The hard problem of consciousness and physicalism
The hard problem of consciousness can be defined as the problem of explaining why and how we have qualia. Qualia are typically defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.
But is it necessary for us to know why and how the brain gives rise to qualia in order to know *that* it does? In other words, wouldn’t it be sufficient to confirm physicalism as the correct metaphysics simply by knowing *that* the brain gives rise to qualia without needing to go all the way in explaining why and how it does so?
What I’m saying is that I think there’s a difference between knowing why and how the brain gives rise to qualia and knowing *that* it does so.
And to me at least, it seems as though we already know that the brain does give rise to qualia. For example, if you were to drink a large amount of alcohol, it would temporarily impact the functioning of your brain which would have drastic effects on your qualia. And people who have brain damage often have marked changes in their qualia.
But is it necessary for us to know why and how the brain gives rise to qualia in order to know *that* it does? In other words, wouldn’t it be sufficient to confirm physicalism as the correct metaphysics simply by knowing *that* the brain gives rise to qualia without needing to go all the way in explaining why and how it does so?
What I’m saying is that I think there’s a difference between knowing why and how the brain gives rise to qualia and knowing *that* it does so.
And to me at least, it seems as though we already know that the brain does give rise to qualia. For example, if you were to drink a large amount of alcohol, it would temporarily impact the functioning of your brain which would have drastic effects on your qualia. And people who have brain damage often have marked changes in their qualia.
Comments (28)
To what degree can we really be said to know what we mean by 'qualia'?
To test the effect of alcohol we'd look at things like reaction time, which can be uncontroversially measured.
If we wanted to test whether alcohol 'feels good,' I think we'd have to reframe that question so that the dependent variable is a choice of statements on a survey. The language we use can be measured (translation software depends on statistical relationships between words scraped from the internet.) This kind of statistical relationship might be about as much meaning as we can hope to get from 'qualia.'
Interesting point. There’s only so far we can go with language and communication in general, but I would elaborate on the meaning of the term ‘qualia’ by saying that they are individual instances of what it is like to have sensations, perceptions, and thoughts. I can see why you have doubts about the meaning of qualia, though.
:up:
That's what I understood you to mean.
Quoting Paul Michael
Basically we assume that such a definition is rational or reliable. But if the instances are truly or radically individual, they wouldn't fall under the same concept, unless it be the most general concept of an entity, making the concept useless.
My suggestion is that we assume that we have the same qualia because we 'live in' the same language, and that 'qualia' are something like shadows cast by language.
Anyone can use whatever vocabulary they see fit, I'm thinking qualia here is just a very loaded word. We all have experience, we can see outside our window and see a blue sky, or a green tree or a person walking around.
We can listen to music, etc. No problem with that.
We know way too little about the brain to think about how the brain interprets a stimulation as an ordinary object.
We have problems with the behavior of particles, much simpler than a brain. So, it's not surprise we can't say much about something as complex as seeing another person or looking at the sky, etc.
I agree.
Quoting Manuel
Yes, we all have experience, though our experiences are all unique. I actually used the word ‘qualia’ in an attempt to simplify the OP, but perhaps it caused more confusion than it alleviated.
Quoting Manuel
Right, I completely agree. However, I think there is a conceptual difference between being able to know why and how the brain might accomplish this and being able to know that it does so. That is to say, we don’t need to know the manner in which the brain gives rise to experience in order to know *that* it does.
Although understanding the ‘why and how’ would conclusively show *that* the brain gives rise to experience, I don’t think it is necessary for us to go that far in order to confirm that it does.
No, I mean, I personally don't have too much issues with "qualia", but it seems to me *some* people here start arguing about the term, which I don't see the point of.
So I speak of seeing outside your window, listening to music or tasting chocolate. If people have trouble with that, then we aren't going to have much of a conversation.
Quoting Paul Michael
Sure. That makes sense. It's assumed to be the case, because what other option exists? Surely experience is not in my finger, or nose, or leg.
I think it's a kind of massive epistemic gap. We can say some things about the human body as well as physics, we can say some things about the brain as a biological organ.
But the difference between looking at neuronal activity in a person and actually having the taste of chocolate or listening to you favorite tune, etc. is just enormous. We lack intelligence to know how this is possible.
But I'm a bit peculiar on this topic. :cool:
I see what you mean now.
Quoting Manuel
People who reject physicalism and, for example, adopt monistic idealism (á la Bernardo Kastrup) claim that consciousness/experience is fundamental to reality itself as a whole rather than generated by the brain.
Quoting Manuel
Yes, it is a seemingly insurmountable epistemic gap, and in fact it is possible that we may never bridge it. But I’m claiming that we don’t need to bridge it in order to know that physicalism is true.
Just look at the reports of people who have taken large doses of psychedelics, for example. The chemical directly interacts with the brain, as can be observed by neuroscientists, and they all report extreme changes in their experience. These reports are pretty convincing to me that the brain generates experience.
Since we can't measure experience (which is largely taken as that-which-cannot-be-measured), perhaps it's better to say that the brain generates these reports. The leap from these reports to some hazy entity known as 'experience' is what should be problematized.
The dependent variable has to be an uncontroversial entity. We can survey a group that gets LSD and another group that doesn't. We can infer a causal relationship between LSD and such reports. But moving from the reports to 'experience' seems unjustified. If it wasn't so common, the fishiness of this leap would be more obvious.
Aha. Now we are getting each other.
Quoting Paul Michael
His is a very interesting case. He makes some good points, I mean, it is true that in terms of acquaintance, we are best acquainted with experience than anything we study in nature.
However, it seems to me that if consciousness were as fundamental as he says, we should be able to introspect and know everything about the world. And there's lots of things to say about unconscious brain processes which are far more prevalent than mental states.
