So, what is Chalmers' Hard Problem actually looking for?

General Philosophy
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Today I thought I’d work on my essay, instead spent significant time debating with Claude.ai, and digesting.
So I’d like to do a reality check against Claude with the following summary. If Claude misrepresents Chalmers’ please let me know.
Assuming it honestly reflects consensus, I’ve added some commentary and wonder if anyone would care to fill in.

Thank you.

Why does any physical process in the brain feel like something from the inside, instead of just happening with nobody home?

When you see a red apple, …

But there’s also the redness itself, the way red looks to you. Chalmers’s question is about that. Why is all that processing accompanied by a felt quality at all? Couldn’t a system do everything your brain does, recognize, name, reach, without anything being felt?

Chalmers calls it “hard” because he thinks explaining functions, no matter how completely, never touches this question. You could have a perfect account of every signal and still ask, "But why does it feel like this, or like anything?”

To me that seems as intellectually valid, as asking: why does this world exist? Well because it does.
Well okay somethings are simply beyond our ability to fathom, now can we get back to focusing on living our day to days?

What Chalmers wants, as an answer, is a set of basic laws of nature connecting physical processes to felt experience, the way physics has laws connecting mass to gravity.

(Long before we have even fully understood the subject in question!)

To begin with. Do you folks see the above quotes as legitimate representations of what David Chalmers, et. al are asking?

Can anyone explain why I’m wrong to interpret that explanation of what Chalmers’ Hard Problem is asking, as a supreme exercise in human exceptionalism and hubris?

Or to put another way, why shouldn’t it be interpreted as a demand for “Nature” to prove itself to us, before we can accept that we are fully Earth’s creations with no supernatural intervention anywhere?

You see, I’ve been paying attention to the output of science since the early 1960s with its stupendous achievements across every field of study, and lately especially since evolutionary biology has matured.

Given all that neurobiologists and evolutionary biologists have uncovered, and promises of future research revelations, I see all the steps to self awareness unfolding as evolving creatures slowly evolved themselves.

Even Chalmers admits it must have been an incremental process, so what’s wrong with accepting current evidence?

Instead I constantly hear and read suggestions about how science needs mysticism to bridge this final gap of accepting our sense of Self, awareness, with bounded-free-will, coming from within our living, breathing, biological creature body and only lasting until our death.

Does anyone have any thoughts to share?

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“Even Chalmers admits it must have been an incremental process.” Careful here. He accepts that experience comes in degrees, but not that evolution produced it. For him, experience is a basic ingredient that evolution merely organized. His defenders will say you’ve misrepresented him, and they’ll have a point.

“For him, experience is a basic ingredient that evolution merely organized.”

Experience is defined as interaction?

But experience is also simply what happens when two frames of reference interact. Sensing that interaction is a personal experience. which seems different from observing an experience. A distinction worth making.

Chalmers calls his view “naturalistic,” but what does the word add?

He proposes something that is not physical, that biology cannot explain, that no instrument can detect, and that must be accepted as a basic ingredient of reality.

Calling it “naturalistic” doesn’t make it part of nature.
I accept supernatural is an over-reach, still it is the conclusion many reach for.

“Science needs mysticism.” Readers will ask who says this.Chalmers doesn’t.

Okay some take issue at calling panpsychism mysterianism. But I do, and that’s seems a different conversation to me.

“Evolving creatures slowly evolved themselves.”

That would be a typo, “With creature (lineages) themselves slowly evolving.”

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Sorry, I only have some banalities. I’ve never really been much interested in this issue. It seems to require a level of expertise that I don’t possess, so I tend to avoid speculative bullshitting. But isn’t the hard problem basically this: how does physical matter give rise to something that appears categorically different from it, namely subjective experience? How do physical processes produce a felt inner life?

The distinction (real or imagined) holds significance because the hard problem sits on the fault line between physicalist and non-physicalist views of reality. For many physicalists, it’s either a category mistake or a problem that neuroscience will eventually solve by explaining how consciousness arises from complex brain activity. For the opposing camp, the persistence of the problem suggests that consciousness may not be reducible to physical processes at all. That’s why the debate generates a certain frisson of excitement. Often it isn’t really about consciousness. It’s a dispute over competing worldviews.

I can’t really comment on deflationary views of the problem, but wouldn’t it be fair to say that scientists and philosophers far smarter and better placed than anyone on this forum generally agree that the problem has not yet been answered?

Do you belong to the camp who says there isn’t a hard problem and the view is mistaken?

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The central factor in Chalmers’ argument is how much of the experience of consciousness can be reduced to a set of particular functions that can be verified through the scientific method.

Have you read Chalmers?

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Nicely framed!

Indeed, that makes as much sense an anything I’ve read.

Yes, I think I do.

Here I would have to disagree, I believe there are a growing number of scientists who think the Hard Problem is a distraction more than an aid.

The philosophical 2020 PhilPapers survey, had three in ten philosophers say no the Hard Problem, as not a real thing, and I have a list of ten scientists who dismiss it in more diplomatic terms then I may use, but same bottomline.

I should be careful about using a term like “waste of time” but that perspective is coming from looking at how we people have dealt with the most important problem we have ever been challenged with: How to constructively deal with humanity’s exploding population & expectation in a way that will provide our children a bright future.

That was the only honestly Hard Problem that mattered - tragically collectively we certainly failed that one.

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Not as a scholar.

It’s science that has held my life long passion.

