"Hard problem" makes it out to be much more difficult than it actually is. To simplify things a little bit, if you combine a spatiotemporal sense (a sense of bounded being in space and time) with a general predictive ability (the ability to freely extrapolate in time and space from one's surroundings,) "consciousness" arises necessarily. It's what having such senses feels like from the inside; the first-person view. It's a matter of degree, of course.
The writing of Chalmers and its consequences have been a catastrophe for philosophy.
It's not hard at all when you acknowledge that such senses exist in the world, and that you (like others) possess them. As an aside it tends to foster a certain tendency towards empathy.
In essence, you're asking why there's an inside to being a self-modeling system. But "inside" isn't something extraneous, something additional -- rather, it's what "self-modeling" means.
Really the "hard problem" has a very easy answer, but it's a physical/functional answer, and dualists and obscurantists simply don't like it.
It's embarrassingly silly to say but I've frequently just boiled down the hard question to the question of "where is the experience of the color blue stored in the universe?" Even as a non-dualist, I still haven't found much of an answer that I like. I'm all ears if you've got a book recommendation.
The question presupposes that "the experience of the color blue" is a discrete object that needs a storage location. But that's the dualist picture in disguise. On a functionalist view, blueness isn't stored; it's what certain neural activity constitutively is when you're that system observing that blue.
As an aside, isn't it more weird that violet and purple look indistinguishable despite being physically so different? It's said that this is because our L-cones (red-sensitive) have a secondary sensitivity peak at short wavelengths. So violet light triggers S-cones + a bit of L-cone. Purple light (red + blue) also triggers S-cones + L-cones. Similar activation pattern = same quale. It's all functional/physical.
Read Tom Cuda "Against Neural Chauvinism." Also Daniel Dennett.
> On a functionalist view, blueness isn't stored; it's what certain neural activity constitutively is when you're that system observing that blue.
Why should there be anything a certain neural activity is when making an observation? This is adding something additional to functionalism. You're just sneaking the hard problem back into the picture without realizing it.
What is mysterious to me is why and how chemical reactions in a certain part of my brain create an experience of blue.
Yes some chemical change happened there, but so what.
These are not very unusual chemical reactions. They happen and are happening everywhere. Does all the chemical reactions going on generate an experience to some experiencer?
I think the flaw in your reasoning is the assumption that chemical reaction is causing the sensation of blue.
But imagine if the consciousness and what it senses cannot be separated. So the consciousness sensing blue and the chemical reaction happening in the brain, are just correlated. One did not cause the other.
One can ask where that correlation came from. I think that the such correlations are inherent in such worlds where consciousness is possible.
I think everything that we observe as physical laws, causality etc, are just such correlations.
This is where these questions take me. Since the experience is the only thing I can be certain of, I'm less drawn to "everything is physical" answers and more drawn to ideas from phenomenology and Bishop George Berkeley. And since I'm not super religious, I'm not really comfortable with those "answers" either.
>where is the experience of the color blue stored in the universe?
It is not stored anywhere. It is part of the consciousness that experience it. In other words consciousness comes bundled with everything it will ever feel.
The kneejerk response would be: Are you not conscious at this present moment? If we were to modulate your spatiotemporal senses with drugs or a lobotomy, do you doubt that you would be very differently conscious, or perhaps entirely unconscious?
I mean, there is a credible first-person answer to that question of yours, which each man can answer for himself.
But considered more seriously, the "hard problem" is an artifact of treating experience as a separate thing that needs to be generated. If you accept that self-modeling systems bounded in space and time exist, you've already accepted that experience exists -- because experience is what such a system is, from the inside. There's no second step where experience gets added. The question "why is there experience?" is exactly akin to "Why is there an interior to four walls and a roof?" The interior isn't a separate thing; it's necessarily constitutive.
> because experience is what such a system is, from the inside.
There being an inside to self-modelling systems bound in space and time is the hard problem.
