Neri,
it would be so nice if sometimes you stepped down from your podium and instead of teaching us you tried to understand what the others say...
Neri » September 25th, 2020, 2:04 am wrote:I have been prompted to respond to what I suppose is the latest post seeking an explanation of the meaning of the so-called hard problem of philosophy of mind.
Actually what you might have been prompted to respond to is not what you suppose it to be. It is far from seeking and explanation to the hard problem of the brain/mind relation.
By the way,
The problem is simply stated.
How can the brain, a physical thing that can be measured and weighed, possibly cause consciousness of anything, when consciousness is not a physical thing and can be neither measured nor weighed?
This is no hard problem: between physical and spiritual there are a number of levels of non-physical things: there are a lot of virtual "things", such as mathematics, logics, language, virtual representations of reality, and all these are non-physical "things" that physical objects (computers, brains) can deal with without problems or any need of other non-physical and non-measurable entities.
Your next question is more to the point:
How can the objective cause the subjective? If the two are entirely different orders of existence, as they seem to be, how can one have any effect on the other?
Here you should be more careful: if anything which is sensed is elaborated in a relational and self-centered, emotionally colored, operatively oriented way, even before conceptual elaboration occurs, this makes the elaboration properly subjective.
What you probably are disturbed by is that stupid structures such as the amygdala, the VTA, the hypothalamus, can produce pain, and pleasure and joy and sorrow and well-being and discomfort, as they produce hunger, thirst, sleepiness and anxiety or rage.
These are non-physical things which we cannot justify. We can only feel them.
So the true problem, the hard question is what the hell means I am suffering, I am happy, what the hell is pain, and pleasure?
We give emotions for granted, and look for an explanation of feelings and qualia.
My point would be that feeling and qualia, and the diacrhronic image of the self that is built in memories and constitutes self-consciousness, can be easily accounted for by physical systems, once they are allowed to prove emotions.
The unsolved stuff is emotions much more than self-consciousness.
Finally, you graciously give us your farewell gift:
The existence of the hard problem does not mean that there must be a soul. On the contrary, the evidence clearly indicates that the brain causes consciousness. The problem is, we do not understand how it can possibly do such a thing.
Nicely stated, and appropriate if you had been prompted to answer to a latest post seeking an explanation to this, and not a post that YOU simply did suppose it was....
The paper cited in that post does not seek an explanation on how the body causes consciousness. If you just read the first paragraph of the paper you would have realized that the paper simply shows that and how subjectivity arises from brain activity and PRECEDES consciousness: consciousness is not needed for subjective processing of experience, self-consciousness rather follows from that.
Still, in order for experience to be not only self-centered and subjective, but actually "personal", emotional colouring is needed, and that is the hard problem, as pain and pleasure do not have a physical nature, and there is no way - as of now - to explain what they physically mean (they physically consist in specific neurons firing action potentials, but that is not what we feel). This is the problem and it is not faced in the paper.
That pain, joy, pleasure, sorrow and well-being exist and are felt is given for granted, and the hard problem remains.
Sometimes, it might be interesting to listen to somebody else's voice as well...