This Cartesian dualism in various disguises is at the heart of most “paradoxes” of consciousness. P-zombies are beings materially identical to humans but lacking this special res cogitans sauce, and their conceivability requires accepting substance dualism.
Only their physical possibility requires some kind of nonphysicality. Physically impossible things can be conceivable if you don’t know why they are physically impossible, if you can’t see the contradiction between their existence and the laws of physics. The conceivability of zombies is therefore evidence for phenomenal consciousness not having been explained, at least. Which it hasn’t anyway: zombies are in no way necessary to state the HP.
The famous “hard problem of consciousness” asks how a “rich inner life” (i.e., res cogitans) can arise from mere “physical processing” and claims that no study of the physical could ever give a satisfying answer.
A rich inner life is something you have whatever your metaphysics. It doesn’t go.away when you stop believing in it. It’s the phenomenon to be explained. Res Cogitans, or some other dualistic metaphysics, is among an number of ways explaining it...not something needed to pose the problem.
The HP only claims that the problem of phenomenal consciousness is harder-er than other aspects of consciousness. Further arguments by Chalmers tend towards the lack of a physical solution, but you are telescoping them all into the same issue.
We have also solved the mystery of “the dress”:
But not the Hard Problem: the HP is about having any qualia at all, not about ambiguous or anomalous qualia. There would be an HP if everyone just saw the same.uniform shade of red all the time.
As with life, consciousness can be broken into multiple components and aspects that can be explained, predicted, and controlled. If we can do all three we can claim a true understanding of each
If. But we in fact lag in understanding the phenomenal aspect, compared to the others. In that sense, there is a defacto hard-er problem.
The important point here is that “redness” is a property of your brain’s best model for predicting the states of certain neurons. Redness is not “objective” in the sense of being “in the object”.
No, that’s not important. The HP starts with the subjectivity of qualia, it doesn’t stop with it.
Subjectivity isn’t just the trivial issue of being had by a subject, it is the serious issue of incommunicability, or ineffability.
Philosophers of consciousness have committed the same sins as “philosophers of life” before them: they have mistaken their own confusion for a fundamental mystery, and, as with élan vital, they smuggled in foreign substances to cover the gaps. This is René Descartes’ res cogitans, a mental substance that is separate from the material.
No, you can state and justify the HP without assuming dualism.
Are you truly exercising free will or merely following the laws of physics?
Or both?
And how is the topic of free will related to consciousness anyway?
There is no “spooky free will”
There could be non spooky free will...that is more than a mere feeling. Inasmuch as Seth has skipped that issue—whether there is a physically plausible, naturalistic free will—he hasn’t solved free will.
There are ways in which you could have both, because there are multiple definitions of free will, as well as open questions about physics. Apart from compatibilist free will, which is obviously compatible with physics, including deterministic physics, naturalistic libertarian free will is possible in an indeterministic universe. NLFW is just an objectively determinable property of a system, a man-machine. Free will doesn’t have to be explained away, and isn’t direct require an assumption of dualism.
But selfhood is itself just a bundle of perceptions, separable from each other and from experiences like pain or pleasure.
The subjective e, sense -of-self is,.pretty much by definition. Whether there are any further objective facts, that would answer questions about destructive teleportation and the like, is another question. As with free will, explaining the subjective aspect doesn’t explain away the objective.aspect.
Only their physical possibility requires some kind of nonphysicality. Physically impossible things can be conceivable if you don’t know why they are physically impossible, if you can’t see the contradiction between their existence and the laws of physics. The conceivability of zombies is therefore evidence for phenomenal consciousness not having been explained, at least. Which it hasn’t anyway: zombies are in no way necessary to state the HP.
A rich inner life is something you have whatever your metaphysics. It doesn’t go.away when you stop believing in it. It’s the phenomenon to be explained. Res Cogitans, or some other dualistic metaphysics, is among an number of ways explaining it...not something needed to pose the problem.
The HP only claims that the problem of phenomenal consciousness is harder-er than other aspects of consciousness. Further arguments by Chalmers tend towards the lack of a physical solution, but you are telescoping them all into the same issue.
But not the Hard Problem: the HP is about having any qualia at all, not about ambiguous or anomalous qualia. There would be an HP if everyone just saw the same.uniform shade of red all the time.
If. But we in fact lag in understanding the phenomenal aspect, compared to the others. In that sense, there is a defacto hard-er problem.
No, that’s not important. The HP starts with the subjectivity of qualia, it doesn’t stop with it.
Subjectivity isn’t just the trivial issue of being had by a subject, it is the serious issue of incommunicability, or ineffability.
No, you can state and justify the HP without assuming dualism.
Or both?
And how is the topic of free will related to consciousness anyway?
There could be non spooky free will...that is more than a mere feeling. Inasmuch as Seth has skipped that issue—whether there is a physically plausible, naturalistic free will—he hasn’t solved free will.
There are ways in which you could have both, because there are multiple definitions of free will, as well as open questions about physics. Apart from compatibilist free will, which is obviously compatible with physics, including deterministic physics, naturalistic libertarian free will is possible in an indeterministic universe. NLFW is just an objectively determinable property of a system, a man-machine. Free will doesn’t have to be explained away, and isn’t direct require an assumption of dualism.
The subjective e, sense -of-self is,.pretty much by definition. Whether there are any further objective facts, that would answer questions about destructive teleportation and the like, is another question. As with free will, explaining the subjective aspect doesn’t explain away the objective.aspect.