There Is No Hard Problem

It is the interface between the two states which may determine the progression (repeatably) ,until the test repeats itself to exactly one half of the number of cycles.

This is similar in kind to qualitative change by increments, or . a fed back system in pattern re-cognition.

Of pattern recognition becomes some constant between a differentiation between variable yet not relatable parts, and by re integration of patterns where the opposite occurs, two different patterns will become recognizable enough to form an impress of likeness , where the difference will not be noticed however remaining calculable.

I think this is the closest it can get to a description

Sorry Carleas for pre-tempting Your line of thought , but I owed this to Karpel.

Physicalists have tended to view all contact as mediated. This hits that which impinges on that. So minds are always separated and solipsism is always a possibility (or zombies) for a physicalist. This is likely true for other belief systems. But some belief systems do not consider things as separate first. They can have separate and intermeshed at the same time. Idealists have an easier time with this also.

I am not arguing that there are not other minds. I was pointing out that physicalism leads to certain conclusions and doubts, given its nature.

But again, there is no reason for this to include experiencing. As in, there is subject feeling this or that while experiencing the phenomenon of X. Looking out, looking in, there is no reason one should have an experiencer more than the other.

But it’s not just that. Functional processes need not have awareness. You can say that when cognitive processes have themselves as the object conscousness arises, but this is just a flat assertion. I see no justification for that. Organism X looks at the gull, no consciousness. Organism X, wonders about its feeling, consciousness.

OK, good. At least we have that on the table. That is a rare physicalist position. But now we need a definition of perceptions of its own operations. Would this take place in a reef, say? Why not consider panqualiaism, while we’re at it. Why is the skin the limit of the orgasmism? We have causal chains coursing through matter, in all directions, why should it honor the skin as a special bounday?

I am still not seeing anything that explains why we do not have a zombie universe. You can say ‘when someone focuses on itself, it becomes consciousn’, but we don’t know if that is the limit of consciousness. We don’t know the mechanism. But we have an axiom that is very hard, if not impossible, to falsify or verify.

It can be said that “we have imperfect information about what’s really going on ‘out there’ in the non-mind universe”, or it could be said that we have perfect information of what’s going on in the mind. Beginning with the latter, as we all would have done before any notion of the former was ever conceived (the “non-mind universe” ‘out there’ conceived in the mind no less), the issue with the latter is that we have less useful predictive power relative to the usefulness in predictive power of the former. The difference therefore is in utility, and the inversion of mind with “non-mind” such that “non-mind” replaced mind as more fundamental was because of utility. Reality is thus a social construct that would not exist or occur to the mind of somebody born into no social contact. You are not far off at all in your mention of spoken language as the foundation of what we now casually deem to be the reality beyond the mind: the source of all the goings in within our mind.

This is the riddle I’ve been exploring, and the solution I’ve been considering for a long time now. Not that it might quite easily be very misguided. I even seem to remember a reference to the construction of such things through language alone by my favourite philosopher, Nietzsche, somewhere in The Gay Science. I can try and seek it out if you’re interested and if you’ve not already read it.

Consider not only air, but all that we experience either side of it. “Where” do they occur? The useful conception is to suggest they originate from reality out there in space, but even the study of “out there in space” reveals that all our experience is only of our interpretations of the data we sense from “out there in space”. The spatial element of our experience is then to be reconsidered as originating in our brain - so where is all of everything then? Out there or in the brain? In the mind? What then of space at all? If you’ve seen Joe Rogan’s interview with Elon Musk, Elon similarly raises the point of “space” and “where” any thing actually is if everything is already virtual reality. For these mind bubbles I’ve suddenly interested myself in, as a concept, the fact that the supposed spatial locations of things in minds overlap with what others say doesn’t mean that the minds themselves are spatially overlapping, or even that minds occupy any space at all - or at least that they don’t conform with Materialist notions of space. “Air” is only really a placeholder to account for the time it takes for the first things we seemingly experience “over there” to meet with things “over here”, and the feeling of resistance that occurs with wind or moving fast. It’s not quite so strange, then, that interactive virtual 3D representations so closely match our experience despite their 2D format. Has the mind been tricked by the 2D, or is the 3D a trick?

