Defending the Hard Problem

Response to Lordimmolation on the hard problem of consciousness.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• hard
• problem
• consciousness
• chalmers
• brain
• weird
• autocerebrescope

[otakurocklee]

Hi SpiritualAtheist. Great video and thought experiment. What you've pointed out in this video is so ridiculously obvious and true... I find it so strange that some philosophers so strongly claim that an experience is "equivalent" to a brain state...

[SpiritualAtheist]

otakurocklee - Thanks for getting this. My whole point was to simply point out the paradox so as to demonstrate that something needs to be explained. If people don't acknowledge the paradox then they won't think anything needs to be explained.

[EverettsVLOG]

im the type of person you are referring to in the end of this vid, i tend to treat 'emergence' as an empirical fact; i think of conscious experience as 'caused' by neural relationships, much like electromagnetic fields are 'caused' by moving charges... looking forward to your next vid

[SpiritualAtheist]

Hey Everett - Thanks for watching. I think there are a lot of you out there (emergence = empirical fact). And I think it makes perfect sense to view consciousness as an emergent property of brain functions just as wetness is an emergent property of zillions of h2o molecules. I will however be arguing against this - sort of. Stay tuned.

[2bsirius]

It is great to hear from you again. I've missed listening to your deep and intellectual think-aloud monologues. Great stuff!

[SpiritualAtheist]

2b - Thanks! I hope to make more videos here in the near future. I've got a lot of weird ideas I've just got to get out of me.

[0ThouArtThat0]

argh, I gave you three instead of five stars accidentally! I enjoyed being a part of your experiment, and I agree that the hard problem is one that cannot be ignored or dismissed.

[petestrat07]

Being a stand up guy. I'd probably want to put your balls in the blender.

Jokes aside, yes there is a hard problem of consciousness that cannot be explained by solving the easy problem.

[Corestore16]

@earth5worker I TOTALLY know what you mean. This question bugs me so much. Why is my consciousness attached to this body and not someone elses?? Very weird

[belly0like0buddha]

I agree that there's a hard problem of consciousness but I think it lies in both overcoming the neural signal to qualia 'language barrier' (AND of course resolving the paradox how how two languages of this sort can exist in the same universe.)

[belly0like0buddha]

I don't think a blender is to a car what a neural correlate is to its corresponding conscious state; a blender and a car may both be made from plastics and metals, but the compositions of these things have no correspondence to one another. A better analogy I believe would be to say that a neural correlate of conscious is to its corresponding conscious state as a computer code is to that of which it produces on the screen.

[Gnomefro]

I find your argument a bit like arguing that a jpeg image of a car is the same thing as a car, and then being confused about the fact that its highly compressed binary format seems, at a glance, to be unrelated to the car in every conceivable way. Yet, properly interpreted, their relationships are clear.

(The materialistic solution to experience would likely be the virtual machine paradigm anyway. "You" are a recursive reality model living in a virtual machine running on wetware.(Matrix))

[Gnomefro]

Hm, I think there's a lot of confusion in this argument. The blender and the brain are not the same thing. What's stored in the brain is a partial model of the blender.

They may look different to an observer, sure, but the only reason for this would be that the observer's visualization software did in fact not interpret the model data the same way the brain does when it causes subjective experience.

[Promatheos]

What you're referring to as the "I" or the "inner you" is not a separate thing from your physical body that could have arisen in any other body. We can't think of the human body as merely a car that the ego drives.

This is a ridiculous, but powerful illusion. Any serious practitioner of meditation would attest to this.

[earth5worker]

Fascinating. What mechanism determined that I (the inner me) would be associated with my particular physical body. Of the billions of people on the earth today I'm on the inside of one of them. But what determined that I would be on the inside of this specific body? Why did I not develop, for example, within my identical twin's body (if I had a twin) and he in mine? If my parents had not had me, would I have been manifested in some other body? Or perhaps not at all? Why/How?