What about underexplained cosmological epicycles like dark matter (in explaining long-standing divergences of gravitational theory from observation), or the Hubble tension?
It really fits well with the OP comments. Nothing really contradicts the theory but there's no deeper theory beyond it. Another comment mentioned as "nightmare" of dark matter only have gravitational interaction with other matter. That would be very unsatisfying for physicists but wouldn't something that really disprove any given theory.
The following seem likely to me: (1) Consciousness exists, and is not an illusion that doesn't need explaining (a la Daniel Dennett), nor does it drop out of some magical part of physical theory we've somehow overlooked until now; (2) Mind-matter interactions do not exist, that is, purely physical phenomena can be perfectly explained by appeals to purely physical theories.
Such are the stakes of "naturalistic dualist" thinkers like David Chalmers. But if this is the case, it implies that the physics of matter and the physics of consciousness are orthogonal to each other. Much like it would be a nightmare to stipulate that dark matter is a purely gravitational interaction and that's that, it would be a nightmare to stipulate that consciousness and qualia arise noninteractionally from certain physical processes just because. And if there is at least one materially noninteracting orthogonal component to our universe, what if there are more that we can't even perceive?
I think every tick is predictable from previous state. Inevitable. Therefore I really like how you put it: mind is just spectating.
If a rock starts moving in one tick, it affects other things in the next tick. Despite being deterministic, that rock is not a spectator.
So if the mind is a spectator, it's not for that reason, it's some other reason.
The "spectator mode" thing you replied to was a totally different concept, where the "mind" is some weird parasite to your brain and you'd walk and talk the same even if you didn't have a "mind". Which is quite a weird idea in my opinion.
Our brain needs to sense our "inner talk" so we can let it guide our decision-making and actions. If we couldn't remember sentences, we couldn't remember "facts" and would be much worse for that. And talking with our "inner voice" and hearing it, isn't that what most people would call consciousness?
If it’s completely impossible to even imagine what the answer to a question is, as is the case here, it’s probably the wrong question to pose. Is there any answer you’d be satisfied by?
To me the hard problem is more or less akin to looking for the true boundaries of a cloud: a seemingly valid quest, but one that can’t really be answered in a satisfactory sense, because it’s not the right one to pose to make sense of clouds.
I would be very satisfied to have an answer, or even just convincing heuristic arguments, for the following:
(1) What systems experience consciousness? For example, is a computer as conscious as a rock, as conscious as a human, or somewhere in between? (2) What are the fundamental symmetries and invariants of consciousness? Does it impact consciousness whether a system is flipped in spacetime, skewed in spacetime, isomorphically recast in different physical media, etc.? (3) What aspects of a system's organization give rise to different qualia? What does the possible parameter space (or set of possible dynamical traces, or what have you) of qualia look like? (4) Is a consciousness a distinct entity, like some phase transition with a sharp boundary, or is there no fundamentally rigorous sense in which we can distinguish each and every consciousness in the universe? (5) What explains the nature of phenomena like blindsight or split brain patients, where seemingly high-level recognition, coordination, and/or intent occurs in the absence of any conscious awareness? Generally, what behavior-affecting processes in our brains do and do not affect our conscious experience?
And so on. I imagine you'll take issue with all of these questions, perhaps saying that "consciousness" isn't well defined, or that an "explanation" can only refer to functional descriptions of physical matter, but I figured I would at least answer your question honestly.
(1) is perhaps more of a question requiring a strict definition of consciousness in the first place, making it mostly circular. (2) and especially (3) are the most interesting, but they seem part of the easy problem instead. And I’d say we already have indications that the latter option of (4) is true, given your examples from (5) and things like sleep (the most common reason for humans to be unconscious) being in distinct phases with different wake up speed (pun partially intended). And if you assume animals to be conscious, then some sleep with only one hemisphere at a time. Are they equally as conscious during that?
My imaginary timeline of the future has scientific advancements would lead to us noticing what’s different between a person’s brain in their conscious and unconscious states, then somehow generalize it to a more abstract model of cognition decoupled from our biological implementation, and then eventually tackle all your questions from there. But I suspect the person I originally replied to would dismiss them as part of the easy problem instead, i.e. completely useless for tackling the hard problem! As far as I’m concerned, it’s the hard problem that I take issue with, and the one that I claim isn’t real.
Animals are clearly conscious in that they observe the world and react to it and even try to proactively manipulate it.
The next level of consciousness, and what most people probably mean when they use the word is human ability to "think in language". That opens up a whole new level, of consciousness, because now we can be conscious of our inner voice. We are conscious of ourselves, apart from the world. Our inner voice can say things about the thing which seems to be the thing uttering the words in our mind. Me.
Is there anything more to consciousness than us being aware that we are conscious? It is truly a wondrous experience which may seem like a hard problem to explain, hence the "Hard Problem of Consciousness", right? But it's not so mysterious if we think of it in terms of being able to use and hear and understand language. Without language our consciousness would be on the level of most animals I assume. Of course it seems that many animals use some kind of language. But, do they hear their "inner voice"? Hard to say. I would guess not.
And so again, in simple terms, what is the question?
The average person may not know the word qualia, but “is your red the same as my red” is a popular question among kids and adults. Seems to be a topic we are all intrinsically curious about. But from a physical point of view, the qualia of red is necessarily some collection of neurons firing in some pattern, highly dependent on the network topology. Knowing this, then the question (as it was originally posed) is immediately meaningless. Mutatis mutandis, same exact argument for consciousness itself.
Evolution just had to give us some way to "feel", to be conscious, about some things causing us pain while other things cause us pleasure. We are conscious of them, and I don't think there's any "hard question" about why we feel them :-)
I agree with the poster (and Daniel Dennet and others) that there isn’t anything that needs explaining. It’s just a question framing problem, much like the measurement problem in quantum mechanics.
And when your fingers type that you experience qualia, are they bullshitting because your fingers have never actually received any signals from your consciousness in any direct or indirect way?
Imagine trying to figure out what is happening on someone's computer screen with only physical access to their hardware minus the screen, and an MRI scanner. And that's a system we built! We've come exceedingly far with brains and minds considering the tools we have to peer inside.
deepak chopra may interest you
There's a more straightforward problem, which is that all of science is limited by our ability to generate and test mental models, and there's been no research into the accuracy and reliability of our modelling processes.
Everything gets filtered through human consciousness - math, experiment, all of it. And our definition of "objective" is literally just "we cross-check with other educated humans and the most reliable and consistent experience wins, for now."
How likely is it that human consciousness is the most perfect of all possible lenses, doesn't introduce distortions, and has no limits, questionable habits, or blind spots?
But this might be easier to read: https://www.space.com/astronomy/black-holes/did-astronomers-...