Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Forums: Philosophy
Email this Topic • Print this Page

Providing a scientific explanation of subjective experience has been elusive only because the nature of scientific explanation is poorly understood. One formulation of the hard problem of consciousness asks how it is that a bunch of chemicals squirting around in a human brain gives rise to subjective experience. Functional explanations involving neurological correlations often give rise to objections regarding certain gaps in our understanding. However, this should not be taken to mean that any such explanation is lacking. All scientific explanations contain a similar gap, yet, most of the things they attempt to explain are considered complete.

To make things clearer, let’s take an example of a scientific explanation that is uncontroversial, such as fire. How is it that rubbing two sticks together gives rise to fire? The answer is well known, friction causes a reactant to heat up and eventually combine with an oxidant releasing more heat and light through an exothermic reaction. We can go deeper but the reader should get the point. This, like all scientific explanations, is only a description of observations, correlations. They don’t explain anything in the sense that they uncover any necessary connections. There’s no reason why oxidizing fuels should necessarily create a flame, they just do. Yet, this explanation is considered complete.

All explanations must end somewhere. We can always ask “Why?” in response to any explanation. If the scientific explanation of consciousness should be considered systematically incomplete then it is only because all scientific explanations should be considered systematically complete. Either there is no hard problem of consciousness or any other scientific explanation, or there is a problem with all scientific explanations. Either way, there is nothing especially difficult about explaining consciousness, which is what the hard problem purports to claim.

Topic Stats
Top Replies
Link to this Topic

Type: Discussion • Score: 4 • Views: 3,128 • Replies: 40

No top replies

@Night Ripper,

Quote:

Providing a scientific explanation of subjective experience has been elusive only because the nature of scientific explanation is poorly understood.

False premise IMO.
Scientific explanation IS understood as providing a basis for prediction and control of publicly accessible data. The point about "consciousness" is that its contents are neither predictable nor publicly accessible. The argument that all "scientific explanation is never complete" is a red herring. It merely reflects Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that all systems require at least one axiom as "an assumption". But whilst such an explanatory system is "successful" in its function of prediction and control, it remains paradigmatically valid.

1 Reply

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Quote:
Providing a scientific explanation of subjective experience has been elusive only because the nature of scientific explanation is poorly understood.

False premise IMO.
Scientific explanation IS understood as providing a basis for prediction and control of publicly accessible data. The point about "consciousness" is that its contents are neither predictable nor publicly accessible. The argument that all "scientific explanation is never complete" is a red herring. It merely reflects Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that all systems require at least one axiom as "an assumption". But whilst such an explanatory system is "successful" in its function of prediction and control, it remains paradigmatically valid.

I don't want to turn this into an argument about scientific explanations per se. I'd like to know why it is you think (if you do) that a scientific explanation of fire is adequate while a scientific explanation of consciousness isn't. In other words, why is there a hard problem of consciousness and not a hard problem of fire or any other scientific explanation? Why is it that rubbing two sticks together giving rise to fire is unproblematic but chemicals squirting around in a brain giving rise to subjective experience problematic?

2 Replies

@Night Ripper,

What is it you don't understand about my answer ?

If the sub-aspect called "friction" relative to the general "kinetic theory of heat" successfully and repeatedly predicts the public event we call "fire" then that is illustrative of "a scientific explanation".
Now YOU give me a "theory of brain functioning" such that a sub-aspect of it successfully and repeatedly predicts a public manifestation of what we call "consciousness" THEN I will concede the point.

Note that poking the brain with an electrode in one location such that the subject consistently reports the smell of fish, or a pain in his elbow, does not constitute "a theory of brain functioning". Nor do the reports of basic sensations constitute "consciousness".

The trivial infinite regress of the "why" question may be a pre-occupation of precocious infants, but is hardly the province of an Oxford student.

1 Reply

@fresco,

If you are satisfied with the explanation behind "rubbing two sticks together gives rise to fire" then why aren't you satisfied with the explanation behind "squirting chemicals in a brain gives rise to subjective experience"? It won't do any good to simply say that there isn't currently an explanation because the hard problem of consciousness says that there can't be one which is a stronger claim.