What is software? Software is the “intangible” information that tells the Hardware what to do, right? Well no, software is all physical too. Every key stroke and mouse click or movement is the change in electrical current through hardware. It results in very specific light shows on your monitor practically incidentally. The “rift” between hardware and software is better said to be the mind’s reaction to these light shows etc., between the hardware of “reality” and the software of the mind. But just as it’s all hardware “in reality” it’s all mind: the computer hardware, the electrical current changing due to inputs, the display of the monitor and the associations of the brain that result in various different outputs of the mind interacting with other elements of the mind that aren’t deemed “self”. Of course, you’re merely creating an analogy, and all the computer would be doing is condensing more complex information that can be much more easily summed up and communicated on an abstract level without details, more efficiently translating meaning (that which we respond to most) than if every detail were specified.

Note that the computer would not be communicating anything if it didn’t change the type of the information that it used to communicate. If it changed nothing, it’d just be functioning as normal: the type of information used to communicate has to be different in order for it to be information. A “complete description of the brain” is no description if a brain is simply working, it has to be translated into something else so that an association can be made - such is the mechanism of the brain itself e.g. the association of one group of neurons with another through electro-chemical stimulation in order for brain activity to occur at all. I can’t simply present “mind” and expect information to happen, it is required - through language - for a different type of substance to be invoked to be associated with mind such that the mind can understand it. This manifests in sensory creations such as “the brain” that works in this very convenient way to represent the mind, within the mind, so that the mind can think it has understood something new. It would never have been able to do this without the brain in this way, not because the brain is of a more fundamental substance.

How’s that for hocus pocus?

The problem is that matter is assumed to be unconsious in materialism.

I belief it is not an assumption at all.
It is just that there is no proof matter can be conscious as generally defined.
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conscious

One point is this;
Being conscious is a very obvious fact [say 95/100].

But what is ‘matter’ is merely a scientific fact which in a way is a 80/100 matter of fact. Note scientific facts are merely polished-conjectures [Karl Popper].

The raising of a ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is problem of conflating and equivocating of different perspectives and a linguistic issue.

I believed it would be more wiser to forget with the Hard Problem of Consciousness since this is an impossibility. That is, it is not possible for humanity to construct a normal biological human nor repeat the 2 billion evolutionary process to enable the emergent of humans as they are today.

Rather humanity can replicate ‘consciouness’ in robots to as close as possible to that of human consciousness. Humanity already doing that at present and progressing steadily.

Matter is believed to blindly follow laws of nature. There was no hard problem of consciousness if matter was conscious since brain could perform all its function in absence of consciousness depending on how it is structured. Like a robot we can unconsciously perform many tasks at once. So the questions are what is the use of consciousness and how matter becomes conscious otherwise the robots we make will be unconscious.

Matter do not follow laws of nature blindly.

Consciousness is an emergent that can be justified and verified as a fact.
Matter is also an emergent spontaneously with the rest of reality as it is.
The laws of nature are realized by consciousness in tandem with matter.
The laws of nature do not pre-exist by itself but is conditioned with consciousness, i.e.
if no consciousness, then no laws of nature. Kant had argued for this.

It is not that matter is conscious.
The fact is consciousness co-exists with and is an emergent with matter and vice-versa, as in the dynamics of Yin-Yang.

The purpose of an evolving higher consciousness in humans is to enable the human species to deal with greater threats [catastrophe, epidemic, global, galatical] to the human species.
With a greater and higher consciousness humanity has the potential to survive the inevitable death of Earth via the possibility of living in other planets, thus our venture into space explorations which is only possible with increasing higher consciousness.
I believe this is the critical reason for why there is an evolution and progress of consciousness within humanity.

Do you have an example of where it does not? Is there matter in your body or your body as a whole that is not utterly determined by the laws of nature?

It can be justified, but so can most propositions. But that it is emergent is merely a hypothesis.

In tandem with matter? So consciousness is not matter?

