this would require us to still be baffled by consciousness after knowing everything about neurophysiology that might be relevant - until then, the keys to unlocking its secrets could still be hidden in our wetware behind a veil of ignorance
Maybe if you start messing with parts of my brain so I can become familiar with the third person correlates of consciousness (which in my usage refers entirely to the first person part) then I could learn something, but I could never learn why or how the first person exists. It just does.
If we perfectly reduce the brain to some scientific model, and I don’t doubt we will, we’ll be able to predict what I will say, but not understand why I’m observing it being said.
If you pose an incoherent question, the answer is 'that's not a valid question', rather than 'oh wow, how baffling'. The baffling is coming from forming what seem to be valid questions that aren't.
Another example of it is that famous who cuts the barber's hair (Russell's paradox):
The barber is the "one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves". The question is, does the barber shave himself?
Here's an LLM explaining it:
the philosophical/logical lesson is: sometimes a description that sounds grammatically fine does not actually describe a possible thing. The contradiction is in the premise, not in our failure to find the right barber.
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For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.
How many books one would purchase from the philosophy section of a book store have you read multiple times and what were they?
Doesn't that prove too much?
Suppose I claim that there is no objective world - i.e. standard solipsism. You may make various claims about the world being coherent to you and existing even in my absence, but these are first-person accounts, just like accounts of qualia and the existence of first-person consciousness are. I can claim that all that I'm observing is something generated by me that contains a part that argues that the world is objective, but that your failure to conclusively prove to me that objective reality exists is a consequence of the concept of an objective world being incoherent.
The claim, "you invent[ed] a thing that doesn't exist", seems to be just as useful to a solipsist to respond to someone arguing for objective reality as it is to a materialist to respond to someone arguing for first-person consciousness. Yet it's considered uncontroversial to assume (without direct proof) that an external consistent world exists.
No :)
Philosophy departments are like economics departments. They engage in long, complex, useless theoretical discussions that have nothing to do with reality whilst pretending that they are connected to reality.
This has caused a lot of people to waste years of their lives trying to understand what the hell is going on and many to mindlessly propagate idiotic, harmful ideas these departments 'teach'.
Anyone that talks of 'consciousness' and how it's baffling is in the midst of being misled by philosophy and/or neuro-'science' departments, much like anyone who even mentions free markets is being misled by economics departments.
In any case, there is a wide variety of views here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...
There is absolutely no reason to believe all aspects of reality are reducible to their parts and equivalent to representations of them.
You can say you are not baffled but I’m baffled by that because it’s like saying you’re not baffled about understanding how there is something and not nothing. “Why should there be nothing?” does not dissolve the mystery.
I think that was the ultimate point of the Turing test. We can't know for certain - so the best we can do is just ask.