Quoting Paul Michael
An "idealist" can say that chemicals are the way nature looks like to an experiencing being who is not aware of this. All psychedelics do is show how what we take for granted is actually a product of mind.
A "physicalist" can say, as you point out, these are just chemicals, and attempt to verify this claim by looking at brain scans.
It leaves the status of experience exactly as it was, "metaphysically neutral", as it were.
Sure, a blow to the head can alter experience pretty substantially, as can a shock to the brain and so on.
Kastrup argues that all lifeforms are actually “dissociated alters” of the one universal consciousness, analogous to dissociative identity disorder, and this is why we can’t introspect and know everything about the world. But this seems ad hoc to me.
Quoting Manuel
Maybe neutral monism is a better metaphysical model/position than either idealism or physicalism, if this is the case.
Quoting Paul Michael
So are qualia "individual instances of subjective, conscious experience" or ."individual instances of what it is like to have sensations, perceptions, and thoughts"? Is there a difference?
Isn't "what it is like to be aware" lest confusingly expressed as "what it is to be aware", in the sense of "how does it feel to be aware", since the idea of comparison is inapt in this context? And does how it feels to be aware of something differ from the apprehension of the qualities of whatever it is we are aware of?
I can go along with attributing a form of DID to everyone.
But not to nature. We don't know if nature is intrinsically like or unlike experience, so it seems to me to anthropomorphize nature in the extreme, to speak of objects as "alters".
Quoting Paul Michael
Yeah either neutral monism, or naturalist monism.
Is there any experience without acquaintance with nature, or any acquaintance with nature without experience? I think experience is just a word to denote that we have awareness. To my way of thinking the so-called "hard problem" is a kind of illusion based on thinking that what matter is is clearly understood; that it is something like "dead" particles that could not, according to our conception, possibly give rise to what we think of as "immaterial" subjective experience. The hard problem then seems to me to be an expression of incredulity based on ignorance.
I don’t think there is a difference, but I was attempting to illustrate what I was referring to by the word ‘qualia’.
Quoting Janus
To me at least, being aware just means having a live first-person perspective of the universe/reality.
And yet the two definitions you gave are different.
Quoting Paul Michael
Aren't we aware of things, other entities, events and environments rather than "the universe/ reality". I think we conceive of the latter, but are not aware of it, meaning that they are ideas, not experiences or percepts.
True, I use experience so to avoid saying "consciousness", and to a lesser extent "awareness", as they are used too frequently.
I think technically, what you say is correct. We have acquaintance with nature in so far as we can experience parts of it. But parts of it must be outside our experience.
Quoting Janus
100%
That's actually historically accurate. Locke speaks about this extremely lucidly in his Essay. A lot of what he said has been forgotten.
I shared a quote here by him, though the whole chapter is fantastic:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/387/tpf-quote-cabinet/p11
Quoting Janus
You're speaking about this better than me. Yeah, I think we sometimes verge on the fallacy that we know so much, when I think it's the opposite. Which makes what we do know all the more impressive. There's no reason why a species should understand anything about nature.
I guess they could be seen as different in the sense that the first definition is broad and the second is more of an attempt to target one’s intuition of what the first definition means.
Quoting Janus
Yes, we are, but everything we are aware of falls within the larger context of the universe/reality. So we are aware of the universe/reality, just not all of it in its totality.
I concur. I personally don’t think we have good reasons to attribute experience to the whole of nature, yet others disagree.
It wouldn't be philosophy otherwise.
If nature doesn't bear a basic form of the mental, then how can the food we , or the mother carrying a baby, transform in a conscious being?
The hard problem is trying to explain why there is a difference in the evidence used to assert that you are aware vs.asserting that others are aware. How you come to know that you are aware vs. knowing others are aware is totally different.
:up: Great passage: I must read Locke one day!
Quoting Manuel
Exactly! The world is intelligible to us, to be sure, if it weren't we could not survive, we would be helpless in the play of blind forces. The intelligibility of their surroundings is also essential to any animal's survival. But this intelligibility is not absolute understanding, and nor should we deduce from the fact of intelligibility that we have any capacity for absolute understanding.
Quoting Paul Michael
I'm not seeing how "individual instances" necessarily mean "what it is like to have individual instances". I think the latter is largely an artifact of reflection; that is, a post hoc rationalization which leads to reification of qualia as something over and above lived experience.
Quoting Paul Michael
I think it is more accurate to say that we are aware of parts of the universe, parts of reality, and of course we logically conclude that there must be a whole which is greater than the parts that we see. The whole can never be an object of awareness though.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You might think that is a hard problem, but it is not the so-called "Hard Problem". I don't think it is a hard problem at all; it seems obvious to me that you intimately know you are aware because you are yourself, and do not know others are aware in the same way, because you are not them.
Absolutely.
I mean, not really knowing what makes up 95% of the universe is a bit of a problem. Hopefully James Webb can shed some light on that.
But the point remains, as you say, our faculties were "meant" for survival in the wild, not for scientific hypothesis.
If you do assume that my private experience (assuming such a thing makes senes) is like yours....enough that they deserve to be collected together under the same concept...then what inspires this confidence?
Are language and other kinds of action synchronized because our hidden 'experiences' are? Or do we have it backwards ?
What governs which objects are granted this 'what-it-is-like' to be them, and why?
Then I think that we are talking about different hard problems. Is it not the type of evidence that we have for recognizing our own self-awareness vs recognizing other's self-awareness, and how to reconcile the differences, what the so-called "Hard Problem" refers to?
If you recognize your own self-awareness using some evidence, but you can't use the same evidence to recognize other's self-awareness, then is the evidence you have for either really evidence at all for self-awareness?