The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
edwardfeser.blogspot.com
edwardfeser.blogspot.com
Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”?
Is it not possible that our experiences, our recognition of color, our smell of moth balls, our hearing of clarinets are, in fact, just aggregate functions of those parts that make us up?
Am I missing some greater argument here? Is this just humanity’s need to feel special on navel-gazing display, or is there a stronger crux here lost in the haze of the article?
Personally I think the information contained in qualia is finite and therefore physical but who knows
my theory is that these things are just questions of resolutions of varying latencies.
Most (all?) of our "science" doesn't require any sort of notion of consciousness to work, we can describe the motion of a projectile or an orbit in a way that doesn't depend on having an "experiencer." But there's this weird category of stuff for which that isn't true. (At least, for now).
you've definitely hit upon the problem, but you have it exactly backward. The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. Consciousness affects physical things (you think, plan, and put out your hand and move something). How does this happen? Saying "it's all physical laws" is handwaving away quite a bit of nonphysical phenomena, relying on "the science of the gaps".
it may very well turn out that orgasm feels like it does because that's a property of physics, but you can't just assert these sorts of things, you have to prove them.
my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.
I'm saying "we live in a simulation", except it's not (necessarily) a simulation, all we know is that it's all there is that we know about.
Similar arguments were tried in the early days of the telescope in the 17th century, asserting that what was being observed could not be trusted due to the mediation of the lenses (early telescopes were generally refractive). While imperfections can limit and govern the information available via telescopes, there is no reason to believe that said information is false or somehow governed by anything other than physical phenomenon. It was, and is, the height of sophistry to make such an assertion.
I’ll give an example that is related to my current day job, where we make devices with displays (e.g., TV’s). I have commonly had people say that picture quality and color on televisions is subjective. However, until we’re into advanced features like content-adaptive processing, it isn’t. Instead, color is objectively and reproducibly measurable as a set of physical properties, and the mappings of those properties to the TV-buying public is very aligned with the science behind color theory.
Now, color theory as we apply it is a blend of physics (very, very reproducible) and perception. The perceptual part of color is largely reproducible over large populations, but there are certainly mutations, conditions, and variances that lead to some degree of varied perception, up to and including blindness (though TV’s these days throw off enough infrared that their brightness is generally detectable by non-sighted users). So, might we all be living in a simulation? Or a simulation of a simulation? Sure. But that has no practical impact because it is an unanswerable question.
Conversely, operating with the assumption that the physical-world sensing and reasoning apparatus available to me isn’t some complex prank is working out pretty well for the trillions+ creatures out there (insects could be an interesting discussion) that appear to be going about their daily lives. Why ask people to prove a negative?
In the meantime, we’ll continue to try to better understand how minds work.
I'm not trying to create a big woo-woo mystery, i'm just saying rationalists should not be quick to assume they know what is going on or where the answer lies.
Casting folks as “rationalists” is reductive, and people actively asserting what is understood (and not understood) being painted as “assuming” is more than a bit fallacious. I’m not accepting an unfalsifiable claim. Primarily because it’s a logical fallacy, but also because it has no utility.
Folks are free to believe that they’re brains in perfect jars (despite having no evidence to support it), but, if that’s not the case, it makes sense to work with the signals, inputs, and levers we have available to us.
That sounds an awful like you're taking as axiomatic that consciousness is non-physical i.e. magic.
It’s still not clear to me why qualia are anything more than the enshrinement of labels. Replace “description” with neuro-interfaced simulation, and the whole argument dissolves.
By asking someone to prove that consciousness is not a product of something outside of physics, you’re demanding that they prove a negative.
Let’s put it more simply: we have no evidence to indicate that human thought or experience require anything beyond the elements and nature of the physical universe.
Otherwise, we’re just trying to explain complexity not yet understood with religious attribution, and we should hang up our science spurs right now.
saying "but I believe in the materialist interpretation of modern science because I run from religion, that fusty old thing I fear, so I insist that consciousness be explainable by physical laws" is not a proof. I am an atheist, but our consciousnesses have created religion, so it exists as much as our other thoughts. What we see with our eyes we also are convinced exists, but in our heads, thinking about it, it has the same nature as our other thoughts, and imaginings.
- that’s a long edit, but I’ll reply with a short one:
I’m not running from religion. I’m suggesting that enshrining consciousness as something ineffable and then demanding that it be fully mapped out by physics to not otherwise be a symptom of the preternatural is a sophistic argument.
The "hard problem" is subjective experience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_character_of_experi...), which is different. You can have different way of explaining it, and what GP is saying is a proto-illusionism, probably not as well thought as it could be, but philosophers wrote on this quite recently (the idea is from ~2010): https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journal/the-illusion-of...
There's a confusion here between "explained by physical laws" and "physical". The problem of qualia, I claim, shows that physics is not exhaustive when it comes to matter. Its methods are necessarily and entirely quantitative, which means anything that doesn't satisfy this presumption of quantifiability is either ignored, or given some frankly bad pseudo-reduction to the quantifiable (and even then, it relies on a tacit Cartesian sort of dualism to work, which is usually unacknowledged).
