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?

1 Like
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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