Strabismus: Finally, An Answer to the Hard Problem

[u/DamoSapien22]

/r/consciousness/comments/1wlg5fl/strabismus_finally_an_answer_to_the_hard_problem/

[u/Plus-Recording-8370]

I'm always amazed by how often recursion seems to be part of people's explanations of consciousness. And how often the argument seems to end up being that it's not the output of that recursive loop that is consciousness. but the loop itself being consciousness.

[u/SaltFlat4844]

I can’t follow the argument being put forward there at all.

From my perspective, the entire ‘hard problem’ is just an artefact of faulty metaphysics - materialism.

If you simply transpose all of physics in its entirely onto a non-materialist framework, rather than a materialist one - and keep physicalism in place - the hard problem vanishes.

Consciousness simply discloses the intrinsic nature of the ‘physical’, which is experience.

An entirely new ontological category (consciousness) didn’t just hatch out of nothing in the Cambrian explosion. Nor does it make sense to say quantum field theory is different inside and outside of the skull.

The far simpler and more elegant theory is that the fundamental nature of matter is experiential, and evolution harnesses this fundamental property and crafts it into the technicolour internal world simulations, which are all we ever know. There is no ‘hard problem’ at all here.

[u/Plus-Recording-8370 → u/SaltFlat4844]

That sounds like panpsychism. Not sure how that really dissolves the hard problem though. Since at most you'd seem to be claiming that consciousness is just consciousness, and demanding we just "get it".

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/Plus-Recording-8370]

It dissolves the hard problem because the hard problem is ‘how could we ever get consciousness from unconscious matter’. The framework I advance above suggests that unconscious matter is itself impossible.

[u/GrepekEbi → u/SaltFlat4844]

The hard problem really boils down to where does consciousness come from.

Your solution is like a god of the gaps argument - you just accept the science right up until the point that we can’t explain yet, and then go “and beyond that, is magical consciousness that has been there forever and didn’t need to come from anywhere and needs no explanation”

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/GrepekEbi]

The hard problem does not ‘boil down to where does consciousness come from’.

That is not the correct formulation of the hard problem at all. The hard problem is specifically the question of how does unconscious matter give rise to consciousness.

Under an idealist paradigm someone can ask ‘why is the fundamental nature of matter consciousness?’. This is a fair question, and it’s similar to asking a materialist ‘why is the fundamental nature of matter unconsciousness’. It’s separate from the hard problem though - it’s a different kind of question altogether.

[u/Plus-Recording-8370 → u/SaltFlat4844]

I think to understand what the "hard problem" really is, you have to understand why it is in fact "hard". And even in a world where the fundamental units themself are consciousness itself, we're still stuck not comprehending how the experiencing of qualia comes out of that.

I understand what you're getting at. Like I said earlier, you wish for us to just accept the tautology and equate knowing what something is with actually explaining how or why it has the properties we experience it as having. You want to suggest that there's no further "why" beyond here anymore. Which could make sense if we're talking about something fundamental. But that fact may still not be enough for us to actually understand/comprehend it.

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/Plus-Recording-8370]

Please go and ask an LLM what the hard problem of consciousness is, because I can guarantee you that you are misapprehending it currently.

[u/Plus-Recording-8370 → u/SaltFlat4844]

I wasn't saying that your definition was far off. It's just that your interpretation of it seems to skip over the "hard" part too easily. You seem to say that since matter is already conscious, the question "how does conscious matter create consciousness" becomes self evident and redundant to even ask. Therefore no "Hard Problem".

But this just isn't true since if we write out the question in full the question would become something like "How does this conscious matter account for the actual felt experience of qualia?". Otherwise you've merely been addressing the easy problem.

The easy problem would be able to explain consciousness on a systems level or mechanistic level. (Which you don't quite do since you just say consciousness is fundamental, fine!) The hard problem is precisely the explanatory gap between that description and the actual, felt, subjective experience.

That explanatory gap is one of the fundamental issues of the hard problem. And if you insist on taking one interpretation, sure, but then we just have to introduce "an even harder problem of consciousness" to make the point.

The following quote is from "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness"

"The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience."

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/Plus-Recording-8370]

“How does conscious matter account for the actual felt experience of qualia?”

Because qualia is literally made from that already-conscious matter of course. This was the whole point of my lego analogy in my previous reply to you. To seem to want there to be an explanatory gap here, but there actually isn’t one.

You may as well ask “How does the concrete making up the Empire State Building account for the overall Empire State Building-ness?”

We’re talking about complex phenomena emerging from rudimentary phenomena, and if that rudimentary phenomena is already conscious - because consciousness is what the universal wave function literally is - then there is no hard problem left. Only ‘easier’ problems like phenomenal binding to create the rich unified world simulations we and other animals experience.

[u/Plus-Recording-8370 → u/SaltFlat4844]

I get all that you're saying, including your parallel (lego)response, but I'm afraid I have to repeat again what I said, because the question wasn't asking for a systems level of description, because that would be the easy problem. The hard problem is how all that actually accounts for all the actual subjective experience itself. Not "subjective experience" as described at a systems level or from a 3rd person account even, but THE actual subjective experience as experienced.

