The Hard Problem of Consciousness

I won’t spam you or share your email address with anyone.

This is a lecture video about "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience" by David Chalmers. In this 2002 article from Scientific American, Chalmers distinguishes the easy problems of consciousness from what he calls the hard problem of consciousness. He explains how there are three broad responses to the hard problem (optimistic reductionism, mysterianism, and dualism, though he does not use the term "dualism"), and how all current neuropsychological research only attempts to solve the easy problems. There is also discussion of potential psychophysical laws. This is part of an introductory philosophy course.

[atheistlinguist]

Who else thinks a better name for "mysterianism" might be "pessimistic reductionism"?

[BugRib]

Consciousness is mysterious and all, sure. But how you're able to write backwards from your perspective is what really blows my mind!

[elgar]

Why questions aren't hard problems. They're not problems at all. Consciousness is an emergent property of our brain AND it is one that has evolutionary advantage.

It is zero surprise to me to learn that our operating state was itself something the brain started monitoring. I am my brain. I experience what it is doing. That's it.

Everyone is making this way more complicated than it need to be. I suspect born fwd by a religious Instinct that has much skin in this game.

[FarCough]

But if Epiphenomenalism is true, how come we’re able to describe that we’re conscious? If consciousness has no way of interacting with your physical brain, why does your physical brain know that you are conscious? How is it able to contemplate consciousness and talk about it with others when, if epiphenomenalism is to be believed, the physical brain itself does not experience or even know it is conscious. To experience is to interact, for us to know the existence of anything we must be able to interact in any way with it, including conscious. If consciousness really was a byproduct that never interacted with the physical world, we’d still feel stuff but the brain would never have a reason to talk about consciousness. You may say that it’s a coincidence that the physical brain believes itself to be conscious but it’s a very unlikely coincidenceness. The idea of consciousness occurring to an unconscious brain would be like the colour red occurring to a brain that can’t process red. And how is it able to accurately talk about consciousness? As if it’s experienced it itself.

[Fuar]

I think that trying to solve the hard problem gives rise to the hard problem. We're trying to look for reasons why and how consciousness emerges. But the why and how ARE physical, objective reasons for something which clearly is not physical.

Consciousness is to the brain what a story is to a book. Or a law is to a piece of legislation (or legal document). The story itself is not physical but the book contains physical elements that describe it and express it. But how does the stuff of the book impact the story? It doesn't. The story is independent of the book. The book is only a holder/container for the story. And there can be multiple copies of books which project the story. The story itself exists on it's own. It is a an abstract conceptual thing. Only when matter comes to influence and interact with the story can it be experienced.

[michaeljames]

Ah! Daniel Dennett; aman unafraid to ask the truly hard questions.. and then answer a much simpler, adjacent question.

[Prmck]

I deeply enjoy your presentations! Thank you for explaining so thoroughly and, when possible, visually, these notoriously difficult topics!

[moodyrick]

*_You Are Your Brain & Your Brain Is You_** ;*
We have yet to find evidence that it's possible, for a _"conscience thinking mind"_ to exist, without a _"living functioning brain"._
If your memories & personality are separate from your brain, _(in a soul), _ then *they would not be effected by damage to the brain.* _(but they are)_
Even though we don't know the exact process by which consciousness arises, it is still _undeniable that it is a brain process that can't occur, separate from the brain._

[alaor]

I do agree with Chalmers that consciousness seems to be a property of reality. But I would not call that view dualism and say that it’s completely separate of the physical world, because we have to remember that changes in the physical world, like the touch of the molecules of ice in the molecules of my hands, do affect my conscious state by creating a subject feeling of cold, for example. So there’s has to be a connection between conscious and the physical world. They must be, at the end, all properties of a single and connected reality.

[nmemonicporsche]

“All is mind” - The Kybalion. I.e. monism

[numericalcode]

A neurobiologist who lives in southern California...but whatever. He won the Nobel prize for the structure of DNA.

