard problem is about explaining the view from the first-person perspective."
and:
"
..whatever account of processing we give, the vital step - the step where we move from facts about structure and function to facts about experience - will always be an extra step, requiring some substantial principle to bridge the gap."
and:
"
... any neurobiological or cognitive account, will be incomplete"
This seems key. What 'substantial principle' can bridge that gap? Only some arbitrary and axiomatic contingency. The problem is one of trying to find an objective explanation for something that
requires a subjective explanation. AFAICS, ultimately a completely satisfying objective explanation isn't possible, because there will always be that ugly join.
All the other arguments and approaches to an objective description of consciousness founder on the same rock - the metaphysical chasm between objective & subjective. It's all speculative hand-waving that goes nowhere.
I particularly discount quantum explanations as based on misunderstanding or misapplication of QM. I also discount pan-psychism as a futile attempt to hide or ignore the problem by making it ubiquitous.
Chalmers says
"if it turns out that it cannot be explained in terms of more basic entities, then it must be taken as irreducible, just as happens with such categories as space and time", which seems as much a cop-out as the Type A Materialism (nothing to explain) he dislikes so much, and he criticises the Type-B materialism of Clark and Hardcastle who postulate an empirical identity between conscious experiences and physical processes, because it makes that identity fundamental (irreducible) - perhaps too much like his own conclusion about irreducibility (above)...?
Again, he talks of examining physical process and phenomenology to
"find systematic regularities between the two; work down to the simpler principles which explain these regularities in turn; and ultimately explain the connection in terms of a simple set of fundamental laws". Quite how these "
underlying brutely contingent fundamental laws", that define contingent relations between the principles of function & process and of consciousness, are substantially different from the Clark and Hardcastle approach, he doesn't clarify. Nevertheless, despite some apparent contradictions, I think he does a good job overall.
If anything, I prefer a version of original Identity Theory (a pre-Type B Materialist approach) which proposes that the sensation of a thing is the sort of state caused by that thing (with the caveat that this occurs in a complex system structured like the brain).
But ultimately, there's no way to objectively explain the subjective position/experience of
being the complex system under consideration. Experience and conscious awareness is what it is like to be an active brain, of sufficient complexity, in the awake state. That's why my starting point is the waves of activation that sweep across the brain when our conscious focus of awareness changes. When you
are that brain, those patterns of activation
are your experiences.
It seems to me that the best we can do is to examine the function of the brain to narrow down the subsystems necessary for consciousness, and to investigate how these subsystems contribute to consciousness. Once we have a better understanding of how the system is put together, we may get a better understanding of why consciousness is the result.