> The question "why is there experience?" is exactly akin to "Why is there an interior to four walls and a roof?" The interior isn't a separate thing; it's necessarily constitutive.
That's given from three dimensions of space. This is not the case with subjective experience. Functional and physical terms don't have an inside where experience lives. It's what makes the p-zombie argument potent.
Let's put this another way. Functional terms are abstracted from experience to model the world. See Nagel's What It's Like to Be Bat paper on science being a view from nowhere, which is really about the fundamental objective/subjective split. Or Locke's primary and secondary qualities.
You can't get experience out of abstract terms. Experience doesn't live inside abstract concepts. We can model the world with them, but experience was left out at the start.
Would you agree that you are conscious at this point?
Would you agree that there are some set of physical laws, an initial state, and a set of random events to the universe that we inhabit?
Would you agree if we simulate this initial state on a computer, and step through it using the set of physical laws, and the random events, we will see the eventual emergence "you", who we know is conscious?
So are you saying that the entity inside the simulation is a zombie who is not actually conscious?
> Would you agree that you are conscious at this point?
Of course, I'm having a conscious experience replying four days late.
> Would you agree that there are some set of physical laws, an initial state, and a set of random events to the universe that we inhabit?
We inhabit a universe modelled by laws physicists have arrived at to describe observed behavior. That's as far as I'm willing to go ontologically.
> Would you agree if we simulate this initial state on a computer, and step through it using the set of physical laws, and the random events, we will see the eventual emergence "you", who we know is conscious?
No, I don't think computation is conscious. It's abstract symbol processing.
> So are you saying that the entity inside the simulation is a zombie who is not actually conscious?
Yes, it wouldn't be me. I don't think simulating the world is the same thing as the world itself, despite all the science fiction stories to the contrary.
I'm not a dualist or anything. I'm in the "it's weird and I have no idea what the answer is" camp. And yes, I've read Dennett. I'm trying to understand your views. Lots of questions follow, but don't feel like I'm barraging you unnecessarily. Just trying to figure out your view with what seem to me like interesting questions that I myself can't really answer.
I'm using "consciousness", "subjective experiences", "senses" and "qualia" as synonyms here, but if you see a difference, please mention it. Obviously "consciousness" has many definitions that have nothing to do with the "hard problem of consciousness", so I'm using it in this sense here. I'll use "qualia" as it's the word that relates most to the hard problem of consciousness. You can substitute it with "sense"/"senses" if you like.
1. Do you view qualia as an emergent property? Of what exactly? What is a self-modeling system? Is a human one? Where would the boundaries be; would they even be defined? The human body or the brain only or the nervous system? Or whatever neurons activate when a certain thing happens, like seeing blue or feeling pain? What about animals - pigs, dogs, rats, snails, ants, bacteria? What about AI, current and theoretical?
2. Could there be a set of minimal self-modelling systems in some abstract space that are the boundary of what has qualia and what doesn't? Like, these 1000000 neurons arranged like that qualify, but if you take 1 out, they don't? Or is it a fuzzy boundary somehow?
3. What kind of statements could be made about the qualia of yourself and of others? Not sure what kind of answer I'm looking for, but how objective or truthful would those statements be? Maybe "qualia is nothing really, we only have the set of equations that govern physics and everything else is an abstraction"? Like an apple isn't anything really, it's just a badly defined set of atoms and energy. There is no "apple" or "chair". Or is it something else?
4. What are your views on meta-ethics and ethics in general? Should we care about it at all?
We have a theory whose plain reading matches experiment at all scales.
Consciousness is something else. It is tempting for humans to pair mysteries up, pyramids and aliens, or whatever. But there isn't any factual basis for linking the experience of self-awareness with quantum mechanics.
Is there a factual reason we know digital minds couldn't be conscious? Where quantum effects have been isolated from the operations of mental activity. That seems like a premature constraint to assume.
