Go to your favorite A.I., type in enactivist sensorimotor coupling, Merleau-Ponty and intercorporeality, and ask it for an elaboration of how these terms function to link subject and world for these writers, and how they differ from the subject-world models of consciousness offered by Nagel and Chalmers. That would be a good starting point for more specific questions.
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I don’t know how far this is true but I recall reading an article that claims that some species are evolving backwards, losing a little bit of their central nervous system with each generation. Deneuralization?
OK, I just can’t get my head around it. Why would a frog leap away from a flame if it didn’t feel anything? Reflex might explain that simple example, but there is a constellation of such behaviors.
Maybe we humans could make a zombie frog, but I can’t imagine how or why evolution would do it.
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So you might speak of rocks as having feelings? You would substitute ‘feelings’ for ‘causation’?
Thank you all. I appreciate the string of thought provoking responses and share a few replies. I don’t have the energy to go back through checking for typos, so please forgive the inevitable.
Okay, as far as it goes, but isn’t interaction and constant feedback loops at the heart of consciousness.
Are you familiar with Lisa Feldman Barrett? You may enjoy this.
Pufendorf Lectures 2024 Lisa Feldman Barrett - Day 2 (of 3) - Constructing the Mind
I thought I offered a good outline in my OP, I appreciate it was a little rough in spots so spent the past couple days refining and polishing. Perhaps give the updated version another read, plus soon as I can I’ll be adding a bit of a bibliography including Lisa Barrett, Arthur Reber, Michael Levin, Mark Solms, etc.
Care to elaborate on that?
I come at this with a keen awareness of the “Physical Reality ~ Human Mindscape divide.” I appreciate that everything I know is processed through my subjective self.
I also understand science can only provide us with observations and measurements and that the rest we humans need to fill in as best we can.
Are you suggesting confusion at why your body produces your consciousness–as opposed to someone else’s?
I would suggest - Impossible expectations make impossible problems.
I also consider this a disingenuous defense considering the repeated emphasis on the “impossibly of physical systems ability to answer these issues” - and the hostility towards incorporating biological awareness to the philosophical discussion, it in a serious manner.
Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that.
I see that as an excellent example of how we overlay human exceptions upon biological systems.
As opposed to the spirit of science where one observes and studies the physical systems to understand how they operate and what they produce. Then let the facts drive the story.
And just as important, if not more so, is that consciousness is a product of endless feedback loops - predict, act, observe, assess, predict, and so on till death do us part.
Well okay. It’s how learning works.
Then you offer specific critique of the failings of said assessment and we work out from there. To think we can know nature in law-like detail, seems a fools errand destined to fail.
Brings me back to the hubristic nature of the Hard Problem and its formulation. An idea built upon human ideas that some believe are mightier than the human reality we see unfolding in front of us everyday.
What do you base that mental fixation on?
Besides the shear unappreciated complexity of our inwards - does it ever seriously look at what surviving for generations requires in a fast paced unforgiving world??
The Hard Problem tries to make something magical out of “feeling like something” when feeling like something was the only route for increasingly complex living organisms, with their complex environments and feedback loops and recall, to go.
“Feeling like something” was the survival advantage that offered everlasting payback!
The drive to thrive. One day at a time. Day after day. That is what creature survival required. It is inconceivable that a Zombie-person, lacking all sense of self & experience could muster the grit required to survive challenging times and events. Zombies belong in pipe dreams, not the vibrant pulsating natural biological world as it plays out over uncountable generations — that modern man seems to have come to loath. Where did that come from?
Because the body is an outrageously evolved sensing organism and not a simplistic machine our intellect can reduce to a comprehensible schematic diagram.
I did agree with the general trend of your comment.
Still, why, why, why. Isn’t that the question that drives parents crazy, and that scientists avoid like the plague.
So, okay philosophers have constructed their impossible question - I say, in big part because we still don’t fully understand our body’s interactive biology - and that too many seem uninterested in exploring.
A body should be able to think and act?
But not to feel?
Why?
Because we believe that biology interacting other biological organisms are incapable of evolving feeling and engagement. That attitude I reject! It trivializes the power of evolution in a way that only a profound disregard of the topic can explain.
But that can only be answered by paying attention to what scientists are discovering, not confining it to philosophical idealistic intellectualizing confident they can logic-it-out.
What’s wrong with, the answers are in evolution - then start catching up on what scientists are actually currently working on. Lisa Barrett, Arthur Reber, Michael Levin, Mark Solms, etc., etc..
Great suggestion.
Claude.ai: Enactivism and Merleau-Ponty deny the coherence of that starting point.
There’s no pre-existing inner subject confronting an outer world that then needs bridging — subject and world are co-constituted through the coupling itself.
Ask an enactivist “how does the physical give rise to the subjective,” and the answer is that the question smuggles in the Cartesian split it should be questioning: separate a creature from its sensorimotor engagement with its environment and there’s no subject left over to explain.