Also, please try to leave out the personal comments directed towards me and address the issue at hand. Where I went to school is irrelevant and little more than a thinly veiled insult.

1 Reply

I thought there is something in the hard problem of counsciousness called "quanta," meaning the subjective experience includes that something may be redder than another red thing in one's subjective experience.

Regardless, the fact that we can discuss what consciousness is, makes it a hard problem, since I believe, consciousness has many more variables (i.e., memory, introspection) than what is done to make fire from friction on sticks.

Also, the fact that I see the premise of this thread as silly might be the answer to there being a hard problem in consciousness, since "silliness" might be perceived by one consciousness, but not another. No other perception, than fire from friction on sticks, when friction on sticks make fire.

However, if one wants to see a correlation of fire made from friction on sticks to consciousness, then that too is the hard problem, in that that supposed correlation is just the ability of one's consciousness to correlate, based on questionnable premises of another person's consciousness.

1 Reply

@Foofie,

I should clarify that the hard problem of consciousness is a specific problem regarding consciousness to be contrasted with other relatively easy problems. I say relatively easy because the other problems are still hard in and of themselves.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

0 Replies

@Night Ripper,

You don't seem to understand the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Both of these can be specified for the "two sticks scenario" but only the second for the "squirting chemicals scenario". Nor have your addressed the issue of "public observation" in the case of the latter.

In one respect "the hard problem of consciousness" is a pseudo-problem because it could be argued, for example, that "all explanations" are themselves a product of consciousness. Here again we see an infinite regress rearing its head, like the trivial "why" question. I suggest you scan Chalmers' compilation of hundreds of papers on consciousness if you wish to dabble further in these matters.

http://consc.net/online

1 Reply

@Night Ripper,

Quote:

Why is it that rubbing two sticks together giving rise to fire is unproblematic but chemicals squirting around in a brain giving rise to subjective experience problematic?

Same reason a schitzophreniac may have problems curing himself. The mind he can use to fix it is the very thing that needs fixing, and so it's like locking unlocking a drawer when the key is inside it.

Personally I think ideas connected to quantum physics have some very interesting approaches to the problem of consciousness. It's called quantum consciousness, and basically, according to this idea, consciousness is a quantum phenomena that happens every time superposition collapses into reality.

It's not brain dependent. It may be that our senses merely measure conscious moments from various sources which our brains form into a coherent, lasting consciousness.
So for one thought, no brain is needed, and the information contained in that thought is the full extent of consciousness.

It is said that each moment the brain processes several billion bits of information. But we are only consciously aware of around 2000 of them.
If we think of each bit as a quantum event that results in a singular moment of consciousness, we can say that the brain recieves several billion conscious moments by means of our senses. What the brain then does is filter these bits, crossreferencing the input from all sources with eachother, and the 2000 bits that are presented to us as "human consciousness" are only the sum of visual impressions that compliment audio impressions, and all the other senses.
In short, it takes everything, uses what can become complimentary input and discards sensory inputs that contradict eachother in the brain. Thus we are left with this impression of reality as it is experienced by humans.

0 Replies

@Night Ripper,

I believe that the problem of consciousness is hard because we have not integrated the objective and the subjective. To the observer, objectively, the subjective is consciousness' form. To whom is involved, subjectively or in consciousness' content, the objective is what is 'out there'.

0 Replies

@fresco,

IMO “the hard problem of conciousness” is the most important question that human reason needs to answer. Because, without answering that we cannot find the meaning of “existence”.

1 Reply

@mitra-soumya,

Firstly,I assume "meaning of existence" involves the definition of the word rather that its "purpose". Either way, you need to explain why the "hard problem" (finding the physical or biological correlates of consciousness) have something to do with the issue of "meaning". The implication of finding such correlates would suggest some sort of deterministic "explanation" for the operation of consciousness such that "semantics" becomes reducible to a sub-set of the"brain-states" we call "consciousness". But such a reduction suggested by "the hard problem" begs the question of the sufficiency of brain states to account for "consciousnes" even if it were to establish their necessity.

