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IMO A big problem for hard problem of conciousness is that it can’t be tackled with logic or philosophy or science. Its gotta be experienced first hand. Whatever abstraction that the words conciousness, qualia, soul, or awareness attempts to point to is beyond our ability to fully represent conceptually. Its a first person experiential state. Theres a difference between being and representing. We can easily experience it, but we cannot easily represent its experience conceptually.
Fortunately solving the hard problem is actually quite easy. You take 12g of magic mushrooms and wander into a forest. You have to meditate and expand your “conciousness” to experience new meta cognitive states. This is how you actually grow an understanding even if its hard to describe with words. No technical or philosophy paper could ever hope to encapsulate experience of being. Most academic nerds dont have the guts to take a heroic dose and write a formal report about it after.
The second problem stems back to linguistic representability. Some word-concept pairings are fuzzy constellations of loosely related half meanings instead of precice pinpoint definitions.
For example “what is the nature of a soul” is a meaningless question because the concept of a soul has no stable definition or meaning. Its a roarshack word that reflects your own theological, cultural, and philosophical biases.
Same with conciousness, what does it even mean to be conscious or aware. How do you define these things without assuming them or creating definition loops where conciousness is the soul and the soul is awareness and awareness is consciousness
If your a theologian or a philosopher and you just want to have the umpteenth discussion on the nature of experience that goes nowhere and breaks no new ground that’s fine. For the engineers, scientist , and math nerds we care about deriving useful new questions that actually lead to new places so the soft question is where we apply cognitive work.
If we want to progress the soft question as modern philosophy forward we need to do away with loose nothingburger words that exist to justify their own definition. Ground descriptions in physics and computation and cutting edge mathematics.
"Do continuously iterating biological neural networks have the capability to model a meta-representation of themselves within their activation atlas? What kind of information must go into such an encoding for successful self-modeling representation? (Sentience and self-reflection)
If so, does this self modeling have computational optimization scaling principles and resolution limits based on information-theoretic laws like beckensteins bound and lauderes principle?
(Are there limits to how much a person can know about themselves, or how many total concepts can fit in their head, or how much of a first person experience can be encoded as memory and recalled later tied to things like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem or physical information-theoretic boundaries?)
Are there informational structures encoded into the neural networks activation atlas during sensory input that cannot be represented within subsystems like classical computers or even modern quantum computers due to representation capacity limits for the systems we can create?
(Is qualia a complex process of experiencing the encoding first person perspective input and its too computationally expensive to fully save to memory storage?)
Such bullshit.
" But consciousness is not like this. Knowing everything there is to know about the brain, or any physical system, is not to know everything there is to know about consciousness. Consciousness, then, must not be purely physical."
This was settled at least a century ago If not longer. If the mind was separate from the physical then lobotomies wouldn’t do anything. Mind altering drugs wouldn’t do anything. The physical state of the neurons including electrical potentials and chemical messengers are the components of thought.
There is no debate. Any philosophers arguing against the repeatedable experimental evidence that your mind is your brain and vice versa is bullshitting. It’s not 300BC when it was debatable.
Recognizing that the physical can affect the mental, and vice versa, isn’t really the end of the dualism argument. Dualists have incorporated that simple observation from the beginning.
From your quote, the key word is “purely.” Is consciousness purely physical, or is some other substance involved, that’s the question.
You can take either side of the argument, but physical-mental interactions only suggest that mental phenomena are not purely separate. It does not indicate that there are no non-physical elements of consciousness. In other words, that mental states are purely physical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism
If you want to read through some of the arguments for and against.
If you want to read through some of the arguments for and against.
That there are arguments for dualism isn’t the issue. There are arguments for a flat earth and many followers of that philosophy.
All arguments for dualism are equivalent to “God in the gaps”. That is because perfect understanding hasn’t been achieved, mysticism is possible.
The absurdity of the argument is that it can be applied to every mechanical observation. Take a simple lever. You push on one end and the other end moves. We can describe the forces mathematically. But when performing experiments, observations only approach the mathematics because of infinite external interferences to perfect measurement. This culminates in quantum uncertainty. The argument could be made that because we haven’t measured every atom in every state that we don’t actually understand the motion. The motion could be from some mystic source.
Can you step out of consciousness and prove there’s a reality outside it? Or do you just keep pointing to an extracted brain existing inside consciousness and insist that it somehow proves that matter is prior?
