The Hard Problem of Everything

Science can't fully explain consciousness, but it can't fully explain anything else either.

0:00 - the hard problem of consciousness
3:24 - explanatory projects beyond science
10:34 - constitutive connections
17:08 - escaping the "why?" regress

[marktermotecnica]

are we able to explain anything at all without ending up with an axiom or some sort of a priori foundamental truth? I don't think so. You always hit a wall. The most general explanation would be something like "because the logical structure of reality has to be consistent" but you can keep asking why and you eventually end up with some sort of axiomatic statement.
Any question starting with "why " ends with an axiom. Do you agree?

[Sandvich]

by asking "why?" you assume that there is some correlation, "why?" implies cause and effect

[saddestsisyphus]

Is it weird that I send your videos to my therapist? Haha

I do so because I've encountered similar questions to yours during therapy time, for more than 10 years. They help me to better explain myself.

Thanks for your hard work! Your videos keep me sane. Merry Christmas 🎅

[Sam-_-]

Hey Kane 🙌🏼 thanks for the upload and for carrying me through my undergraduate degree. Have a good Christmas!🎄

[jonathanmitchell]

That's interesting. I feel like learning math actually does feel similar to thinking about the hard problem of consciousness in a way. It's always really difficult to know what actually constitutes "understanding" in math since you can know "how" do certain things without feeling a sense of deeper comprehension. I'm not sure it's even just about brute facts. I think part of it is that there legitimately is no "truth" at that level of explanation. I liked the idea of understanding being an instance of computational reduction, and with that perspective, there could be many possible explanations that reduce a system to a simpler set of objects and actions, but retains the behavior we deem important.

[Kastelt]

Well this just gave me a new way to see... Well, everything

[CognitiveOffense]

I find myself incredibly sympathetic to this line of argument.

The older I get, the more time I've had to answer questions and every time I do I find a plethora of new questions growing to attention. It's questions all the way down!

As I've fallen down this Chasm of Utter Ignorance I've also discovered that 'everyone is wrong about everything all of the time'. Whatever justifications a person has for believing or holding to be true a certain fact or assertion, there is an end to their ability to explain it. At a certain point, everyone, on every topic, just kinda goes "Well, that's just the way it is" and hand-wavingly (if they have them!) goes on with the rest of their life.

Thanks for sharing. I found it both worthwhile and enjoyable time well spent.

[ReviloliverLewis]

Hmm, I’m not sure I follow the argument that water’s liquidity poses a hard problem. There is a direct and intuitive explanation:

Water molecules at room temperature have weak bonds that allow them to move around each other like grains of sand. This property of being able to flow *just is* what we call “liquidity”.

But we cannot do the same with consciousness. I cannot make a reductive explanation of processes in the body’s nervous system which *just is* some conscious phenomenon. (Or alternatively, if I can, perhaps through some more advanced emergent theories, then consciousness loses its hard status and neither consciousness nor anything else is a hard problem).

[dustinking]

Here's my attempt at restating what you're saying: There are an infinite number of things (broadly defined), and relationships between those things. And theory can only cover a finite range of those relationships. So any explanation is potentially unsatisfying, because it's limited, and there is an infinite number of things and relationships that it doesn't cover. Moreover, when explaining thing X in terms of Y, there are an effectively infinite number of things, and relationships between those things, in the gap between X and Y, so the explanation will leave an effectively infinite number of those things and relationships out.

So an explanation could be useful by narrowly defining H2O and wetness, and choosing the right subset of things between the two, but it still leaves an unlimited amount of stuff out.

[Opposite]

1. So you want an explanation of why a painting invokes (causes) melancholy without using a (causal) mechanical model? Maybe I am misunderstanding you but this sounds to me a little bit as if you ask to explain the properties of an atom without using an atomic model. Other explanations are of curse valid but maybe redundant.

2. It could be that the micro structure is in contradiction with the water not being liquid. Maybe this contradiction can be proven mathematically. But of curse, why should reality even obey the law of noncontradiction in the first place?

3. There are four kinds of explanation. A brute fact explanation, a circular explanation, a infinite chain of explanations and trivialism. Of curse the right answer is trivialism obviously. You can literally explain everything with anything else without boundaries. Why does an apple fall if I am throwing him? It is simply because snow is white and because my dog ate the yellow snow.