Kant was also a theist.

And you are missing his point completely. Since matter will do what it does, following deterministic chains of action, there is no need for consciousness. The body would react as the body reacts. There is a witness, an experiencing, but bodies could do with out it.

So nature is teleological?

So you’re not Darwinian.

So you mean that a falling apple is conscious. How about a tree? What if you cut a branch of tree?

It is ridiculous to equate to ‘matter following laws of nature blindly’ as if like some ignorant person following man-made laws/rules blindly.

As Kant had argued, whatever is the laws of nature are finalized by humans based on human observations and experiences of consistent events, thus man-made and driven by human consciousness.

Nope, it is not a hypothesis.
Human consciousness and its range of awareness can be easily proven.

The theory is, DNA wise there will be an emergence of a range of human consciousness over their lifetime which can be easily proven within ALL humans [with rare exceptions].

We know for sure human consciousness emerges but to trace its origin is impossible.

Consciousness is a mental state, it is not matter as defined via Physics.

Irrelevant.

If you are not conscious, how can you express the above?
Thus reality-as-it-is in relation to human beings is conditioned upon human consciousness, this is an undeniable fact.

There is witnessing and experiencing via an emerging consciousness.
There is a range of experiencer but there is no ultimate experiencer without human consciousness.

Nature is not teleological in the sense of an ultimate purpose - whatever that is.

There is no predetermined destiny that the Earth will be hit by a large rogue asteriod or meteorite that could split the Earth into billion of pieces. The increasing progressive evolution of consciousness within humans is merely to give it a chance to survive ever greater threats that are to be known in time.

Irrelevant to the point.
I agree with Darwin’s theory of evolution.

You missed my point.

In the general context of ‘conscious’ the default is always with reference to human consciousness.
Non-human animals has their own consciousness [relative to their evolution hierarchy] which is definitely not equivalent to that of humans.
Generally, non-living things which are not animals are not associated with ‘consciousness’ i.e. a apple, tree, do not have consciousness [as generally defined].

Why human is so fundamental in your world view?

The point is humans are part and parcel of reality-as-it-is such that we cannot extricate the human factor from reality and still claimed it is reality-as-it-is.

Say
Reality-as-it-is is 100%
Reality-as-it-is = X% [others] + Y[human factor]% = 100%.
If you take away the human factor from reality-as-it-is, then what you have is an incomplete reality.

Though it is an incomplete reality, theists claimed such a reality is God - the ultimate being.
Whilst God will provide psychological comfort to the majority, the downside is the terrible evil and violent acts committed in the name of God, especially in Islam’s case. One of the type of terrible evil among others is this evident stats;
thereligionofpeace.com/TROP.jpg
One point to note, whatever is attributable to a God - the all powerful - is beyond human control and management. If God said so, then believers must do it without question.

On the other hand, when we recognized and understand the fact that reality-as-it-is comprised the human factor as fundamental and part & parcel of reality, then we have some degree of control over reality.

Note it is not my view, but the Eastern religions, like Buddhism, and other non-theistic spirituality has been adopting such a perspective since thousands of years ago.

But there was no human some millions years ago.

The above is true but only true as conditioned by us being humans. There is no other way but to face this condition.

How can you realized the above statement without being human?
Note the terms ‘human’ ‘millions’ ‘years’ ‘ago’ are only valid concepts because human exist.

There is no way you can prove anything then, i.e. ‘some millions years ago’.
The only way the above statement made sense is via human concepts, cognition and realization. Kant provided the philosophical justification for this point.

It is natural and tempting to reify nothingness, but
the reality is, as Wittgenstein stated,
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”.

Whenever humans take it too seriously and attempt to speak of and reify the ‘whereof one cannot speak’ there is an accompaniment of a huge potential liability via theism. Note the terrible evil and violent acts arising from theism when theists reify the unspeakable nothing which is fundamental driven by an impulse from an existential psychological crisis.

Btw, what do you have to lose if you were to shut up and don’t even think about “it” [impulse driven thought] at all. Like the fact that one must breath no matter how, most people cannot shut up about "it’ i.e. the ultimate being aka God, Absolute, etc.

