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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Chalmers from your link: There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

There's nothing harder than explaining a delusional idea - while still accepting that it's true.

Most individuals in this society take "consciousness" as some, often unique, mix of subjectivity, meta-cognition and other stuffs. It's also commonly taken as a quality characterizing humanness despite no agreement on what it is.

Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard. It's hard like the problem of explaining astronomy in terms of astrology, the hard problem of reworking astronomy in terms of earth-centered coordinates and any science that attempts to carry-on without clarifying terms.

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There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first-person experience exists and is the basis of all science, but is very hard to connect with the scientific view of the universe. If science has to "discard" this fact as inconvenient, that says more about science than the fact.

There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first person experience exists and is the basis of all science

The most commonly agreed thing is the people agree they have first-person experiences. That this is "the basis of all science" is a fine example of how people jump from this highly value quality to any old thing - I've also heard that subjective experience refutes all materialism, shows humans aren't computers, proves the existence of God and so-forth.

Why are joe_the_user's comments being downvoted? He's presenting a well known view among philosophers, just doing so forcefully.

But he isn't talking about "first-person experience", he specifically said "consciousness". Which is a confused word. He can't give any solid definition to it, not without using other similar and "fuzzy" words. He can't give any test that distinguishes "consciousness" from "non-consciousness".

You can say "that's the point of the hard problem", but that's as silly as making up a "hard problem of defining blegness". And insisting that I have "blegness" but refusing to define what I mean by that.

The problem of consciousness is a purely empirical question. That is we can examine the brain, and we can figure out how it works. We can find a set of rules that explains human behavior. In theory, we could even model human behavior so well that we can understand exactly why some people insist they have "consciousness". We could record the neurons that fire to produce that thought, and we can trace back to what structures because it.

And once such a detailed model exists, there is nothing left to explain! We would know exactly why people are saying they feel "conscious" or "blegness". There would be no need to introduce weird philosophies or supernatural beliefs.

>he specifically said "consciousness". Which is a confused word. He can't give any solid definition to it

We can't give solid definitions for anything without ultimately referencing some shared baseline of experience. So unless you're saying you don't experience qualia/conciousness, then it's as well defined as anything else is.

>We would know exactly why people are saying they feel "conscious" or "blegness".

But that still wouldn't explain the experience itself.

>So unless you're saying you don't experience qualia/conciousness

I don't see any evidence anyone experiences this, including myself. It's just nonsense.

>But that still wouldn't explain the experience itself.

How would it not? If you know exactly what causes people to say they "experience" there is no need to explain anything else.

>There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first-person experience exists and is the basis of all science

That is a wildly incorrect characterization of the Hard Problem. Remember, Chalmers and most of the rest of the Hard Problemers fully admit that all the "merely" functional aspects of consciousness actually exist. They think that a p-zombie can in fact perform scientific experiments, reason about the world, figure out what time the bus will come, etc.

So in fact, first-person experience, as characterized in the Hard Problem, is not the basis of any science. Functional cognition is fully admitted to be the basis for every field of human domain knowledge, and it's also the object of study for cognitive scientists.

But consciousness is unique. It is the phenomenon that allows us to experience all other phenomena and there is nothing like it in the rest of the universe as far as we know.

Just because we don't know how to specify what the problem is exactly doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist; it just means that we don't fully understand what the problem is. Denying that there's a problem to solve means we won't make any progress on it.

I think it is more likely that consciousness is singular rather than unique. There is only consciousness. There is no "all other phenomena" - only the experience of that phenomena as consciousness. I've never known anything other than consciousness. The chair in sitting on is my consciousness, otherwise it would be outside of experiencing.

> Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard.

I'd say that the hard problem of consciousness is above science, it's metaphysics, out of the scope of science. Because subjective experience is the only "thing" that exists and science is just a tool to systematically describe the subjective experience (what we perceive).

With a science-is-everything mindset, you will never "get" the hard problem of consciousness.

The problem is that science relies on observing phenomena to prove or disprove theories. You don't observer consciousness, so it is hard (if not impossible) to study using "normal" science.

Are you saying that consciousness does not exist?

They are saying consciousness is not some special thing.

I.e. not Dualism.

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