It’s what we people have allowed ourselves to do to our world this past century, of course under the momentum of the past couple millennia, that has my attention.

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Did you read his work as a non-scholar?

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So, for a lay person like me, how would you describe the hard problem of consciousness, and what is your preferred answer to it? In simple dot points.

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Those selections do not include Chalmers saying:

I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness.
We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

—Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

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My guess is that most people who argue that consciousness is non physical also believe in a higher power and most physicalists are sceptics. Although there are other possibilities illustrated below.

Its probably not a debate that is going to be resolved on its own terms.

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View of mind / reality Higher power No higher power / sceptical Don’t know
Physicalist Physicalist + higher power Physicalist + sceptic Physicalist + agnostic
Dualist Dualist + higher power Dualist + sceptic Dualist + agnostic
Don’t know Uncertain about mind + higher power Uncertain about mind + sceptic Uncertain about both
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People like to make fun of panpsychism but an increasing number of philosophers of mind (including Chalmers) think it is worth considering. The basic problem is how to explain the manner in which subjective experience and introspective consciousness can arise from the physical or matter if we consider those entities to be entirely devoid of any form of psychic (mental or experiential properties or precursor elements).

Panpsychism in various forms has a long history in both Western and Eastern Philosophy. In fact it was predominate prior to the development of the mechanistic deterministic worldview derived from the success of Newtonian physics. I would like to point out that mind set is a metaphysical theory in its own right. The development of quantum physics has given panpsychism a new life and some people very familiar with modern physics have at least nominally considered the panpsychic thesis.

It is important to note, panpsychism does not say all entities are “conscious” in the same manner that human and higher animals. It does say that some primitive element of experience, awareness and mind are deeply embedded in the fundamental elements of nature.

No rocks are not conscious, in fact in keeping with integrated information theory only societies or organisms with complex enough composition or organization would possess the higher orders of mind and experience. However, in terms of ontology, these are differences in the degree but not the ontological kind of mind.

I personally subscribe to the type of panpsychism (termed panexperientialism or protopanpsychism) which derives from the process philosophy of A.N.Whitehead. Whitehead himself never uses the term panpsychism. Instead he discusses the experiential and physical (dipolar) nature of the fundamental units of nature which he terms “actual occassions” (events). The succession of events, and the flow of nature (past, present to future) requires the fundamental elements to have a certain relationship to other events and a certain kind of protoexperience which Whitehead terms “prehension” to avoid confusion with other terms associated with higher forms of experience.

In any event it is hard to see how purely physicalist explanations for the content of consciousness or experience can be expected. Physical correlates of consciousness certainly. It takes a functioning brain to have human consciousness. This does not imply that showing which anatomic structures and which neural pathways are involved in specific experiences or feelings will ever give us a satisfactory explanation for the experience itself. Some philosophers say the problem is not able to be solved. I think perhaps science will not solve the problem since objective observation is the hall mark of science. As a philosophy forum however the notion of neutral monism, that the fundamental units of nature contain both physical and psychical properties really should not be dismissed out of hand.

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The Chalmers argument does not claim what is non-physical but presents problems to reducing all explanations to a standard designed to exclude the question.

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Never read Chalmers.

That’s like asking your biological parents for a DNA test to prove they’re actually your biological parents. There’s nothing inherently wrong with asking, but the premise is funny to me: “Hey Dad, you seem too stupid to be my father. What magic tricks did you use to pick up Mom? Yeah, I’m adopted, prove me wrong.”

This is the main point I wanted to comment on. Some thoughts on this: if you were to bring a modern computer back to the Renaissance, people back then would widely consider it magic or supernatural. Why? Because it’s technology far beyond their current level of understanding.

​Looking at it from that angle, there is no such thing as the “supernatural” or “mysticism”, there is only science and technology ahead of its time. A lot of philosophers seem to miss this point entirely. The duality between the supernatural and the natural only exists as a product of time, human perception, and current knowledge limits.

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Then it will be difficult to correlate your comments with his thesis.

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Naw it’s fine as long as you have psychometry abilities or you can just not answer questions about the thesis. Either works.

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Quotes from Chalmers:

“The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel.1”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“Some say that consciousness is an “illusion,” but I have little idea what this could even mean. It seems to me that we are surer of the existence of conscious experience than we are of anything else in the world.”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“We won’t have a theory of everything without a theory of consciousness”
― David J. Chalmers

It seems clear that Chalmers is looking for an explanation, a theory not necessarily a scientific (physicalist or mechanistic) theory but even a philosophical theory to explain the existence of “consciousness”. Just a definition of “consciousness” would be a start. Chalmers has written a lot, spoken a lot and expressed a variety of viewpoints over time. They range from serious consideration of panpsychism to a notion that the question can not be answered by science (a category error). He is seeking something other than explaining away or ignoring what science does not address.

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I think there is an opposing camp which presents stronger opposition―namely that subjective experience as we intuit it to be cannot in principle be explained in physicalistic or mechanistic terms, because such terms cannot capture the “what it is likeness” of subjective experience.

The counter to that is along the lines of Dennett’s position, which is that our intuitive sense of what subjective experience is like is a simplistic, inadequate and thus mistaken model, at best a fiction, albeit perhaps a useful or even a necessary fiction.

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I’m closing this topic because the OP breaks the rules explained here:

Here is the relevant part of that announcement:

Whoever is interested is welcome to start a new discussion on the topic using their own words. And if anyone wants to criticize or discuss my decision, they can start a topic in Feedback.

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