The point is, those with weaker spirituality will not be able to modulate their reificating impulse but will be compelled to end up speaking of [grasping at] some kind of God or the likes [Being, Absolute, Oneness, etc] so that their unease will be soothed.
There is a correlation between this impulse to reify nothingness with the sensitive desperate need to breath when the breath is stop for a certain period.

See:
The Desperate Need to Breath and Spirituality
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=194655

Things can exist objectively without a need for an intelligent agent who can conceptual them.

The above is a mere statement which anyone can think of and make.
How can you EVER justify the above without human subjects being part and parcel in arriving at the above statement.
I have argued, how you arrive at the above proposition is due to psychological impulses within the self.

Btw, objectivity is inter-subjectivity via implicit and explicit consensus.
Thus objectivity falls back on the human subjects factor.
Note objectivity does not arise from merely conceptual abilities but rather comprised the whole evolutionary process, sense experiences, sensibility, intellect, conceptual, reasoning, etc that enable reality-as-it-is to emerge.

The most objective knowledge on hand is scientific knowledge which is based on inter-subjective consensus, i.e. within the scientific community and that the non-scientists has faith in the scientific framework and system’s reliability and credibility.

I meant to ask you about this, so I’m glad you brought it up. I would say here that, for the only system where I can observe both inner and outer perspectives, I must conclude that functional processes and awareness are inextricable from each other. I think it’s reasonable to infer from that that other systems with substantively similar functional processes have substantively similar awareness inextricable from them as well.

This gets a bit question-begging from here, because I’m going to say that nothing that appears conscious can not be conscious (i.e. I reject philosophical zombies as a coherent concept), but then any possible counter-example can be rejected because I’ll just say, yep, that’s conscious too, or, No, that doesn’t really look conscious. But I don’t see a coherent position that describes consciousness in a way that permits us to conclude that dogs or great apes are conscious (if perhaps in a limited sense), but doesn’t allow us to conclude that AlphaGo is conscious in a similar limited sense.

You say later that, “Since matter will do what it does, following deterministic chains of action, there is no need for consciousness.” Let me give an analogy that will clarify my position, if not compel its acceptance: suppose we have a collection of black pixels on an otherwise white screen, at the points

(1,1),(1,2),(1,3),…,(1,10);
(2,1)(3,1),(4,1),…,(10,1);
(10,2),(10,3),(10,4),…,(10,10); and
(2,10),(3,10),(4,10),…,(9,10).

Looking at these pixels, we would be tempted to call what we see a square. What stops us from saying that, “there is no need for [the square]”? That claim seems to miss the mark; the square isn’t a separate thing that does something with the pixels, it’s just a different way of describing the same thing. That’s how I read claims about there not being a need for consciousness: it’s not about need, it’s that consciousness is a valid alternative description of the same thing as we’re describing when we talk about neurons and networks etc.

I don’t think just any causation suffices, nor that that’s implied by my argument. There’s a real difference between the causal processes at work in a reef and the causal processes at work in a brain. Put briefly, I would say that the causal connection that must exist for consciousness is for patterns in one causal system to be atomic causes in another causal system, e.g. one part of the brain reacts not to the firing of any specific neuron, but to certain patterns of neural firing within a system.

I’m open to the idea of a reef or an ant hill or an economy having some limited form of consciousness, but many of the links in these systems aren’t the kind of self-observation I intend. When a person recognizes a shape or texture, one part of the brain is identifying patterns in visual stimuli, and another part of the brain is identifying the identification of patterns.

When AlphaGo recognizes and reacts to shapes formed by pieces on a go board, it’s reacting to things that don’t exist in the rules and aren’t true elements of the game. Part of the system is taking information about the location of the pieces and spitting out a shape it identifies, and another part is taking that shape as its input and spitting out an estimated score, and another part is taking those estimated scores and spitting out the best move. These layered systems are reacting to abstractions in lower levels of the system. That’s a different kind of causality than e.g. fish A population goes down, fish B population goes up. So too with why the skin is the boundary of the organism: the relevant types of causal chains happen within the organism (though, I am sympathetic to Dennett’s position that there is some arbitrariness to the boundary, and also that there may be multiple experiencers within a single brain).

