Or, maybe the question I should be asking: have I been misunderstanding the hard problem?
I had occasion to go back and look at Chalmers’ famous paper. Here’s one place where he talks about the hard problem:
At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.
https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
I think the way the majority of people, with have any understanding of the hard problem, understand it is much as I have understood it. It is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises from physicality. Typically joined to this understanding are discussions of qualia, the question of how physical processes can generate them, and some general “mystery” of consciousness.
Take a look at the last line again of the Chalmers’ quote. It seems to me that an understanding of why experience emerges by physical theory is not all that intractable. In fact, a reasonable explanation could be arrived at without explaining qualia at all. It is all a question of what would constitute physical theory explanation for the emergence of experience.Explaining why and how consciousness has emerged shouldn’t require a complete explanation for how it works; however, a more complete explanation of how it works might fall into Chalmers’ category of easy problems: ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; the integration of information by a cognitive system; the focus of attention, the deliberate control of behavior; and others.
A few observations:
1- Consciousness has emerged in biological organisms
2- Consciousness, if not a spandrel, performs some function of evolutionary value or it would not have evolved.
3- Intelligent motility is a good candidate for why consciousness might provide evolutionary value.
4- Intelligent motility requires memory, learning, and ability to predict based on memory and learning.
If we look at the complex of learning, intelligent motility, memory, and prediction (LIMMP), we have nearly a complete evolutionary explanation for why consciousness has emerged in physical organisms. Of course, there is one relatively large thing missing – the direct physical links between consciousness and the LIMMP complex – but we already have good scientific evidence that these links exist. No organism moves with intelligence while unconscious. No memories form or complex learning take place in an unconscious person. Decisions and predictions can be traced to brain processes that involve conscious experience in one or another.
Some will say that the missing physical links is exactly the problem needing explanation in the hard problem. But the problem of missing links is completely researchable by science. It is so researchable that it could actually be placed with the easy problems.To be clear, we don’t completely understand memory and learning. But we already have good reasons to understand these to involve physical processes in the brain since synaptic connectivity patterns change when learning takes. Fundamentally, we need to link the physical processes identified in prediction, learning, and memory to conscious experience.
In other words, what we have to discover is what the brain is doing physically to itself when it has conscious experience.We could derive the why and how consciousness from physical theory by successfully correlating physical change in the brain with conscious experience.No explanation of qualia is required and no explanation of the “mystery” is needed. The research topics are all closely related to Chalmers’ easy problems.
Some might say a robot or zombie could also learn, have memory, and exhibit intelligent motility; hence, consciousness isn’t needed and the hard problem remains. Yes, a robot could do all of those things but the point is irrelevant. The questions are why and how living organisms predict, learn, remember, and move intelligently. It is not any or all of those things are consciousness by themselves. It is that those abilities require consciousness in living organisms. That means that consciousness is itself physical and can modify the brain. We only need to discover how and when we do, since the brain is physical, we would have a physical theory.
So, tell me. Was I misunderstanding the hard problem? Or, am I misunderstanding it now?
Broad Speculations 
I don’t think you were misunderstanding this problem James, or that you’re misunderstanding it now. It is a hard problem. It may never make sense to us how the non subjective creates the subjective. But the place where I think Chalmers messes people up, is getting them to decide that the problem must be solved in order for progress to be made. I think that’s wrong.
Many have taken this problem so seriously that they’ve gotten creative. Maybe if everything has a little bit of subjectivity to it then all we need to explain is how brains combine little bits into human levels?
I say instead maybe all we need to do is figure out what brain information might be informing to exist as consciousness? What sort of thing would be appropriate to exist as pain, fear, itchiness, mirth, vision, and so on? What has the potential complexity and fidelity to exist as such? When we figure out what the brain is informing to exists phenomenally (and I mean determine this empirically), then we should be able to study this consciousness stuff such that certain elements of this problem might begin making sense. Or maybe not. Regardless we should finally get some causal answers even if we don’t understand why. Here we should be able to use this physics medicinally. Or maybe we’d like to build conscious computers? Thus we’d try implementing the same sort of physics for that purpose.
This is how things went with gravity. Newton and Einstein couldn’t tell us why causality mandates the existence of gravity. Their theories sure did help anyway though.