So where Chalmers treats the hard problem as a metaphysical gap between two orders of fact, enactivists tend to treat it as a symptom of starting analysis at the wrong level — inside a private, disembodied mind rather than at the coupled organism-environment system.
Reading that is like a breath of fresh air.
I couldn’t find any article like that, nor the term. Secondary Simplification or Regressive Evolution is what you are thinking about. But referring to it as evolution going backwards is another example of people laying our human conceptions upon the biological complexity, that hurts our understanding.
Neurons have a very high metabolic cost, occasionally creatures find themselves in new environments that are safer (…) and they simply don’t require the neural investment that an earlier more competitive environment demanded. If this persists over generations, the body will naturally trim back unneeded hardware, to economize.
Evolution was a process of exploration, experimentation, and culling; inevitably efficiency and motivation became important players in the survival game. There was never a switch turned on. Biological or mythical. Connecting with one’s “Self” evolved over eons, and to different degrees.
Keep in mind, during the deep time of Earth’s Evolution, minute incremental advantages, such as the slightest sense of I Am or I Want, was all it took to create a difference that mattered and that would, with deep time manifest itself into, who knows what, take a look in the mirror, we are here.
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Yes. The reason why the problem of consciousness is felt so intriguing and “hard” is because those who consider it are automatically driven to consider also their own experience of consciousness. If consciousness were just a phenomenon external to us, we wouldn’t even have created the concept of “feeling like”, we wouldn’t have any idea what the expression “feeling like” means. Once we are driven to consider our own experience of consciousness, we, more or less consciously, are automatically confronted with the question “Why is there precisely me in this experience of consciousness, rather than just another person, among the infinity of billions of possibilities?” This question is the pure root of the concept of subjectivity; it is so pure that any form of objectivation, such as language, reasoning, thinking, will never be able to understand, to explain, to objectify it.
Because your consciousness is the particular experience created by your brain in its physical form. That physical form can only create one consciousness: yours.
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This answer seems working because you have considered my consciousness. It seems working to me as well the moment I consider your consciousness. The reason is that this answer considers consciousness from a perspective external to it: either you consider my one, or I consider your one.
If you, instead, try to consider your own consciousness, not from an external perspective, like when we look at ourselves on a mirror, but from your internal perspective, from the point of view of your feeling your living presence inside your own experience of your own consciousness, then you cannot but feel that your consciousness of feeling yourself is something exceptional, completely unique, impossible to express by words, totally different from all other experiences of consciousness that you can imagine happening to other people.
This way you will realize that all experiences of consciousness happening to other people are all extremely similar to each other: I and another person are both external to you and there is no reason why you should wonder how is that I am I and the other person is the other person.
Instead, the moment you pay attention to your own feeling your exclusive experience of being yourself, you instantly realize that you are not “just another one”. You are “the one”, the only one who feels your feeling. From this feeling of total uniqueness and exceptionality, the question arises: how is that this incredibly unique event has happened in this body instead of another one? Why is there me as well in this world, rather than just all other people, as it was already before my birth and will be after my death? Why, when my body was born, my absolutely exclusive consciousness, that I can feel right now from my inside, was born, instead of just another one, like the other ones that now I can see out there, in the form of other people who are not me?
Yes. Why “this”? This “perspective on a world” – how does it come to be? And if “this” is one of many, then why “this one”? Quite right.
I’m a little surprised by the tone of this response because I was very gracious. I said I basically agreed with you and that looking at the evolutionary history and survival benefits of consciousness is a promising area of study and analysis.
I just wanted to add that this, in itself, doesn’t constitute an actual solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Because a couple of things you had said, like:
…implied you might be taking that position. So I wanted to be sure you didn’t think you’d solved, or even partially solved, the hard problem of consciousness.
The point where we can say the hard problem is solved, or handwave it, is when we have a model that gives clear answers to questions about subjective experience. e.g. what’s the total number of primary colors – is it infinite?, do mantis shrimps see polarization as colors?, is there a maximum pain and are humans capable of experiencing it? etc etc
If you think either you’ve solved the hard problem, or if you think the hard problem is a bit silly, then be my guest and try to answer questions like these.
There are some interesting issues associated with this type of response on TPF. On the one hand, a poster can’t be held responsible for schooling every interlocutor in the basics of a complicated philosophical or scientific theory. On the other hand, if everyone simply referred every interlocutor to the primary sources, or to AI, we’d soon have no conversation at all. (And, if I may say so, doing it in a condescending tone – “go to your favorite AI, type in . . .” etc., as if the interlocutor needs childish, step-by-step instructions – is never appropriate.)
There needs to be a middle ground, don’t you think? I wonder if it’s ever been clearly stated in our Guidelines – I don’t believe so. If it were up to me, it might go something like this:
“When you have chosen to engage in a conversation, and are addressing a reasonable and pertinent point, make every effort to do so in your own words, or by offering selected, succinct quotes from primary sources. If this seems unfeasible, say why. And of course no one is under any obligation to reply to anyone.”
