Why do you think we can find an answer to the hard problem of consciousness? You argue (to me convincingly) that it’s bizarre to claim there is no fact of the matter. But I think the conventional view is that there is a fact of the matter but finding it will be very, umm, hard.
(I am fond of the “meta hard problem of consciousness”, namely why you would say you think there’s a hard problem of consciousness. In principle that should be solvable..)
I’m not confident we can find an answer. But we’ve made progress in the last 50–100 years:
Dualism was (approximately) shown to be false through pure a priori reasoning, but nobody figured it out until the 1900s.
Neuroscientific evidence is widely regarded as evidence against dualism (although IMO the a priori arguments are more important).
Computational functionalism is IMO the strongest theory, but it wasn’t even possible to formulate this theory until we had a theory of computing, which was developed in the early-mid 1900s.
I gave a couple other relevant examples in OP.
There’s also the “working backwards from beliefs to evidence” argument: I’m confident that Dynomight is conscious; therefore, I must have evidence that he’s conscious. I’m less sure about what that evidence is, but the problem of “figure out what evidence I used to determine that Dynomight is conscious” seems like a solvable (if difficult) problem. (I can point to a bunch of pieces of evidence, but I don’t know how to weight them, or if there’s more evidence I haven’t pointed to.)
From a pure outside view, I guess I buy it. It seems hard, but we’ve made progress on lots of other stuff that seemed hard.
But I think the inside view is very problematic here! You have zero access to any consciousness except your own. It seems like this makes it ~impossible to learn anything through experimentation. For example, don’t we already know why you think I’m conscious? It’s because (A) you know you’re conscious (very strong evidence) plus I seem similar to you and (B) some assumption that your place in the universe isn’t that unique (no real evidence, but plausible).
Why do you think we can find an answer to the hard problem of consciousness? You argue (to me convincingly) that it’s bizarre to claim there is no fact of the matter. But I think the conventional view is that there is a fact of the matter but finding it will be very, umm, hard.
(I am fond of the “meta hard problem of consciousness”, namely why you would say you think there’s a hard problem of consciousness. In principle that should be solvable..)
I’m not confident we can find an answer. But we’ve made progress in the last 50–100 years:
Dualism was (approximately) shown to be false through pure a priori reasoning, but nobody figured it out until the 1900s.
Neuroscientific evidence is widely regarded as evidence against dualism (although IMO the a priori arguments are more important).
Computational functionalism is IMO the strongest theory, but it wasn’t even possible to formulate this theory until we had a theory of computing, which was developed in the early-mid 1900s.
I gave a couple other relevant examples in OP.
There’s also the “working backwards from beliefs to evidence” argument: I’m confident that Dynomight is conscious; therefore, I must have evidence that he’s conscious. I’m less sure about what that evidence is, but the problem of “figure out what evidence I used to determine that Dynomight is conscious” seems like a solvable (if difficult) problem. (I can point to a bunch of pieces of evidence, but I don’t know how to weight them, or if there’s more evidence I haven’t pointed to.)
From a pure outside view, I guess I buy it. It seems hard, but we’ve made progress on lots of other stuff that seemed hard.
But I think the inside view is very problematic here! You have zero access to any consciousness except your own. It seems like this makes it ~impossible to learn anything through experimentation. For example, don’t we already know why you think I’m conscious? It’s because (A) you know you’re conscious (very strong evidence) plus I seem similar to you and (B) some assumption that your place in the universe isn’t that unique (no real evidence, but plausible).