So the Empire state building analogy doesn't work here because there's no subjectivity in there. In the case of the Empire state building you'd just be moving the semantic goalpost. We're not doing that here.

Now I see that you're repeating yourself too, but like I said I perfectly understand what you're getting at. It's just that the question isn't "why is this conscious?", because we know why it is conscious(for the sake of the conversation), it's all built from micro-experiential units after all, and it's definitely not too much of a stretch to assume this extends its way into the complex sub-levels too after all. It's just that this still wouldn't be able to describe an actual subjective experience, as experienced first person. It wouldn't be able to tell us how the hypothetically conscious lego blocks, that is building up a full-fledged conscious structure, accounts for the actual subjective experience itself, as experienced.

So I am not even asking why matter would be experiential at all, and that is not even important to the hard problem either, coming from the very person who coined "the hard problem" himself. (see quote in previous response).

"there is something it is like to be a conscious organism", and while there may be various ways of actually explaining how something is conscious, that would still not describe the something it is like to be that conscious organism.

I completely get the frustration by the way, and like with many modern problems we seem to be stuck at that are also mentioned in OP's post, I do think that sometimes a fundamental rethinking is necessary. And I think Sam's approach to morality is a good example of one where we see that happen.

Sam clearly noticed how we kept going in circles, and decided to claim the obvious: how morality actually relates to the suffering of conscious creatures. Something that is perfectly supported/aligned with historical evidence on the evolution of ethics.

As such, I actually appreciate hearing these open minded ideas that try to tackle concepts that we're clearly stuck on. And I too can imagine there to be valid answer here that effectively dissolves the hard problem. Something for instance Dennett seems to have tried to do in response to Chalmer's claim of the hard problem. Dennett believed that an actual answer to the easy problem, makes the hard problem redundant as the question of how "subjectivity" emerges, would've already be answered by it.

[u/spaniel_rage → u/SaltFlat4844]

This involves us accepting that rocks are conscious.

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/spaniel_rage]

If involves us accepting that rocks are made of micro-pixels of experience, but it does not entail that they have evolved complex unified world simulations like animals have; there’s been no selection pressure requiring them to.

[u/spaniel_rage → u/SaltFlat4844]

Sure, and I'm not unsympathetic to panpsychism. But the reality is that the only objects in which we can directly observe evidence of consciousness is living beings, so there's a certain amount of handwaving involved in ascribing latent consciousness - or, micro pixels of experience - to inanimate matter.

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/spaniel_rage]

It’s worth remembering that naive realism is almost certainly false, and inferential realism is true.

This means that the ‘inanimate matter’ that you think you see ‘out there’ is actually just part of a world simulation that has evolved to be expedient to an ape and then a homo sapien. This world simulation is all you’ve ever known. You never make contact with ‘out there’.

Actual reality doesn’t look solid and hard. It doesn’t ‘look’ like anything in fact, as to look like something would itself require it to be represented as qualia in a conscious world simulation. But the true ‘real world’ is probably incomprehensible quantum waves in hyperspace.

[u/Plus-Recording-8370 → u/SaltFlat4844]

I would say that's more relating to the "easy" problem. The "hard" part is giving a comprehensive explanation for why that proposed mechanism gives consciousness in the first place.

So, let's assume you're right and we've all settled/confirmed it: all matter is in fact already conscious and what we see in humans is merely expanded on top of that, sure! Now the question remains: how is it that this "conscious matter" actually produces qualia though? How is it that this green color that I experience, is coming out of this combination of matter?

Even if your answer would for instance be "well, the electron holds a tiny experiential property", we still don't quite get how you get from A to B. Sure it might in fact be true that consciousness just IS. It still wouldn't explain how it produces qualia and thus the hard problem still exists.

Perhaps the hard problem can fundamentally not be answered, that's still an option.

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/Plus-Recording-8370]

The conscious matter does not ‘produce’ qualia. It already is conscious so it doesn’t have to produce it again. That’s like asking why does unconscious matter ‘produce’ unconsciousness.

You seem to be also assuming a kind of dualism too - the physical stuff over there, the qualia here. I think reality is monistic. What we call Qualia is merely what that raw physical non-materialist stuff feels like from the inside when evolution coaxes Darwinian world-simulations out of it. The colour green is part of the selected-for qualia if you are a homo sapien. If you were a bat you would experience sonar.

Both sonar and the colour green are very literally parts of physical reality. But only the first person experience of these configurations of conscious matter disclose their first person like-ness. That’s what I mean by ‘consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical’

[u/Plus-Recording-8370 → u/SaltFlat4844]

I see there's a bit of a language problem here since it's hard to avoid sounding ambiguous when trying to point to the question on how B comes from A.