One of the advantages of a place like TPF is that you can – if you’re lucky – get good, point-specific answers from traditions you’re less familiar with, from people who know what they’re talking about.
Same problem as “Stuff emerges.” It’s too vague. It’s a kind of promissory note, or perhaps a statement of faith. Put another way: It may point in the correct direction, but it isn’t an explanation.
As for “what scientists are actually currently working on,” see above. A paragraph or two that cites relevant research would be much more helpful.
This question always confuses me.
May I ask if you wonder why that dog is not that other dog?
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The question “why that dog is not that other dog?” doesn’t create wonder because both dogs have a fundamental similarity, compared to you: they are both external to you, they are both external objects. Wonder arises when you get involved in the question, the moment you ask “Why am I not you, why am I not another person?” The moment you get involved, you get driven to consider not just two external elements, that is you and the other person, but also your internal experience of feeling yourself being you. This internal feeling yourself cannot but make you feel completely different, so different that you wonder: “How is that such a unique and incredible experience of consciousness, that I am feeling now, decided, happened to exist precisely in this body of mine?”
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Well, I am a poet who often enters the heads of dogs.
OK. I am able to feel the wonder without that, but each to his own.
For me, it sounds like, “Why is today today, rather than another day?”
It’s just what happened. Maybe there was a lottery or something, but I think biology just needed to give me a point of view.
@Mijin1, apologies of being harsh, it was the ideas championed by many, that I was reacting to. Not your thoughtful challenge.
I’m saying appreciating the fine detail of evolution dissolves the hard problem by revealing it to be a non sequitur when it comes to relating to evolutioinary biology.
I’m implying the Hard Problem is hard out of design and - and not a reflection of what a straight biological investigation into how creatures and humans interaction with the evolving world arrives at.
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This wondering about our feeling an I happens because our mind mixes two perspectives: the external one and the internal one. When you say
you are adopting the external one. This means that you imagine yourself being outside yourself, like an imaginary you flying on a helycopter and seeing everything, including yourself, from a detached position, from distance.
When you say
your are coming out from the helycopter, leaving aside that external perspective and paying attention to your feeling instead. Feeling is always internal, reasoning is always external.
The problem is that we are able, in our mind, to put both perspectives in connection, in a dialogue. The moment the two perspectives come in contact, the magic, the wonder, the clash happens. The external perspective wants to understand, because life has shown us that, by asking good questions and working on them, we can understand things that at first sight seemed mysterious and magic. However, this external perspective gets continuously frustrated, because it bumps continuously into the impenetrability of the internal perspective. This bump works like a challenge, so that we react by eleborating more and more complex theories, in this superhuman effort to penetrate into the internal perspective.
The problem is that the external perspective is nothing but objectivity, while the internal one is subjectivity. Objectivity objectifies instantly whatever it considers, so that it automatically loses sight of subjectivity. Objectivity should understand that it has limits: precisely because it is objectivity, it cannot understand what is not objective and cannot be objectified. What is not objective and cannot be objectified is subjectivity, that is your experience of feeling an I.
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Yes, that seems right.
I’m not sure I agree here. My reasoning all seems internal to me. Sometimes I go to the helicopter to look out and form an understanding, but it’s still me piloting that helicopter, isn’t it?
It’s just casting my consciousness outside of myself—which I consider the prime advantage we humans have.
I’m just not sure I see that as a problem. It seems our power.
OK. I think I maybe see what you’re saying. Western Reason vs. Eastern Being maybe?
But why do you see this as a problem, I’m wondering.
You feel reasoning internal to you because you feel that you do it from inside your brain, but actually it is based on detachment, on looking at things as objects and verifying logic by making comparisons. For example, you cannot do the reasoning 2+2=4 basing on your inner feeling. To do that reasoning you need to project your imagination outside yourself, look at 2+2 from an external perspective, make comparisons from that external perspective. This is what makes reasoning shareable, provable, expressible, understandable, objective. You cannot pilot understanding. Understanding is an act of obedience to what is imposed to you by external evidence. The same applies to reasoning. You cannot pilot reasoning and establish that 2+2=5. External perspectives and evidence force you to obey, to adapt your reasoning and your understanding to what gets forcedly imposed to you by evidence.
Putting the external and the internal perspective in a dialogue should be, as you said, our power, but it also creates conflict, because the external perspective tries continuously to get in control over everything and it gets frustrated when it realizes that it cannot penetrate into the internal one. This conflict can become so radical that objectivity can even decide to kill subjectivity. Objectivity doesn’t like those differences that it cannot understand. Some people who decide to live being guided totally by objectivity are at risk of becoming dictators, because, once we absolutize what we consider objectivity, we lose sight of our limits and of humanity.