By this line of reasoning, asking why we don’t have a zombie universe seems to me a bit like asking why causality exists at all, or why there’s something as opposed to nothing. If that’s the only sense in which consciousness is a hard problem, I’m satisfied. If we can explain consciousness so that we expect it to arise from certain types of causal chains, and that expectation is borne out by creating causal chains of the relevant type and getting consciousness-like behavior, then the hard problem is of existence and not of consciousness.

Part of my problem with this framing is it seems impervious to evidence. When I deal with other things that have brains, I can see pretty clearly that they don’t always have perfect information about what’s going on in their mind. People misunderstand their own motivations and provably confabulate explanations. I have pretty good reason to believe I’m just your average brain-having-thing, and so I should similarly expect that my self-information is imperfect.

If instead we start from the position that our self-information is perfect, then we either have to reject these observations, or conclude that I’m not your average brain-having-thing. But because I can act on my own brain, I can directly experience both my own failures of introspection, and the mental consequences of physically altering my brain (e.g. lobotomy if we want to be thorough, but a beer will do).

I think we have no choice but to understand ‘space’ from within the matrix, i.e. when I say ‘space’ or think about the concept of ‘space’, I’m thinking about the thing-for-which-‘space’-is-a-placeholder. I’m over here and you’re over there in a way that is meaningful and intelligible in the only way that something can be meaningful and intelligible. Furthermore, when we do things like say “‘Air’ is only a placeholder”, we’re really borrowing the same kind of meaning and intelligibility and saying “consider that ‘me’ and ‘air’ bear the same relationship as the equation y=x+2 and the variable x”, all of which are things just like “air” and “space” and what have you.

I am not sure I follow this part of your argument, and I’m also not sure how far apart our positions are. It seems like we’re both OK saying that brain and mind are the same thing, and you’re just calling that thing mind and I’m just calling it brain, or something like that. Is that what’s happening? Because you’re right that the brain isn’t a more fundamental substance than the mind, any more than the pixels are a more fundamental substance than the square. What you say in the last paragraph of your post seems similar to what I say in the paragraph above: what matters are the relationships between the concepts, the concepts by themselves don’t do any work, but provided we have a set of concepts with certain relationships between them, consciousness can be ‘explained’ by relation to non-mind concepts.

I don’t think that’s so. Every materialist I’m aware of would say that certain matter is conscious (i.e. the human brain).

And some kinds of panpsychism are arguably materialist, at least in the sense that the fully-functioning human mind is explained in terms of its constituent atoms.

Karpel Tunnel made a point I would like to echo: conscious did not evolve to solve future problems, it evolved because conscious beings were able to solve the past problem of reproducing. It is always possible that an adaptation that was useful for previous evolutionary contexts becomes maladaptive when the context changes.

Not quite.

If we look at living things [as with humans] in nature, there is an underlying trend of improvements in their adaption of threats, etc.
Human beings are endowed with an inherent faculty to improve, think, reason, speculate, and project into the future.

From our experiences, humans are able to predict the future and the potential threats that the human species could be exterminated from various causes.
Such ability of thinking ahead and planning drive the evolution of our consciousness.
Our drive to explore the furthest possible realm of outer space also have the secondary effects of driving technology further.
The development and advances in war in relation to preservation of the group also help to advance human consciousness.

Thus I do not believe human consciousness have evolved because humanity has been able to solve the problems of reproducing.
Human consciousness is evolving continually because humans has an inherent faculty to improve, think, reason, speculate, and project into the future. Thus the more conscious we are, we are more conscious of greater threats to the human species which in turn drive greater consciousness and so on.

In the past, humans awareness of threats were confined to whatever was happening within their neighborhood, but as human gather more experiences and knowledge, i.e. their awareness of threats extended greater till now we are worried if a large enough rogue asteroid appearing from nowhere and heading toward earth. In view of such a potential threats, the average human has to increase its consciousness to meet and deal with a such greater threats.
Besides global and galactical threats there are other serious threats to the human species which would drive humanity toward higher consciousness.
Solving the reproducing capability of humans is not a significant factor.

