The Problem with the Hard Problem
No Problem
https://www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness/
By Carlo Rovelli
David Chalmers wrote about the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" in 1994. He acknowledged that it is very difficult to understand how the brain works at a physical level but he figured that that would be accomplished. He called that 'the easy problem'. He claimed that understanding all that physical stuff wouldn't help us at all in understanding how we can possibly be aware.
This is a reflection of the dualist position; that body and mind are connected somehow but are fundamentally different sorts of things. There are very many problems with that position. For me, a major problem is that it gives no clue about what a mind is or how it works or anything about it. It's handwaving posing as profundity.
Rovelli writes, "Chalmers claimed that even after hypothetically accounting for our entire behavior, and for all our reports about our inner life, there would still be an “explanatory gap” between brain processes and experience. "
Rovelli fails to understand that there would be an explanatory gap. For me the issue is that accepting that there would be an explanatory gap is to basically accept the dualist idea without the dualists having to even argue the issue.
Rovelli nicely puts it this way. How can dualists know what we would understand if we understood what we don't understand now?
Max Velmans in How Could Conscious Experiences Affect Brains? proposed an interesting way of thinking about our experience. Our experience is observing our brains from an internal perspective. Our brains can also be examined from an external perspective. So the so called Hard Problem dissolves into a perspective issue. I have a different experience on the grove of trees outside my window than a person walking by on the sidewalk. That's a perspective issue, not a mystery that can't be solved.
I've often thought of the mind-body problem as a category error that speaks of the mind as a thing like a body. A mind isn't a thing that we possess that is so mysterious that we'll never understand it. To paraphrase Ian Anderson in Thick as a Brick. "I don't believe you! You've got the whole damn thing all wrong!" We don't have a thing called consciousness. We are conscious. It's an ongoing process.
This is what I call the nounification of a verb. I've found this error in other places and it can lead to misunderstanding. For instance, the idea that an artist has creativity (a noun - thing possessed) misunderstands what's going on when an artist creates ( a verb).
Rovelli talks of dualism as a product of ancient ways of explaining reality that invokes ideas like gods and souls and life force. He nods to how Darwin's Natural Selection changed our perspective on life that didn't depend on God as an explanation.
I think the basis of awareness is responding to a sensed environment. Systems that are don't have to be very complicated. Single celled organisms that can move up a nutrient gradient towards food are aware.
I like to think of the paramecium and the amoeba as having a sort of mechanically aware. And they work on different principles.
The paramecium is set up so that the cilia on the side opposite to where the food gradient is detected swim faster. This causes the little guy to swing towards the food. When the food is straight ahead it swims towards it.
Amoeba does it differently. It seems that the cell wall nearest the food source softens a bit and the material of the cell balloons into the softer section and so the whole thing flows towards food.
Pretty cunning and pretty mindless. I'd say that we are pretty cunning too in our own way and that we don't need a mind either.
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.