dmb said to Krimel and DT:
You don't see how that resembles the distinction between pre-conceptual
experience and definable concepts? You don't see how that relates to the
distinction between dynamic and static?
DT replied:
No I don't, not based on what I've read of Chalmers so far. I'm only half way
through and trying to correlate with James by rereading bits of his, so it's
slow. Pirsig as I have said does not say much directly and substantive about
consciousness so you just have to keep him in the back of your mind.
dmb says:
After looking at the most recent responses from you guys it seems pretty clear
that we need to back up. It seems to me that both of you are pretty foggy about
what the problem is. Krimel, for example, has somehow managed to equate
pre-conceptual experience with the unconscious. That's just not what we're
talking about here and the hard problem of consciousness is not about
unconsciousness. For example, Pirsig says that Quality is the first thing you
know, James says pure experience is the immediate flux of life and that we act
on it, and Dewey distinguishes it the conceptual with the non-conceptual with
the simple terms "known" and "had". In each case, we are talking about the
immediately felt quality of conscious experience. We're just talking about the
distinction is between feelings and thoughts, between qualia and conceptual
knowledge.
Chalmers laid the problem out in a 1995 paper. I'd guess that his 1996 book
grew out of this paper. Here's now Chalmers explains the hard problem:
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we
think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is
also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is
like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we
see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness,
the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other
experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a
clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains
to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of
emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all
of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of
them are states of experience.It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects
of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of
experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in
visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory
experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we
explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to
experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a
physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.
Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems
objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.If any problem
qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central
sense of “consciousness”, an organism is conscious if there is something it is
like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something
it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal
consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here, but I find it more natural to
speak of “conscious experience” or simply “experience”.
dmb continues:
Let me repeat the central question, just in case you missed it. "Why should
physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?" Chalmers is saying
we don't have any good explanations for that. He's saying that physical
explanations seem to be adequate for the relatively easy problems of
consciousness, but then there is the hard problem. In that same paper he says,
"The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to
the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in
terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that
seem to resist those methods."
Seeing the color red, for example, can be pretty well explained in terms of
physics, optics, neural processes and the like. The physical processes involved
in this kind of explanation are so straightforward that it's really not much
different than explaining how a camera works. This explanation becomes nearly
worthless, however, when we start to ask what it is like to see red. Why should
a particular wavelength of light striking the retina evoke all the feelings you
might associate with red? Painters don't use red simply to accurately reflect
red objects, they use it to evoke feelings. Why should acoustic waves evoke so
much feeling that you gotta dance? Physical explanations can't explain why the
blues are blue. If you're in Amsterdam, red means one thing and if you're in
Moscow it means quite another but in both cases the inner meaning can be evoked
by exactly the same shade of red.
In terms of the difference between physical processes and the
what-it's-like-ness of experience, it doesn't even have to be that rich. Let's
say you are a genius scientist who also happens to be blind. You could have a
perfect understanding of every physical property and process involved in seeing
the color read and yet you'll never know what it's like to see red. The former
simply does not explain the latter. That's the problem with physicalist
explanations of consciousness. Chalmers is saying that physical processes can
only explain so much.
"This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why
doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner
feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are
discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and
categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that
conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the
very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a
term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an
explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one
side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere."
Again, let me repeat the salient lines. "There is an explanatory gap between
the functions and experience" and "a mere account of the functions stays on one
side of the gap".
When I think about this gap between functions and experience I can't help but
think of the gap between Krimel's version of James and my version. As I see it,
your emphasis on "perception" has turned James's pure experience into a mere
function. See, I've never denied the existence of these processes and functions
as you seem to think. But I have repeatedly objected to that kind of
explanation as reductive and irrelevant. I sincerely hope that Chalmer's
framing of the hard problem will help you see what I mean. Chalmers is saying
these functional explanations can't explain the felt experiences that arise
from them. Likewise, pure experience can't be explained in terms of perceptual
processes, let alone equated with them. That would be like trying to explain
the quality of a road trip in terms of gas mileage or oil temperature. They are
certainly involved in the road trip but that's just not what we're asking
about.
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