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My point is that it really isn’t a hard problem. It is a question of the standard for proof and evidence.
The brain information is the information for moving intelligently as a biological organism. That means living – avoiding damage and harm, searching for food, and reproducing. Pain and love, despite the importance we place on them, are very primitive implementations.
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Well I guess it all depends upon what one means by “hard”. I think Chalmers subtly meant “magical”. That’s not an option for me given my contrary metaphysics. So I’ll agree that there’s no hard problem of consciousness in that sense. But I don’t mind using the term to reference something that we don’t grasp and might never all that well. And leaving things like “pain” out and going with “avoiding damage and harm, searching for food, and reproducing” leaves out the critical point I think, or what’s meant as “hard” here. Though I do know different from you, sometimes people decide that phenomenal dynamics simply occur when a robot runs advanced enough functional code. Or maybe it’s when the right algorithm is converted into the right other algorithm without it going on to inform anything to exist as an experiencer? I consider such proposals incomplete.
In order to get around determining the “hardness” of a problem, maybe analogies are best? Newton had no clue about “gravity”. He didn’t need such an understanding however in order to theorize how this unknown business effectively works. Anyone able to do this with consciousness ought to become at least as important as he was, and even without knowing why their proposal effectively works. And this ought to open up the possibility for new progress.
I realize that McFadden thinks consciousness makes sense to him as an EM field. He’s wrong about that. Still if his proposal does become experimentally validated, he would then effectively become such a “Newton”. Chalmers would still say that his hard problem remains, though this would be under a fundamentally new paradigm with scientists focused upon using the discovery practically and generally pushing it further through more experimentation.
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I wrote a reply to your comment but WordPress ate it somewhere.
The gist of it was whether the hard problem is a metaphysical problem or a scientific problem or some sort of muddy mixture. I think for most people – maybe even Chalmers – it is a muddy mixture where science is expected to solve a metaphysical problem. The hard problem is regularly brought up in some critiques of science.
Purely from the scientific perspective there is no reason consciousness can’t be researched and some explanation arrived at. The metaphysical problem, on the other hand, probably can never be resolved.
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Bizarrely I found the original comment.
I think Chalmers is conflating a metaphysical problem that assumes matter and mind (even if one reduces to the other) with the scientific problem of understanding how the brain works to produce consciousness.
And that may be the crux of my problem with the whole forumulation.
I can’t see how consciousness can be completely beyond any scientific explanation unless he believes it is supernatural – not amenable to scientific approach at all. But if it can be investigated and “explained” by science (which never finally explains anything anyway) it would be an easy problem.
If he is not conflating the two, then I can only see he is talking about a metaphysical hard problem. That would imply dualism, which to my understanding is what he leans towards. So, the really hard problem is he simply can’t choose between physicalism or idealism.
But I can’t see how we are forced to choose one, two, three, four, or why not 10 billion substances that compose the world. We gain nothing by reducing to one or two. Furthermore, from current science, it doesn’t seem we can reduce physicality to a single particle or wave or force. People may be trying but it isn’t within reach yet. So, there is no reason to suppose that consciousness is a unitary phenomenon either when physicality isn’t.
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Eaten comments are extremely frustrating. Fortunately the original was found. I’m horrible with computers but at least for that problem I’ve done well. I always write comments in a word processor file for whatever blog I’m using, and so never lose comments. Also it can be nice to have my own searchable document of what I’ve said in the past for later reference. Usually I can think of a word or two where the search eventually gets me to the right place.
My general thoughts on metaphysics is this. There is only one element of reality that I (or any non-god) can ever know about what’s truly real. It’s the Cartesian position that I exist while everything else remains provisional. But then from this known I presume that there’s a perfectly determined causal world which creates me. This monistic presumption is somewhat out of convenience since the converse would render science obsolete to the extent that causality does thus fail. Anyway beyond my own existence and a presumed causal world which creates me, everything else is epistemology to potentially make sense of.
Here I think I’ve answered the metaphysical question. Though it’s possible that I’m non-causal (which is to say a second kind of stuff), I presume that I’m natural anyway. Furthermore this way we can get into epistemology and science rather than just metaphysics.
