i’ve been diving deep into the “hard problem of consciousness” lately and i wanted to get some perspectives from this community. as atheists and skeptics, most of us hold a materialist view of the world, right? we assume that everything comes down to physical processes in the brain.
but here’s what bugs me: even if we eventually map every single neuron and chemical reaction, does that actually explain why we have subjective experiences? like, why does “red” feel like “red” and not just a wavelength of light being processed?
david chalmers calls this the gap between the physical brain and “qualia.” do you guys think science will eventually solve this with neurobiology, or is there something fundamentally missing in our current materialist model?
not looking for “soul” talk or anything like that, just curious how you all reconcile the subjective “feeling” of being alive with a purely physicalist worldview.
I doubt it’s something fundamentally missing so much as insufficient data. We often cannot fully explain every aspect of everything and the appropriate response to that is to not to let our imaginations run wild until we have more data. Otherwise it ends up amounting to this:
what explains X and what does not explain X is a matter of opinion
I’m not convinced there is a hard problem of consciousness; other than the problem that people want life to be magical and reality just refuses to obey.
i see your point, but is it really just a matter of ‘missing data’? science is great at collecting data on how things function (the easy problem), but the ‘hard problem’ isn’t about function.
even if we had every single data point about every atom in the brain, we’d still just have a map of matter in motion. there’s a conceptual gap between ‘matter moving’ and ‘feeling like something.’ saying we just need more data sounds a bit like ‘materialism of the gaps’ — assuming a physical answer exists just because we want it to, even when the problem itself isn’t physical.
how can ‘more data’ about objects bridge the gap to subjective experience?
i get why it might look like ‘wanting magic,’ but this isn’t about looking for a supernatural soul or anything like that. david chalmers, who defined the problem, is a naturalist.
the issue isn’t ‘opinion,’ it’s an explanatory gap. science is excellent at explaining functions (inputs, processing, outputs). that’s the ‘easy problem.’ but even if we have a 100% perfect physical description of a brain processing the color blue, that description doesn’t contain the experience of blueness.
it’s not about magic; it’s about logic. how do you get ‘subjective experience’ out of ‘objective matter’? if you say it’s just a matter of opinion what explains what, then we’re basically giving up on the scientific method’s goal of objective explanation, aren’t we?
Aye it wid be braw fir a pint o’ heavy or a hof n a hof n’ a bap eh…(Must be said with paisley or Glasgow intonation)
And to stay on topic, each individual’s brain works in a different way, minor fluctuations in voltage, resistance, damage, temperature all affect perception of the individual. That the majority of dough brains work within the same narrow parameters is what allows the “common” perception of reality.
Yes, I see your thought, individual perception is not reality, really. That is broadly why the Scots “how” is perceived as the English “why” but nowhere else except in some parts of Canada. Why some epileptics can “hear” color and all the other wonderful differences between us as individuals.
It is not a “problem of consciousness” it is a problem of perception never being truly objective, it can be similar, but with the electrically charged dough brains we have they will never perceive even the most mundane things in an identical fashion.
That is NOT what science is. Science is about prediction and testing those predictions. Explanations are just opinions. To me: a probability distribution is a perfectly fine explanation for a phenomenon; while others feel a distribution doesn’t explain anything.
In my experience: a person who doesn’t want to believe X, will continue to claim X isn’t explained (not matter what is produced). The same person who wants to believe Y, will accept just about any explanation offered (no matter how silly).
Consider the hard problem itself: it contains the assumption that nature can’t be explained. So if you define science the way you do; you are defining the hard problem into existence and making it exempt from scientific investigation, right from the start.
fair point on the semantics, but i’m using ‘why’ in a functional sense here.
even if we explain the ‘how’ (the mechanics of neurons), we’re still left with the question: why does this physical process need to be accompanied by a subjective experience at all? a ‘zombie’ brain could theoretically process all that data and trigger the same behaviors without any internal ‘feeling.’
so the ‘why’ is: why is there a subjective ‘plus’ to the physical ‘how’? if the physical mechanism does all the work, why isn’t the universe just full of biological robots (p-zombies) instead of conscious observers?
i see you’re taking an instrumentalist approach to science—basically saying if it predicts, it works, and we don’t need ‘explanations.’ that’s fair for quantum mechanics, but a bit dismissive for philosophy of mind.
