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?