I make the initial distinction between "physical law" and "physical" because an Aristotle or an Aquinas would not deny that, say, dogs and cats and myriad animals are conscious (they would find the notion absurd), even as they hold that, of the animals, only human beings possess intellects, which, owing to their capacity for abstraction, must be immaterial. What does that mean? It means that just because physics cannot account for consciousness, either today or at all by virtue of its methods and scope, it does not follow that consciousness cannot be material. It may not be exclusively material perhaps, and perhaps consciousness, like "being", is analogical in meaning, and our use of the term suffers from a fallacy of univocity that it has only one meaning.
> my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.
While I reject mechanistic metaphysics, the notion that everything is "information" or "computation" is incoherent, or at the very least, stands in for something else, like idealism, which has its own set of problems. "Computation" comes from the Latin "computare", i.e., "com" ("with, together") and "putare" ("to reckon"). That is to say, computation is semiotic, so to speak. It is intentional, about something else. So it makes no sense to speak of computation as the ground of reality, because it is an operation that presupposes reality. Information suffers from analogous problems. You would only be passing the buck by appealing to them.
It seems to me youre just taking the opposite as an axiom without any basis.
My personal belief is the two viewpoints are not so contradictory. Consciousness can be a fundamental part of all matter (not simply an emergent phenomena or product of matter). This is no more magic to me than admitting matter has "energy" or does things randomly.
Consciousness is a label. It’s a noun that is used (among many long winded arguments, apparently) to mean a range of things, but relaxation of that label doesn’t extend to universal consciousness of matter without rendering that concept pointless.
> A related argument known as the “knowledge argument” was famously put forward by Frank Jackson. Imagine Mary, a scientist of the future who, for whatever reason, has spent her entire life in a black and white room, never having experiences of colors. She has, nevertheless, through her studies come to learn all the physical facts there are to know about the physics and physiology of color perception. For example, she knows down to the last detail what is going on in the surface of a red apple, and in the eyes and nervous system, when someone sees the apple. Suppose she leaves the room and finally comes to learn for herself what it is like to see red. In other words, she comes for the first time to have the qualia associated with the conscious experience of seeing a red apple. Surely she has learned something new. But since, by hypothesis, she already knew all the physical facts there were to know about the situation, her new knowledge of the qualia in question must be knowledge of something over and above the physical facts.
In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. The version of this that I learned first was "what is it like to be a bat?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Another one that I can recall offhand, from Descartes: Physical things have extension in space. One way to test whether something has extension in space is whether you can cut it in half. But your consciousness can't be cut in half, you can't even conceive of what this would mean. So it's not physical.
Make of the arguments what you may. I wrote term papers against both of the above in undergrad. But it's definitely something people have thought carefully about, not just an ideological assertion that consciousness Must Be Different.
No, you don't. You just have to accept that the facts about physical phenomenon that can be learned through language are different than the physical experience of physical phenomena themselves, and that learning the latter is distinct from learning the former. The latter, however, is obviously physical.
And, even if it wasn't wrong in that way, that would be an argument for the nonphysicality of some subset of the subjects of knowledge, not an argument for the nonphysicality of consciousness.
Whether she learned through language is irrelevant. Before seeing red, she might have learned about it by consulting extensive charts of the brain, or (black-and-white) videos of timecourses of brain activation. Maybe she even got to run computer simulations of her own brain response.
By construction Mary already knew everything physical about the color red, so the new knowledge she gained through consciously experiencing it is not knowledge about anything physical.
That materialistic, mechanical, “mathematically reductionist” brains might produce the particular qualia isn’t a hard problem. We alter the brain and the qualia of experience are altered: it is unavoidable that the brain is involved in generating the experience.
The actually hard problem is how (or whether) chemistry can generate awareness, into/onto which the qualia of experience arise.
When I first studied philosophy, I expected that there would be sober, serious, fat-free answers to philosophical questions, all of which would be clearly distinguished from mystical woo. Having studied philosophy, I now can’t help but notice:
- Philosophy doesn’t solve philosophical problems (even as judged by the very lenient criterion of whether a majority of philosophers even agree that the problem has been solved!)
- In many cases, including some very simple ones like “what is knowledge?” the closest thing to a respectable consensus view requires an appeal to counterfactuals, which are way spookier / mystical / wooey than the things they’re invoked to explain. The most worked out systematic account of counterfactuals—- by David Lewis, one of the most cited Anglophone philosophers of 20C so hardly a cherry-picked example—- is so infamously out there that his colleagues refused to believe that he actually believed it.
- The above point is quite generic: systematic commitment to essentially any philosophical position will eventually require you to bite some bullet that will make you sound completely insane. Lewis thought that all possible worlds were real, Fodor thought the mind had 50k innate concepts and no more, the Churchlands thought consciousness is an illusion. As far as I could tell, that is just the way it is.
By contrast, much of Thomistic philosophy is a lot more reasonable than might be supposed. Take his doctrine of the soul, for example.