Observe that if it’s true that I’m natural rather than supernatural, then there ought to be epistemic evidence of the causal dynamics which create me. This is why I consider it so important for scientists to rig up ways of inducing EM energies in a person’s head that are around the parameters of synchronous neuron firing. If it turns out that these exogenous energies alter a person’s consciousness for oral report by means of their causal effects upon the endogenous EM field, and exhaustively verified, then each of us should ultimately exist as a constantly changing electromagnetic field. This is to say not actually “body”, but rather something that a given EMF producing machine creates.
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“if it’s true that I’m natural rather than supernatural, then there ought to be epistemic evidence of the causal dynamics which create me.
Exactly.
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If I understand you—and I may not—then I agree with this part of your comment; nothing forces us to have one (or even two) substances that compose reality. And we really gain nothing by reducing everything to one—even though consciousness, for example, ultimately may be amenable to an epistemically objective explanation as emerging from complex arrangements of physical components. Reality does not have to be assumed to be merely physical. Reality can certainly be two, even three or more substaces that have the same ontological value. I submit that the more we understand “complexity” in nature the more we can accept that conscious experience can emerge from the physical as a separate ontological reality—as can other aspects of our world.
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I think we agree. In the debates between materialism and idealism, materialism is usually the one accused of reductionism, but idealism is equally so. Idealism just reduces to something different. Instead of reducing, we could embrace diversity with layers of things each having a reality beyond its reduction to something else.
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I don’t necessarily think you are misunderstanding Chalmer’s hard problem per se.
“…what we have to discover is what the brain is doing physically to itself when it has conscious experience.”
So, are we talking about a self-caused cause here? Because that is what your assessment suggests. As far as research goes, I think we have to overcome the really really hard problem of a self-caused cause first before we can move on to Chalmers hard problem.
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I don’t see as that different from your own mind as system approach except I don’t see a single mind system. Consciousness arises from the brain but also can act on it. It’s feedback. Consciousness is physical, in the brain, and part of causal chain that begins and ends with the the familiar parts of the brain.
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“I don’t see as that different from your own mind as system approach except I don’t see a single mind system.”
Oh but it is different, and that difference is ontological, just like the hard problem of gravity is an ontological problem. Whereas the hard problem of the mind in your fragmented version is an epistemological problem.
But if your rationale does not see the hard problem of gravity as an ontological problem then it would fit perfectly with your approach to the hard problem of mind as well.
With that, I think I’ve reached the end of my participation because I have nothing more to contribute besides beating the same old drum…. boom, boom, boom.
Good luck Jim, and good luck Eric……
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I don’t see any ontological problem with the world at all. I just see limitations of reason and knowledge. The ontological problems are illusions. Different approaches seem like different colors until the right light is shining on them and then they are revealed as the same.
Good luck.
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I think you know my stance at this point. I see the hard problem itself as a misunderstanding, hand wringing about a bad theory of consciousness we can’t let go of due to remnant dualist intuitions. The “easy” problems, with the addition of affects and some other omissions, are the ones worth solving. They’re far from easy of course, but they’re coherent and scientifically tractable.
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Of course, the “easy” problems aren’t all that easy, but, if we use Chalmers’ idea of “easy” , all of the problems with understanding consciousness are easy.
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Damned if I know. But I think something that doesn’t get enough attention is imagination. Imagination allows game planning of future actions so it can lead to massive survivability. But we also need to be able to distinguish between imagined scenarios and observed scenarios (we possess this ability and I think it is necessary).
I think the necessity to be able to distinguish “experience” memories from imagined memories may play a role in being able to recognize experiences.
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Did you see the piece about imaginative rats in my previous post?
The place where the imagination seems to be happening is the hippocampus where space and time mapping seems to be taking place. The hippocampus and structures similar to it appear in all mammals and many other animals, including birds, and possibly insects. Some form of imagination might exist even with rudimentary consciousness.
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It is such a valuable survival tool, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in many animals. For example, if I put on my boots, my dog thinks it is to take him for a walk. I think there is some rudimentary imaginative thinking going on there.
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My cats definitely have some imaginative thinking going on too. But it probably isn’t as rudimentary as a dog’s. LOL
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:o)
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You’d probably stop reading everything I write if you saw me around my cats.
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