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Comment by aaimnr | Hacker News Reader

Chalmers is the guy who coined the hard problem of consciousness. The reception varied extremely, some people refused to even admit that there's any problem at all with explaining consciousness. So now, after many years of multiple disputes he describes the meta problem - that the base problem itself is so controversial.

The clearest example of the meta problem is Daniel Dennett, another prominent philosopher, who not only doesn't agree that the problem is hard, but also insists that the consciousness itself is illusion, so there's nothing mysterious to explain in the first place. Quite mind-boggling statement to most people, including HNers, as far as I remember from other threads related to the subject.

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> so there's nothing mysterious to explain in the first place

I'm not familiar with either author, but this sounds so wrong that I wonder if you misrepresented it, because slightly after a slight modification I would agree, there's no explanation in the end, the misrepresentation of which is trivial, because the consequence is effectively the same. There are two sides of the same medal: we need to refine the model, and we need to skip it to get to the meat.

Saying the need is to skip the model to get to what matters is the same as saying it's not mysterious. You're saying, "shut up you guys, you're just blabbing on about silly things that don't matter. (possibly so that you can justify your cushy university position) There's no mystery here, instead buy my books where I talk about things that really matter."

>I'm not familiar with either author, but this sounds so wrong that I wonder if you misrepresented it

No that’s exactly what Dennett argues, and that’s why his position is so maddening and infuriating to people who do think there’s a hard problem.

It is like asking about the nature of an apple and being told that there is no apple. Then throwing the apple at their head, only to have the person continue insisting that the apple is a figment of your imagination.

Then throwing the apple at their head, only to have the person continue insisting that the apple is a figment of your imagination.

Now you're getting to the realm of torture, pain, and horror. I think that most people can be quickly driven to the point of admitting the reality of the consciousness of pain and horror. This isn't an experiment that would easily get past the ethics board, however.

It's also like eating the apple in response and asking "which apple?". Eating is an existential problem, but not a hard one, at least not as hard as procuring the food, which in turn even lower animals may accomplish.

Dennett: ""Qualia" is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. .... At first blush it would be hard to imagine a more quixotic quest than trying to convince people that there are no such properties as qualia; hence the ironic title of this chapter. But I am not kidding."

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