The Hard Problem of Consciousness Explained

[NeoShaman]

The order is reverse. It's the other way around. We do not start with physical world, but the mental one. So the question is now how physical world becomes conscious, but how consciousness creates construct of physical world.

[mYcRiSpDiScK]

I find myself pondering this when I'm trying to think my way out of a problem that comes from my own thinking. I'm entangled in the problem which makes the solution near impossible to derive.

[chromakey]

The hard problem is not with consciousness, consciousness is the most immediate of anything.
Matter on the other hand, in which you have a story in your mind on how it creates you being aware of it (consciousness) is the problem.
The more you investigate matter, the more it is simply divided into parts, everything conditional to something else, changing and dependent.
=The hard problem of matter

[kensurrency]

The answer is easy. Consciousness gives rise to physical reality, not the other way around as we are told to believe. How do we prove this? I don’t know. Maybe we can’t. That’s why we can argue about it indefinitely.

[ricliu]

Poor explanation! You just repeated the same question without defining an answer ...

[rokitman]

It's beyond amazing how God built us I will Love Him forever
<><

[johnhiggins]

We are more than the sum of our parts.

[Madoc_EU]

Here is an interesting thought experiment: Imagine that you have a fully artificially intelligent robot before you. Imagine the robot has some very elaborate artificial cognition going on within it. And of course, the robot is truthful to you, it considers your statements very deeply, and it won't lie. In this thought experiment, we simply assume that the robot doesn't have subjective experiencing going on, it's basically a philosophical zombie. It's a thought experiment, so we are allowed to make this assumption, which would be untestable and possibly un-knowable in real life.

Now you want to explain to the robot what the difference is between you and it, in such a way that the robot can truthfully acknowledge its lack of subjective experiencing. How do you do that? What do you tell the robot?

I consistently find that whatever I tell the robot about my subjective experiencing, whatever I say, as long as it is understandable and not super vague, the robot would truthfully claim that it has it too.

For example, I might say that my immediate experiencing feels holistic, a locus of consciousness, rather than a set of separate processes.

Now, the robot, if it is truly intelligent, would have some sort of top-level mind state within its program flow as well. Something analogous to our overall conscious state of mind. However the artificial brain of the robot works, it must be comprised of functional units of some kind. Be it simulated neurons or something else. Those functional units cannot *all* process *all* of the data that the robot is working with at the same time. There must be some inner reduction of complexity going on with its current working data. We can say that even without knowing how exactly its programming works.

Therefore, the robot will very likely have some inner model of an overall state of its cognition that is very reduced in complexity. This is where the top-level decisions and recognitions are being made. They then trickle down into more detailed and focused sub-systems.

So given what I said about how my consciousness feels holistic, one locus, the robot could find its own computational processes similar in organization. Therefore, it could truthfully say that it has this too.

I find it impossible to find anything that I could tell the robot that would fully convince it that it doesn't have what I call subjective experiencing. Of course, I could just tell the robot: "You don't have subjective experiencing. Just believe me, this is a command." -- But that's not the point here. We want to say something to the robot that the robot can then compare to its own artificial mental processes and find that it doesn't have that.

I think it's impossible. This thought experiment shows to me that subjective experiencing is not only hard to put into words, but utterly impossible to put into words. It is simply not graspable to the intellectual mind.

This gives me even more appreciation for how miraculous the occurrence of subjective experiencing seems to me. From the view of objective science, subjective experiencing seems to be what scientists call a "brute fact". We cannot reduce it to anything else, even though we can say that it is clearly connected to other things, like the brain.

[michaelleahcim]

Free will can exist without understanding the mechanisms of consciousness. Why do you think it is relevant? We are free to choose love or fear, courage or cowardice, service to others or service to self. At the same time we don't have free will untill we make the unconscious conscious, for only then are we an undistorted flowing expression of consciousness. Paradoxical

[balkrushnakadam]

It is like a computer creates its image above all binary processing it does in background and make a abstract self out of it.

[alligatorsarecoming]

The hard problem is this: is consciousness an emergent property of the brain, or is the brain akin to a complex filtration system for consciousness?

I lean toward the latter explanation. I think the filtration of consciousness creates something of a mind-body-consciousness complex that we call "I" and "me". This creates the illusion that consciousness is atomized, a necessary illusion because without it, everything would be intermixed, chaos. Consciousness would remain static, everywhere all at once, confused. Consciousness could never experience itself outside of these complexes. It would just be one lump. It has to tie itself to a complex of some sort that seems to operate within a closed system. Id venture to say that other kinds of complexes become possible when we think of consciousness this way, those that dont necessarily consist of a body like the one we have--a material or immaterial (synonymous with mind and body)-consciousness complex--and that not all complexes have boundaries as restrictive as ours. In other words, not all complex systems are as closed as ours. Perhaps some allow for openings such that consciousness can be better perceived as one, depending on the type of intelligent entity filtering it.

I am not an expert. While much about my opinion on this stems from my own process of philosophizing what consciousness might be, i soon realized that many others have come to the same conclusion i did. As stated, then, my opinion is shaped by those of others who gave me some of the words to describe what i was thinking.

[Zayden.Marxist]

Consciousness arises in and through the biological imperative of survival. Antonio Damasio explains this in-depth in many of his books. Remember the brain is embedded in a body, which is embedded in its environment. These connections need to be considered to understand consciousness.

[mattsapero]

Everything is Universal Consciousness and no angry deity trying to guilt trip you is anywhere involved with it. Please learn to meditate and creatively visualize your future into reality. I discovered this on the beach in 94. There’s no reason why you can’t do the same.

[Rabbiton]

Through resonance, the hard wiring is a whole lot of vibrating atoms, how do we tap into it, by resonating on the same level as the 'source' of consciousness? Don't know but a very interesting question.

[agajafarli]

Have Greg Rosenberg on. He has a solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

[the.trollgubbe]

It's a brain process, why overcomplicate it

[Filip-cing]

just like anything else
the biggest question is why we ever came to nonsense of an idea that our experience does NOT come from material processes in our body - what the hell does that even mean ?
non material = random drivel

[polishsandman]

What program do you use for this moving animations? @TheoriesofEverything