I found this hard to understand. I’ll work from my sense of what it means, but we may need to go back and clarify.

Humans, especially in science, have decided on a particular set of things that have consciousness. Until the 60s and 70s one could not even, professionally, grant animals consciousness. Before this transition we drew conclusions about what must be the case for something to be conscious and we were the only thing considered conscious. After the set expanded, we drew slightly broader conclusions about what must be the qualities of something to be conscious. A set of functions. We did not discover consciousness or a consciousness meter.

It seems to me any conclusions drawn about how function relates to interiority are speculative in the extreme. We can test functions, so we say those functions lead to consciousness. We can test this by hitting people over the head and the like, but this may only be testing memory and other functions, not bare consciousness.

My robot hoover would then be conscious. This is not a destroying counterexample, but I just want to make sure you are granting what I think is entailed.

It seems like you have rejected it, but not on grounds of coherence, but via definition.

OK. Why would not any ecosytem or complex metabolism-like thing not be considered conscious?

It’s because consciousness is an utterly different category from non-experiencing matter. I can get a panpsychism as coherent. I just see nothing that addresses why this other category arises. IOW a square and those pixels are two ways of describing visual qualities. What an outsider will experience.

Consciousness is not just that, it is about what is experienced by the thing.

It’s fine to propose a Turing test as a way for us to achieve consensus on what likely experiences. But that’s a practical solution to developing consensus. It’s no help in determining how something occurs. It cannot be part of the scientific explanation of the ‘how consciousness arises.’

IN a sense what I see you saying is ‘Let’s forget about the hard problem’.

Fine, that might be a good working proposal. But it is not showing that the hard problem is easy. It is not answering the hard question the hard problem proposes. It is saying it doesn’t matter. Fine. Though for those who are interesting in the how of how does consciousness arise in otherwise dead matter, you haven’t eliminated the hard problem.

It’s hard for me to imagine this isn’t true in a reef ecosystem. Reactions to salination, presense of light, profusion of diatoms from family X. These things affect the digestive system of fish and mollusks, these in turn affecting water temp, if slightly, poop from the fish changing the underwater flora, the flora changing the lighting, causes moving in and out of organisms to the water, into neural matter and out of neural matter, creating patterns of metbolism and homeostasis over long periods of time, often in cycles.

There is no one to interview and it is hard to text a reef for consciousness.

Why limited? What does that mean? I think function and consciousness are being conflated again.

Perhaps dogs have vastly more consciousness than us - if we suddnely experienced life as a dog we would marvel at the tiny pinprick of consciousness we had. They just have less cognitive functions.

Consciousness to me is the experiencing.

And the reef responds to all sorts of patterns.

I think there would be analogies in the reef to different levels of causality.

Though we need to know why this is not just a bare assertion. Suddenly impacting molecules generate awareness.

A panpsychist can say this, but not someone who thinks ‘here is consciousness, but not there.’ Causation runs through the whole universe. Something runs through the whole universe with nothing nowhere to be found. You are positing that X leads to consciousness. Fine. Posit that, but unlike causation and existence, you are saying something specific about it, but not justifying it. And it needs a justification because you limit it to specific places.

If someone says, causality is not present at X, one must say why it is not.

You state that a specific kind of complexity is the cause. But that’s a statement.

I think there are two problems with this.

  1. it needs more justification and 2) we have a bias in science towards seeing things that first are us only, then later are like us as having consciousness. The set of what is conscious has been expanding and now many scientists are starting to think it makes sense to grant plants consciousness. In a situation where we have an expanding set and no way to measure consiousness directly - and can only infer through reports by individuals or measuring of functions - I think we are merely speculating. And when we measure functions, we bring our bias to the table.

We need to be able to demonstrate our set is THE set before when can then draw conclusions from that set.
And even when we are sure of the set, we are only saying correlation. We haven’t described the mechanism.