The hard problem of consciousness is starting to seem slightly less impossible to me than it used to.
Specifically, I remember reading someone’s dismissal of the possibility of a reductionist explanation of consciousness, something along the lines of, “What? You think someone’s going to come up with an explanation of consciousness, and everyone else will slap their forehead and say, ‘Of course, that’s it’”?
But that kind of argument from incredulity fails because it conflates explanation (writing down or speaking an argument that other humans will hopefully understand) with understanding (whatever-it-is human brains do to model reality).
For example, there are lots of people who mistakenly think a reductionist explanation of free will is impossible, who will not magically be cured by handing them a well-written explanation of compatibilism, because in order for that to work, they would have to read and understand the argument, and whatever process the human brain uses to read and understand stuff could be flawed in such a way that most people just won’t get it. Or more mundanely, it takes years to learn a technical discipline like math or chemistry. A mathematician can’t just tell an arbitrary person about their ideas; one would need to study for years to understand what the words mean.
In general, none of us really know what other humans are thinking; we’re just making inferences from observing their behavior. I trust the global mathematical community enough such that I believe it when I hear news that the Poincare conjecture has been proven, even though I haven’t built up the skills to understand the proof. But suppose some neuroscientist somewhere has come up with an adequate explanation of consciousness, but wasn’t able to convince their colleagues, because the explanation requires unusual skills for which there is no standard vocabulary and which are very hard to teach … how would I be able to tell whether or not this has already happened?
Maybe all of this was obvious to some of you (in which case I apologize for being a slow learner), and maybe some of you have no idea what I’m trying to talk about (in which case I apologize for being a poor explainer).
The hard problem of consciousness is starting to seem slightly less impossible to me than it used to.
Specifically, I remember reading someone’s dismissal of the possibility of a reductionist explanation of consciousness, something along the lines of, “What? You think someone’s going to come up with an explanation of consciousness, and everyone else will slap their forehead and say, ‘Of course, that’s it’”?
But that kind of argument from incredulity fails because it conflates explanation (writing down or speaking an argument that other humans will hopefully understand) with understanding (whatever-it-is human brains do to model reality).
For example, there are lots of people who mistakenly think a reductionist explanation of free will is impossible, who will not magically be cured by handing them a well-written explanation of compatibilism, because in order for that to work, they would have to read and understand the argument, and whatever process the human brain uses to read and understand stuff could be flawed in such a way that most people just won’t get it. Or more mundanely, it takes years to learn a technical discipline like math or chemistry. A mathematician can’t just tell an arbitrary person about their ideas; one would need to study for years to understand what the words mean.
In general, none of us really know what other humans are thinking; we’re just making inferences from observing their behavior. I trust the global mathematical community enough such that I believe it when I hear news that the Poincare conjecture has been proven, even though I haven’t built up the skills to understand the proof. But suppose some neuroscientist somewhere has come up with an adequate explanation of consciousness, but wasn’t able to convince their colleagues, because the explanation requires unusual skills for which there is no standard vocabulary and which are very hard to teach … how would I be able to tell whether or not this has already happened?
Maybe all of this was obvious to some of you (in which case I apologize for being a slow learner), and maybe some of you have no idea what I’m trying to talk about (in which case I apologize for being a poor explainer).