[robheusd]

Not to be obnoxious, but any form of water that is to be found on Venus (if it at all contains water) is quite sure not in liquid form but gaseous, and on Mars in the form of ice. The state of water, as science correctly explains, depends on temperature and pressure. And water molecules don't have the property of liquidity, that's just nonsense. The property of liquidity or solidity manifests itself only for a large collection of those molecules. For an individual molecule one can only measure it's kinetic energy.

[walterlucas]

Did you considered posting the audio of your videos on Spotify ? I know that in my case there are a lot of times where I would like to listen to your channel but it would be more convenient in an audio track.

[PeteMandik]

Hey Kane, great stuff. I'm largely in agreement with this and also your "Philosophy Without Justification" video. I'd like to hear your thoughts on an issue that arises in my mind in thinking about both videos. If, as you suggest in PWJ, that reasons are answers to why questions about why you hold such-and-such beliefs, then what's implied by the (seeming) suggestion here that there are no answers to why questions? Isn't the account of reasons thereby undercut? Aren't you left with the view, then, that there aren't any reasons after all? I don't intend this as a gotcha or a takedown, just wondering what you think of this "no justifications, and no reasons either" view. Cheers!

[inoculatedcity]

Great video!! I still feel the frustration from when my childhood “why” questions would be answered in any of the three ways you described and I’m still trying to make peace with the fact that there really is no satisfying answer when you go deep enough into pretty much anything. Personally I’ve always found the “brute fact” answer most frustrating, especially when I really feel like it must go deeper than that. What about you, do you have a similar reaction to any of those three possible responses?

[joelturnbull]

Ideas like these are why I found science class so difficult in High School. Obviously, I didn’t (and probably still don’t) have the ability to think through and articulate these ideas with much sophistication, but I just found the explanations I was given so unsatisfying. I’m the kind of person who finds it difficult to understand something until I have some idea of how or why it is the case, but with this kind of hard problem, that just blocks my understanding.

[darcyone]

Awesome video, I share the same intuition! It seems to me a matter of modality..physically, we can trace down every phenomenon to a bunch of brute facts..metaphysically, possibilities are completely open!

[yonahweiner]

The model of h20 includes forces. Forces determine the behavior. Liquidity is just that behavior. It’s logically impossible for it to behave that way and not be liquid. It’s like saying that people are dancing, drinking, and having fun together, but that doesn’t entail it’s a party. Of course it does! That’s just what we mean by party!

[absupinhere]

The difference, I think, between Hume’s cause effect disconnect issue and the hard problem of consciousness is that hume’s is overcome if we presume laws of physics but for conscious states, those laws are going to be several orders of magnitude harder to derive for methodological reasons.

[robheusd]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in exploring these "hard questions" as on the question of consciousness, it would seem to me quite natural to pose such questions in the context of evolutionary biology of living organisms which have a metabolism and reproductive system and needed to be able to survive and adapt to different circumstances and developed sense organs and the means to organize those sense perceptions into usefull feeedback signals to respond to those signals, etc. because that is the only context in which consciousness makes sense. Of course, as developed living organsisms which inherit the features of all our ancestors, consciousness did not come about in its current state but in a less developed state, perhaps only as a few brain cells that could distinguish light from dark and send a feedback signal to muscles or other organs on which direction to go to, etc. Consciousness is not some abstract function of the brain with which we are able to ponder the questions of life, the universe and everything, but in most of the history of consciouss animals and for the most part still serves a different purpose. And the brain not only functions to equip us with conscious experience, but also to keep us alive and send and receive signals to and from different body parts by which we keep functioning even when we are unconsciouss aka in a sleep state. Certain chemical substances can directly interact with our state of consciousness and even bring us in a state of unconsciousness (anesthesia) which gives plenty of ground for assuming that the physical state of our living body influences our state of mind.

[tobiasyoder]

Seems like your point could be summed up as saying that the question of why certain physical states give rise to conscious states is similar to the question of why are fundamental physical laws what they are. Also on the aesthetics bit, it seemed like you just accept mind independent aesthetic realism?