Modern people tend to think souls are nonsense because they’re thinking, consciously or not, of a more or less Cartesian doctrine of the soul, a spooky mental substance somehow connected to the body, perhaps through the pineal gland. But for Aquinas, the soul is just the pattern of the body, the information required to arrange matter into a particular organism rather than pink mist.
So far so naturalistic, but what’s with the immortality of the soul? This is just Aquinas’s solution to the problem of universals: if human beings can have knowledge of a priori truths like math, then that can only be because a part of the soul is already there in a realm of perfect unchanging necessary truths, hence immortal.
Now you can take this argument or leave it, but I can assure you that by prevailing standards in philosophy of math it’s actually quite tame, because there are no non-spooky options in that field.
Feser himself was guilty of these prejudices, some of which he describes here[0]. So he has the perspective of being on the "other side", if I may allow myself an oversimplification (he doesn't deny that there are insights to be found in other views, something consistent with the spirit of "logos spermatikoi").
As far as wacky trends in philosophy today are concerned, I will say that if you don't think eliminativism is bunk, then you probably have not understood what it claims.
W.r.t. the soul, to make things more precise for those interested, I would not say so much "pattern" as "form", which is to say the organizing cause of a thing. For example, the "sphericity" of a ball of bronze is its form or formal cause; it is that which is essential to the kind of thing it is, what makes it the kind of thing it is. Patterns are an effect of the form. Souls are just the forms of animals, and the human soul is immaterial because of the intellect's capacity for the abstraction of universals from particulars, to name one cause. Its immorality is the result of its immateriality, as mortality is corruption or destruction, i.e., change moving away from what something is by virtue of its form toward some other form, and that is change that only matter can undergo.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.h...
This hints of bigotry and poisoning the well. Focus on his arguments.
(Also, what does "extremely traditionalist Catholic" mean? He certainly doesn't meet that description as I understand it. He has been critical of both laxity and rigorism, for example.)
> His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area
His academic background was originally in the tradition of analytical philosophy. The man was an atheist. It was only after he began teaching and rehashing tired caricatures of Aquinas's arguments that he took notice and began to find the real McCoy convincing. So, he is very familiar with what else is on offer and skillfully deals with those topics. Many of his writings, including blog posts, take these other views on their own terms, often to show where their weaknesses and errors lie.
I presume that by calling his views "niche", you mean "views held by a minority of philosophers today", or perhaps "fringe" in some pejorative, dismissive sense? Because the subject matter isn't niche at all. It's a full-blooded view of expansive scope (hello, metaphysics anyone?), and frankly, IMO, the most well-defended and defensible. .
Truth is not decided by majority vote.
> If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.
Again, not true. He writes in an eminently accessible manner. His book "The Last Superstition" is 101 material. Having some familiarity with basic Aristotelian notions can sometimes expedite understanding, perhaps, but you don't need to be a scholar to grasp much of what he writes. And often, he doesn't even make any explicit use of technical language from the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, only arguments using common language.
Of course, I am not averse to straining to learn something new. I have heard one philosopher say that he only began to grasp metaphysics in his 50s. Anyone looking for a royal road is perhaps ill-suited for philosophy, or any serious field of study.
> It is possible at least in principle, he says, for there to be a world physically identical to our own down to the last particle, but where there are none of the qualia of conscious experience.
No. I don't consider this possible even in principle. Imaginable, yes, possible? No.
One example is enough to dispose of any contradiction, so here's one: in this contrafactual world, a person says "I feel the sun warming my skin". Since qualia do not exist in the contrafactual, in that world, the person is a liar. In this world, he is not. That is a difference: QED.
Ah, but you may say: this is not a physical difference. No, perhaps not. But it most rapidly results in one. Liars and honest men are not the same. Especially when they lie about having any and every experience of existence. This is a difference which must perforce produce change: it beggars the imagination to picture such a world careening forwards identical to our own.
This is not physics. It is fantasy.
There are various intelligible rejections of the hard problem; Anil Seth's "Beast Machines", Colin McGinn's "Mysternianism", and Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory", all come to mind. None are completely satisfying or widely held, all are try to strike a balance between the problems of effective materialism and the more woo-woo frames of idealism and panpsychism (or, commonly, go hard to one end of the scale).
None, not a single one, not from the people who think a billet of 304 stainless steel has feelings or the ones who think the human mind isn't meaningfully differentiated from that billet in its cold unfeeling nature, tries to so fully reject our materialist knowledge of the physical world and regress into this literally medieval understanding.
The author may be experiencing an unbalancing of the humours.
And also, he rather coyly avoids stating what his actual beliefs are -- he's a traditional catholic, so his actual explanation is going to be something like a soul. (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html)
Only the faithful bring up Descartes and dualism with a straight face (not so much as a knowingly raised eyebrow for the audience), or make arguments like "this is how things are naturally phrased in English, therefore that must be how they literally, ontologically, are."
This one has less wacky diagrams, and also is more vague and thus less easily falsifiable.
On the other hand apparently there's a soul involved.
Both ideas are better discussed by their original authors than Bakker's strange bootleg. This post's philosophical soup is somehow even less convincing and coherent than Bakker.