[dorothysatterfield]

Isn't there another option besides physicalism and dualism? What about idealism — the theory that consciousness is fundamental and physical bodies are illusory? I'm thinking of the Analytic Idealism proposed by, for example, Bernardo Kastrup.

[msimp]

Jeffrey doesn’t venture into the realm of Idealism because he would probably endanger his professorship for doing so, given the paradigmatic stranglehold of scientific materialism on the dogmatic foundational presumptions that are enforced in our institutions of higher learning—but the fact is there is important work being done that this lecture fails to consider.

The deeply flawed presumption that there is such a thing as an objective observer is the most glaring example of such dogma. Science is based on that presumption. It is a 3rd person illusion that presumes that there is a “me” that can find out about “it” without “it” being affected by “me”. even though the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to this notion. Nobody ever proved Berkeley wrong, because you can’t within the auspices of 3rd person science and that, by Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle anyway, means that it isn’t science. Fair enough, but that doesn’t mean what he said wasn’t true that if nobody heard the tree fall, it didn’t make a sound.

Just because Einstein was bothered by the idea that if nobody is looking at the moon, it does not exist doesn’t mean he was right. He was also very bothered by “spooky action at a distance” and went to his grave not buying it. Then John Bell came along.

It might very well be that the Advaitists were correct all along and that existence and consciousness are the same thing, and that it is also Blissful! This is in fact provable via 1st person Science, so-called by the Advaitists, of course you would have to actually perform the experimentation, which is subjective and contemplative, but this is anathema to 3rd person scientists because it violates their fundamental methodology.

[ralphclark]

The philosophical reasoning presented by the speaker is flawed in the way he leads us back to dualism. There is only a need to explain consciousness as a separate but necessary adjunct to physics if it manifests downward causation, and that is not merely unproven, but as our AI implementations being increasingly humanlike it must seem more and more indefensible as a claim.

In reality, it is not possible for any person A to prove their consciousness to person B. Ergo it has no physical existence at all. It exists only as a complex dynamic abstraction (like a song or a poem) made out of the interactions of lower level abstractions (like memories beliefs and ideas). So it’s a purely informational thing.

The end of this chain of reasoning is that conscious experience is really just an informational shadow of some kinds of physical data processing system that are constructed to maintain an awareness of themselves. Being an abstraction, that shadow doesn’t really exist in the real world at all, and it doesn’t affect anything that does, so there’s no need to amend or supplement physics.

[sibanbgd]

Alas, what about idealism among optimistic reductivism and dualism

[jongomm]

Consciousness has replaced heaven, or the soul. It's just "god of the gaps" stuff. Oooh a vivid blue! There are people in the world so highly trained in recognizing exact colours, they can identify a colour without context, within incredibly narrow bands of accuracy. THAT is a deep experience of colour. The reason "blueishness" is so inexplicable to some, is not that it's oh so vivid, it's that's it's oh so vague. Imagine your favourite photo of your favourite person. Is your imaginary version as clear as if you looked at the photo? No. So why is the vague imagined experience deemed "hard" and special, but the much clearer physical experience deemed "easy" and mundane? There's still no person there, you know it's only a photo. In effect, you're imagining the person both times.

Consciousness is just a word for how we describe the experience of mental interpretation of physical things. How thoughts make us feel. It's complex and vague and unique to every person. But it's not supernatural. It's natural.

I love your videos dude. This one even inspired a rant! Please make more.

[-ml]

Thank you so much. I really like how you explain things

[IndoonaOceans]

writing on glass is brilliant as it stops what tecahers always did at school - turning their back on you when they wrote on the board behind

[alanG]

Dualism is in danger of becoming a bit like creationism. "You can't explain this, therefore God/Spirit.". We have really only had the tools needed to explore the brain for the last 20-30 years so the first steps are to get a clear understanding of the basics, which is ongoing. The "hard" problem may not be so hard, once that is understood.
BTW No-one has ever actually found this other "stuff" of consciousness. That is a problem, perhaps philosophers could tell us where and how to look? Also why is it always associated with bodies?