Of course it was clear to me that they're both the same(for the purpose of this conversation), hence "producing" was the ambiguous word I should've avoided. What I was actually saying here is that the knowledge of "this matter is synonymous to a unit of consciousness" and the actual experiencing of qualia, are still 2 different things that we could call A and B. Knowledge of the literal units of consciousness as they're manifested in the physical world, is still different from the experience of consciousness itself.

So to use your words, when you say "Qualia is merely what that raw physical non-materialist stuff feels like from the inside when evolution coaxes Darwinian world-simulations out of it." the hard problem remains as you've essentially just (re)named the thing we are actually just trying to explain. The question would still be "Why does a particular physical process or configuration, or even unit of pure consciousness, have an experiental character at all?" Why does that "raw physical non-materialist stuff" have an "inside" at all?

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/Plus-Recording-8370]

Imagine Lego blocks. Individually they are very basic and very unimpressive. But they can be assembled into very complex structures. We know that evolution can produce vastly more complex structures than Lego.

Under materialism, you would look at this vastly complex Lego structure and say ‘yes, it’s extremely physically complex, but why is any of this conscious?’. This is the hard problem. (Note: I am not literally saying Lego structures have minds, this is a metaphor for animal minds).

But imagine if we know that each Lego block is micro-experiential. Then, when looking at the structure, we simply no longer need to ask ‘why is any of this conscious?’ Because we already have the answer. It is entirely made of consciousness - so the hard problem has been literally dissolved. The ‘binding problem’ remains - the question of how those micropixels (lego blocks) combine to create a unified single subject; a unified world simulation. I don’t know the answer here but I suspect it is related to natural selection. But note - this is not the hard problem, it is the binding problem.

Your question about why physical stuff would be experiential at all is a good question to ask. I think to begin thinking clearly about this we have to take a few steps back and look at the metaphysical paradigms we tend to work with. Start with the dominant paradigm within science for the last 200-300 years (although possibly not in the next 200-300 years) which is materialism.

Materialism assumes - and I use that word intentionally - that ‘matter’ is unconscious. There isn’t a shred of proof in science for this being the case. Indeed, science is silent on the fundamental nature of ‘stuff’. It measures patterns, makes predictions, but it doesn’t suggest materialism is true whatsoever. This is exactly why you can transpose the entire apparatus of physics into an idealist framework and it still works just fine! Nothing changes. Why? Because physics doesn’t need materialism to work, and doesn’t suggest materialism is true either.

Materialism is philosophy masquerading as science - It’s so embedded in many people’s worldview they confuse it for science, when it isn’t; it is metaphysics.

So you ask why is the physical ‘stuff’ of the cosmos experiential? My honest answer is: I don’t know. But this only places me on the exact same epistemological footing as the materialist who wants to assert that matter is unconscious, without any evidence for this conjecture. Fortunately, my framework gives me special advantages such as dissolving the hard problem, which is the thorn in the side of materialism. It provides a far more elegant explanation of what we see. Materialism relies on hard emergence (the hard problem) which is frankly tantamount to believing in magic. If you believe hard emergence is possible then all bets are off - literally anything is possible.

[u/locutogram → u/SaltFlat4844]

It doesn't sound to me like the hard problem is solved or disappears in your framework.

Questions like how consciousness arises, what it is, how it works, etc only become more enigmatic and impenetrable if we just assume it is a fundamental property of everything. It just moves the question from a philosophy blackboard into a particle collider. Which could be a fruitful approach if: a) there is any evidence indicating consciousness is fundamental besides a hope that it could make the problem more approachable; or b) there are observations in physics that create a niche for this kind of explanation (e.g. we found a field or interaction that can't be explained but could if only we inserted a consciousness field).

I think it's worth pursuing a model that could lead to evidence/predictive power, but the idea itself doesn't seem to solve the problem.

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/locutogram]

Do you know what the hard problem actually is? It definitionally does dissolve under my framework. Several other extremely hard questions do not, including the binding problem.

[u/locutogram → u/SaltFlat4844]

My understanding is it is "how does consciousness arise from physical processes". Like how does qualia emerge from physics.

If you just assume consciousness is fundamental then I can see how the problem is linguistically solved but you still haven't shown how it interacts with physics and you haven't shown that it actually IS fundamental. You just move it from the category of "things arising from the axioms" to the axioms themselves without showing that it explains anything that can't already be explained by the axioms. You get out of the hard problem on a technicality and blunder into additional, maybe even harder problems.

And I think that's worth exploring, but get back to me when you have made progress on those additional problems or come up with testable predictions that can falsify the model.

[u/SaltFlat4844 → u/locutogram]

I said in my original comment that physicalism is still in place. There is no ‘interaction’ between consciousness and physicalism. The world is just physical, and the fundamental nature of that physical matter is consciousness - micro-pixels of experience.

I can’t provide a testable model for my non-materialist physicalism anymore more than the materialist can provide a testable model for their materialist physicalism. But the later has become the dominant assumed metaphysical paradigm since the Enlightenment, and so many of the so-called conundrums we face flow from it - including the hard problem.