Also even a simple stimulus can have all sorts of context dependent meanings and associations. Is see red. That's the colour of blood, also the colour of one of my wife's dresses, and our car. There are thousands of cross-connections between that simple input and every level of my memory and emotional life all firing off in the rich chemical soup of my brain.
I just don't think the 'hard problem' is all that much of a step beyond the easy problems. Once you've solved those, the hard part looks a lot more tractable.
Think about it: every way you would describe a subjective experience seems to eventually rely on a first-person statement at some point. The obvious way to resolve this is to deny that first-person perspectives actually exist, that they are an illusion, despite the fact that we can apparently directly observe their existence. So before we can accept this argument, we need an explanation for how this actually works. It's not something you can just hand-wave away.
Merely asserting the existence of self-awareness or describing how self-awareness arises doesn't address any of the questions raised by qualia, even if they are an illusion.
It seems self-evident to me that there are only a few options:
- Human brains aren't conscious (which we humans tend to dispute)
- Human brains are conscious and have experiences as an inherent byproduct of accepting and processing sensory input which includes input on their own internal states (ie. there is no 'hard problem')
- Human brains are conscious through some other, as-yet-undescribed mechanism which operates in parallel with the systems described in the last option (a 'strange loop' separate from the 'mundane loop' of our normal feedback system)
- Human brains aren't inherently conscious and consciousness is imbued into them via some supernatural phenomenon (which feels like abdication to me - 'a wizard did it' is never a satisfying answer.)
I'm only an armchair philosopher so I'm well aware there may be some widely accepted conclusions on this stuff that I've just missed so far.
My point was that even concluding this were true basedo n some compelling evidence, it still doesn't explain all of the strange qualitative aspects of our subjective experience. There's a lot missing that needs to be explained. For instance, such an explanation would have to address p-zombies, Mary's room, and other philosophical puzzles. I think it's possible to do so, but there is an explanatory gap that needs filling.