[starfishsystems]

As a cognitive scientist, I find myself squarely in the camp which finds the "hard problem" argument unconvincing.

The argument is unconvincing for the same reason that many otherwise interesting discussions of consciousness also end up going in circles. We can't seem to reach an agreement on what consciousness is, and as a result many approaches conflate properties of consciousness with properties which are not conscious at all. Confusion is inevitable.

Perhaps then it would be useful to begin by thinking about what consciousness ISN'T. I propose that it isn't part of the spectrum of cognitive processing that ranges from the simplest responses of unicellular life to its environment at one end of the spectrum, and goes on to increasingly elaborate neuroanatomical function at the other end.

Spiders, fish, mice, mammals: they and we are all functioning in essentially the same way, responding to internal signals that are representations of our environment. What is it "like" to respond in this way? Ask your fingertip when it touches a hot surface. It's a meaningless question. A purely neuroanatomical description will suffice. We don't suppose that there is some homunculus down there at that level of expression, an "experiencer" capable of greater things but fated to the menial toil of relaying the information on to the rest of the organism. There is, as far as we know scientifically, absolutely no evidence of such an awareness at this level. Nor is it needed in any way.

When we come to it, consciousness is a very minor recent cognitive feature which seems to manifest for sure in only one species on this entire planet, and arguably not often even then.

We may persuade ourselves that most of our cognitive activities are conscious, but nothing could be further from the truth. Even as I'm writing this, almost all of what I'm doing is not being consciously chosen. If you were to hide the keyboard from me, for example, I could probably only locate half of the keys by a conscious exercise of memory, yet my fingers find the positions accurately and without any deliberate assembly of motions. Even my casual intention to type "motions" produced an entire unconscious cascade of appropriate neural activity. Most of my ability to assemble ideas into plausible sequences of inference has thorough long practice become unconscious. The initial practice was indeed deliberate and conscious, but eventually I no longer need to focus my attention on it. I've trained my unconscious mind to do the work.

And my unconscious mind has no idea what it's "like" to be an unconscious mind. This is not a hard problem. There's no philosophical conundrum to it. It is undoubtedly a process that runs in human neuroanatomy.

The thin layer that I have of introspection and theory of mind and ability to frame abstract propositions and arguments, well, it's half unconscious also. Still, I can knowingly access and manipulate scraps of it, which is amazing, and I can knowingly refuse to do so, which is equally amazing. However, I don't propose that I could recognize what makes this sort of process neurologically distinct from an unconscious process of comparable complexity. Likewise, I wouldn't expect to look at the zeroes and ones inside a computer and be able to infer what processes might be taking place there.

It's very cool that we can think about thinking. That requires some capacity for symbolic abstraction, which I strongly suspect requires language - and not just the literal representations of a language such as arithmetic but of a higher order equivalent to algebra.

Several species can perform simple arithmetic tasks such as detecting differences between small integer sums. Solving an algebraic equation calls for manipulating abstract symbols whose meaning has yet to be determined. And this degree of cognitive ability seems essential before we can think about abstractions such as thinkers, thoughts, possibilities, impossibilities, and so on.

Even then, all this could and often does proceed unconsciously. It took the course of most of human evolution to achieve this much. I can solve simple integrals in my sleep, and compose music, for example. Even, once in a rare while, I'll have a dream in which I wonder whether I'm dreaming, and carry on regardless.

I can't exactly tell you what this skilful dreaming is "like, " though I can tell you what it's like to awaken with a memory of it. There is a homunculus, and it's me, and it seems to tangibly and smoothly emerge from these other, distinctly unconscious, capabilities as well as reaching down into them a short distance.

How is this sort of emergence a "hard" problem? It's just one thin layer of capability. Don't conflate it with all of cognition, because then you'll be obliged to account for all of cognition as if it were conscious, and that sort of overreach is entirely unjustified. It's how we get ridiculous claims such as "the universe must be conscious" or "consciousness requires a quantum substrate."