The had problem of consciousness is related to neither neuroscience or physics, far from being a central problem in either. It's a central problem in philosophy.
Especially not by being declared not-a-real-problem by the problem itself.
Regardless, not everything fits into neat little boxes.
I would personally be more interested in the views of a neuroscientist on the matter, but then again I'd expect them to be likely to dismiss it as not being a problem at all. I'd also be interested in the views of someone who works with AI and the like.
Personally I think the problem will be "solved" as soon as we have sufficiently advanced conversational assistants and we just start assuming they are conscious because they seem like they are. I think having that sort of thing in our daily lives will dramatically change people's intuitive perspective on the issue.
Some neuroscientists having an interesting take on the election does not imply that elections are a neurological topic. Philosophy is open to contributions from amateurs.
"Professionalization tends to result in establishing acceptable qualifications, one or more professional associations to recommend best practice and to oversee the conduct of members of the profession, and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs (that is, professional certification). It is also likely to create "occupational closure", closing the profession to entry from outsiders, amateurs and the unqualified."
I don't see how this contributes any insights into the issue. How is that "world" any different from a real world experience, relevant to this issue?
I mean, nothing in Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride explains "why it feels to everyone like experiences are being exported out of it" either.
Yeah, exactly. There's no way to tell if neuroscience is just the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride through which something else is getting pulled through on boats. Is there any evidence one way or the other? What would evidence look like? I think it is beyond the reach of science because there is no experiment you could ever do that would illuminate it.
Something that can only be resolved by discussing the options and choosing which one feels the most reasonable is philosophy, and not science.
Either there exists some effective computation that would produce behavior similar to the behavior of conscious being, and could be performed in VR world too, or computation would require exponential resources, or (in the most unlikely case) such computation would not exist, and it would be possible to show why it cannot exist.
Neuroscience and Physics can help to find the rules for that computation. And Philosophy can have fun talking about what lies beyond unknown.
If by hard problem of consciousness you mean that kind of question, then it is definitely up to philosophy because no one else is even asking it.
Everyone answers the question about P-Zombies every day, by deciding the people they meet are conscious, based only on their behaviour.
The more interesting question is whether it is possible to get human like behaviour from a program running on classical computer.
If you were to ask me whether I think neuroscience currently has any understanding of the hard problem of consciousness, I would say that I don't think they do.
But it's still related to neuroscience.
Seems a bit self-serving. Surely the physicists could make a claim that all fields (including philosophy) are subfields of physics.
In fact, the soundness of the scientific method itself is a philosophical argument, as it cannot be scientifically demonstrable without assuming the conclusion.
That's conjecture. Some philosophies of mathematics in fact disagrees with this claim, which is exactly my point. This debate we're having cannot be settled by any sort of scientific or mathematical argument, it's a purely philosophical debate about the meaning of scientific and mathematical arguments and what should or should not qualify.
Philosophy is extremely broad, in most areas there hasn't been a dominant successful way to do it. In Natural Philosophy however, one way took over entirely, it's named Science, and Physics is just the name for the use of Science for a particular type of question in Natural Philosophy.
Philosophy in other areas didn't have this. For the question "Why do we die?" there are a bunch of approaches and none of them is especially satisfactory. Different philosophers each take their own approach. But for the questions in Natural Philosophy like "What is the Sun made of?" Science turned out to be very, very good at providing satisfactory answers and other methods largely fell away. Whilst good answers to "Why do we die?" feel nice, answers to questions like "How can I preserve this meat in order to eat it a week from now without getting sick?" had very practical consequences that were hard to argue with. Science took over the whole world.
But it's just a way to answer questions within one (important) corner of philosophy. Science doesn't have any answers for "Why do we die?" or "What is good?" which aren't questions of Natural Philosophy.
Historically, all branches of knowledge were branches of philosophy. There is a reason why PhD stands for "philosophiae doctor" ( aka "Doctor of Philosophy" ).
> Surely the physicists could make a claim that all fields (including philosophy) are subfields of physics.
Certainly not since physics deals with the empirical natural world. Physics doesn't delve into morality, virtue, essence, good, evil, etc. There is the physical world and the metaphysical one.
In modern times, the empirical branch of philosophy ( hard sciences ) have cut out their own special niche, but fundamentally, they are still a specialized branch of philosophy.
I gotta say, i agree with the grandparent. Metaphysics is philosophy. It is not physics. It is not cognitive science. At best the questions posed by metaphysics provide inspiration for physics and cogsci, but they are fundamentally not part of those fields.