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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.

Internal experiences are probably a bit different, but it's a mistake to think this is the only reason to deny the hard problem. We all experience perceptual illusions of various types, auditory, visual, etc. In other words, perceptions are useful but deeply flawed. Why do you think your perceptions of subjective, qualitative experience doesn't have these same issues? I see no factual reason to treat them differently, therefore I simply don't naively trust what my perception of conscious experience suggests might be true, eg. that subjective experience is cohesive, without gaps, ineliminable, ineffable, etc.

Once you accept this fact, the hard problem starts looking a lot like a god of the gaps.

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To me it seems your reply is conflating consciousness with perception. The perception is the consciousness. Auditory illusion, for example, is just signals to the senses and your senses miss-representing the inputs. The consciousness is the part which is aware of these sensations. If they are accurate or not - is not the point. The point is that you are aware of them.

> The consciousness is the part which is aware of these sensations

Why are you so sure this awareness is not itself a perception generated internally? A higher order perception parameterized/modulated by other perceptions perhaps, but still a perception, which is why subjectivity and qualia appears to have a perceptual characteristics, eg. I can focus on/attend to my subjective experience or qualitative experience and it becomes sharper, or I can ignore them and it fades more into the background, just like any other sense.

This places front and center the fact that it, like all perceptions, are fundamentally incomplete, and necessarily inaccurate because the brain "fills in" missing information, eg. your field of view might seem complete, but you have literal physical blind spots that your brain fills in. Perceptions are accurate enough to be useful, but not fully reliable. And so we should conclude the same of our apparent perception of subjective, qualitative experience.

I feel like your response simply reinforces my point:

> The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.

The hard problem deals with "why" there's a subjective interior experience to begin with, not the nature of that subjective experience.

And when I say "the interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem" I don't mean your experience of qualia and such (e.g. your perceptive experience). I mean your core internal experience of being a conscious entity MUST be dramatically different.

> I mean your core internal experience of being a conscious entity MUST be dramatically different.

Sorry, I still don't agree. I found it equally hard to understand eliminativism until I reframed what I was perceiving in terms of my knowledge. This is not a question of the "experience" being different, this is a matter of what reliable information I'm extracting from the "experience".

Ask yourself why you don't naively accept that water breaks pencils [1]. It's because you don't take your perceptions at face value, but instead interpret them within a consistent body of knowledge that we call science, which tells you that water refracts light. You and I still both perceive the broken pencil, but we know that's not what's really happening.

Analogously, we are both perceiving what we call "qualitative experience", I'm just interpreting this within a consistent body of knowledge that we call science, and concluding that this perception is faulty, and that that's not really what's going on.

So it's not the perception itself that causes us to reach different conclusions about what's going on, it's that external information that is demonstrably more reliable is telling a different story.

[1] https://scienceathomekids.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...

> and concluding that this perception is faulty

I should qualify that with "probably faulty". There's always room for expanding the ontology of science, but it has to be very well motivated, a standard which I don't think has been met for qualia.

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