science isn’t just about probability distributions; it’s about understanding the nature of reality. when we explain how water boils, we aren’t just giving an ‘opinion,’ we’re describing a physical transition. the ‘hard problem’ isn’t a refusal to believe; it’s pointing out that even with a perfect prediction of brain activity, the ‘feeling’ of being alive remains untouched by the data.
and i’m not making it ‘exempt from investigation.’ on the contrary, identifying the gap is the first step of any investigation. if we pretend the gap doesn’t exist just to protect a specific definition of science, aren’t we the ones being dogmatic? i’m not looking for ‘y’ (magic/religion), i’m just pointing out that ‘x’ (current materialism) hasn’t accounted for the observer yet
i see where you’re coming from, but the analogy with ‘living flesh’ doesn’t quite hold up.
we can explain life through biology and chemistry: metabolism, reproduction, and cell division are all physical functions that we can observe and measure objectively. they are ‘easy problems’ because they describe what matter does.
consciousness is different because it’s not just about what the brain does (processing info, reacting to stimuli), but how it feels from the inside. you can give a complete physical description of a ‘living’ cell without needing to invoke any subjective experience. but you can’t give a complete description of a ‘feeling’ just by pointing at neurons firing.
the ‘special’ thing about consciousness isn’t that it’s magical, it’s that it’s the only phenomenon we know that has a first-person perspective. how do ‘objective’ atoms create a ‘subjective’ point of view? just saying ‘it’s a property of matter in certain configurations’ is a label, not an explanation
Consciousness isn’t materialistic - that is, made of matter. It’s what our brains experience as self-awareness. It’s close to a feeling, but with a bit more depth. Without our brains, consciousness doesn’t exist. In that respect it is special.
However, when people bring up consciousness to support a religious position, what they are really doing is trying to force their opponents to give an explanation for its existence, while they don’t offer one. godidit isn’t an explanation.
You’re asking the wrong question. Subjective experiences are private to the experiencer and can’t be directly studied, so we can’t make direct conclusions about them. I regard perception (via the senses, or via how the mind processes sensory input or its own thoughts) as a filtered lens eliciting certain emotional responses. The mechanics of how that works is pretty well understood, but I don’t see us ever taking some je ne sais quoi like “qualia” and “explaining” it. It goes back to the old saying, “there’s no accounting for taste”. What it is like to experience a color or an odor or some form of intimacy for me, isn’t the same as it is for you, and might indeed be quite different. In fact one of the big surprises for me at least in growing up was in discovering how utterly different other people were from me, almost alien in ways. There is human commonality, but also human diversity. Knowing that this subjective (and not entirely intersubjective) diversity exists explains “qualia” adequately for me. It doesn’t need some eldritch spiritual explanation. It is multiplying entities and complicating matters in ways that don’t clarify.
More generally I think it’s good to learn to sit with uncertainty (or simply not knowing all the answers to everything) when there’s not enough basis to claim to know it. This is not some intolerable tension that must be resolved. It can be allowed to be as it is.
Because for me, it is precisely the latter. I don’t feel red. I use my biological eyes, and process the wavelengths of light bouncing off items that are sent are my visual cortex. What a marvelous system!
Allow me to ponder…
Sight, of course, has evolved independently dozens of times. Which could lead one of wonder if sight, like consciousness, is merely an evolved reaction to environmental factors. A rudimentary life form reacts to its environment. As life becomes more complex, so does its variety and degree of reaction to the environment…from moving away from discomfort all the way to perceiving red and comprehending that the red flowers have tastier nectar.
It’s apparent that I’m no biologist (calling @Calilasseia) but, based on the little I know, it seems like a slam dunk that everything I perceive does indeed come down to a physical process.
And as a personal side note, it sure seems like this notion of qualia is all the rage lately. I’m really weary of it.
Well the work being done by Annaka Harris is possibly the best discovery so far that consciousness is preexisting complexity it does not arise from it like the theist would hope. And humans attach our “feeling” to it reacting to life to consciousness. But reacting isn’t life itself it is internal to the individual
Sorry, but feelings are physical too, we know how they function, we even know why.
You claim that consciousness is some special trait because it creates a first person perspective, but that just begs the question, what’s so special about a first person perspective that a physical brain cant be responsible for it? I see no reason to think is not just like anything other function. Or in this case a combination of functions.
) but, based on the little I know, it seems like a slam dunk that everything I perceive does indeed come down to a physical process.