Yes, but if you agree with the other content of the article, it’s not a “Hard Problem”; it’s a “hard problem”.
The point of the article is to remove the ontological aura around the Hard Problem. One way to do this is to replace the question “Why does consciousness exist at all?”, which is not relevant from the physicalist perspective developed in the article, with “What are the conditions for consciousness?”
If we do that, the question becomes scientific, not philosophical. Consciousness is one of the physical phenomena that are hard to explain and that we observe before having an explanation.
As an example, we can consider dark matter. If we accept that it’s there, the task is not to explain “Why does dark matter exist at all?”; the task is to find its constituents and physical conditions.
The other relevant part of the article argues that there could be physical phenomena we can never fully explain because of limits on our access to them. Imagine a scientist inside a black hole trying to understand how the universe started, or whether it started at all. Some of the evidence needed to answer these questions might be inaccessible to that scientist. This should not, by itself, make the study philosophical rather than scientific, because science can also identify the boundaries of possible explanations. We can formulate theories and recognize that, given our understanding and the observations within our reach, there may be no way to distinguish between them because they provide the same observable predictions.
So I am not claiming that the remaining questions are easy, or that we can necessarily answer them completely. What I would argue against is giving the problem of explaining consciousness a unique philosophical status simply because it remains difficult or may never be fully resolved.
Yes, but if you agree with the other content of the article, it’s not a “Hard Problem”; it’s a “hard problem”.
The point of the article is to remove the ontological aura around the Hard Problem. One way to do this is to replace the question “Why does consciousness exist at all?”, which is not relevant from the physicalist perspective developed in the article, with “What are the conditions for consciousness?”
If we do that, the question becomes scientific, not philosophical. Consciousness is one of the physical phenomena that are hard to explain and that we observe before having an explanation.
As an example, we can consider dark matter. If we accept that it’s there, the task is not to explain “Why does dark matter exist at all?”; the task is to find its constituents and physical conditions.
The other relevant part of the article argues that there could be physical phenomena we can never fully explain because of limits on our access to them. Imagine a scientist inside a black hole trying to understand how the universe started, or whether it started at all. Some of the evidence needed to answer these questions might be inaccessible to that scientist. This should not, by itself, make the study philosophical rather than scientific, because science can also identify the boundaries of possible explanations. We can formulate theories and recognize that, given our understanding and the observations within our reach, there may be no way to distinguish between them because they provide the same observable predictions.
So I am not claiming that the remaining questions are easy, or that we can necessarily answer them completely. What I would argue against is giving the problem of explaining consciousness a unique philosophical status simply because it remains difficult or may never be fully resolved.