If on the other hand you are talking about purpose of "existence" you presumably are already happy that you know what existence is, and "purpose" becomes an athropomorhic equivalent of "reason for the creation of existent things". Unfortunately that begs a second question about the determinism involved in potential solution to"the hard problem", namely that such determinism has ""purpose" as opposed to being mechanistic.

1 Reply

@fresco,

...unless you present your definition of consciousness all that talk addresses nothing fresco, and you know it... so please be kind and give us "your version" !

1 Reply

@Fil Albuquerque,

I don't need a definition to discuss "the hard problem". I can assume a vague concept like "mental activity" for that purpose.

My own definition would be something like "ordinary consciousness" is a phrase we use to describe the experience of being-in-a-world and the expectancies and memories we have of interaction with such a world.

1 Reply

@fresco,

..."being" in a world is at least vague...you mean measuring a reality, experiencing is about accounting for...

...the function of measuring something according with our own capacity of measuring, therefore dependent on our limitations and specificity´s, imply´s that our capacity to question it, cannot also transcend this limitations... so to use your own terms, either to assert or to refute any kind of truth ends up falling into the very same trap. (Closure)

1 Reply

@Fil Albuquerque,

I take "being-in -a-world" to be Heideggarian. It requires no reference to measurement other than a nominal level of "itemization" but such itemization can be "pre-conscious" in the sense that we are "drawn" to segment the world by natural (bodily) processes.

0 Replies

The presented content of experience (images, sounds, odors, haptic feelings, etc.) are a brute add-on to the properties conventionally ascribed to non-conscious matter. An ultimate account of all material properties (pertaining to "How can a brain, which is matter, hallucinate manifestations?") is of no concern for biological research since it is occupied with a higher level than physics or elementary physics. And going back to Galileo, physics itself kicked-out such secondary qualities from being part of its objective world that it studies.

So experience is an orphan when it comes to the physical sciences . . . there is no field interested in satisfactorily explaining it or resolving such a problem. And as for the psychological, cognitive, and philosophical disciplines... Well, who in the other camps gives a flip about their ramblings and speculations, apart from maybe the occasional confession of being attracted to identity theory, eliminative physicalism, etc? Wink

1 Reply

@G H,

Quote:

And going back to Galileo, physics itself kicked-out such secondary qualities from being part of its objective world that it studies.

You are correct that what we think of as "science" assumes "objectivity". The significance of "the hard problem" is that the status of such objectivity itself comes under investigation.

1 Reply

@fresco,

Quote:

You are correct that what we think of as "science" assumes "objectivity". The significance of "the hard problem" is that the status of such objectivity itself comes under investigation.

Yes, if I understand you correctly or we're both referring somewhat to the same neighborhood. The content of perception, including experimental measurements and theoretical constructs about them, as well as third-person and technical descriptions, are abstracted from the largely external-oriented part of experience and treated as an objective model -- or the model is even reified by the naive or uncritical among scientists.

What one is dealing with in the hard problem is those philosophers who seem to treat physical as metaphysical, or place physicalism in the more boot-thumping status of metaphysical realism. Rather than revising physicalism (a useful invented scheme or view) to solve its problem, physicalism is treated as non-artificial, the literal circumstance for world taken to either exist outside of as well as including conscious agents or cognitive processes, which is therefore not mutable or revisable.

Schopenhauer: "If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of the subject's representations."

Whether or not there really are subjects (minds) that such concrete experiences belong to or is produced by is another issue. But also in some if not all materialist schemes the phenomenal representations of observing agents should be taken as making the world manifest and giving it those spatiotemporal forms -- hallucinations / perceptions which it is deprived of when they die. They return to the blankness or "absence of any presented content" state that non-conscious matter normally has in such physicalist schemes.

1 Reply

consciousness is based on the evolution of the combination of awarness and memory

and both are based on the neccessity of survival

so to survive or not to survive , is the essence of consciousness

1 Reply

Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know