Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11

[Soupie]

I have never said [HCT explains consciousness].

Hahahah... hahahahahahhahahhaha. Bwahahahahahhaha. :catches breath: hahahahhaha bwhahahaha.

Okay. I'm done now.

I'm curious... is there such a thing as a non-materialist physical explanation?

Yes. Think panpsychism or Strawson's "real materialism."

Essentially, this is the position that consciousness is not a property or phenomenon that causally emerges from non-conscious properties or phenomena but is itself fundamental or a fundamental property of matter.

As @smcder has illustrated, not without its own problems of course.

HCT is a physicalist explanation...

Ok. Good.

I'm now tempted to ask: a physicalist explanation of what? But no, I don't really want to hear your answer.

 

[Constance]

HCT does not explain qualitative/conscious experience, Pharoah. It just doesn't.

Pharoah has repeatedly recognized this, Soupie, and has also recognized that no one else has been able to "explain qualitative/conscious experience" either. I find it strange that you don't also see that Chalmers in particular has not been able to "explain qualitative/conscious experience. All Chalmers has done is to recognize the challenge of doing so and to give this challenge a name: 'the hard problem'. If anyone, scientist or philosopher or artist or social theorist, is ever able to provide a response to this challenge -- an answer to the hard problem -- he or she will likely receive a Nobel prize. By 'an answer' I mean an explanation that will satisfy both physicalists and non-physicalists alike. In general, the inquiry concerning 'what conscious is' is currently blocked by presuppositional ontological disputes that preclude genuinely interdisciplinary efforts to investigate the nature of experiential consciousness. As a person holding fast to a physicalist ontology, you insist that the hard problem of experiential consciousness can only be answered within the boundaries of your preferred ontology, a strict monism that lacks the resources to recognize the nature of experiential consciousness in any but physically mechanistic terms. Failing the accomplishment of an adequate physicalist-mechanist approach to the hard problem in current consciousness studies, you (among others) resort to one or another unsatisfactory attempt to avoid the scandal of the nonphysically explicable nature of consciousness in humans and other animals by asserting that consciousness must already reside in the q substrate of the world [a claim for which there is presently no evidence]. This would-be explanation of experiential consciousness does not "explain qualitative/conscious experience" either.

It seems obvious to me, and to phenomenologists in general, that we cannot hope to understand qualitative/conscious experience without studying the experience/experiences themselves that ground the development of self-aware protoconscious and conscious prereflectivity and reflectivity in the evolution of species of life available to us to study on earth. The hard problem requires more from philosophers and scientists than merely identifying the hard problem as the hard problem, as Chalmers became famous by doing. He merely gestured toward the door that consciousness researchers have to walk through, leading to confrontation with the experiential phenomena that require investigation.

HCT provides a clever description of how species and individual organisms have evolved and developed a unique point of view—a relationship, really—with the world.

HCT is more than 'clever', Soupie. And you've said much more than you intended to say about what HCT describes: a detailed overview of the stages of evolution through which "species and individual organisms have evolved and developed a unique point of view--a relationship, really-- with the world." You've admitted that the development by individual organisms of a "unique point of view" constitutes "a relationship, really--with the world." The WAIM question perhaps seems misleading to the extent that it suggests the possibility of a one-on-one, or one-to-one ontological explanation for the uniqueness of the coming into existence of each individual animal's personal sense of being as located within its environmentally contextual sense of the being of its environing 'world'. In plain fact, the individual animal's sense of its involvement with the mileau in which it exists grounds the reality of the lived world as distinct from the objectivist ontological theory of the world as impersonal, as mechanistic and capable of description without experience of it.

HCT doesn't even sniff a material, causal explanation for why the experience of deep blue exists for humans. Sorry.

I continue to wonder why you raise the question of why various species of animals experience colors differently as if this is the ultimate question to be answered regarding experiential consciousness. Maybe you can justify that at some point. But to respond to the first part of your sentence -- "HCT doesn't sniff a material, causal explanation [for varying phenomenal appearances of the selfsame world for different species] -- I think you've misunderstood the direction of Pharoah's thinking and the project of HCT.

 

[Pharoah]

@Soupie

Pharoah:
I have never said [HCT explains consciousness].
Hahahah... hahahahahahhahahhaha. Bwahahahahahhaha. :catches breath: hahahahhaha bwhahahaha.

Since we are having a laugh, let's have a quiz.
Who wrote this
"The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists "

SEP:
The words “conscious” and “consciousness” are umbrella terms that cover a wide variety of mental phenomena. Both are used with a diversity of meanings, and the adjective “conscious” is heterogeneous in its range, being applied both to whole organisms—creature consciousness—and to particular mental states and processes—state consciousness

Problems of Consciousness:
The descriptive question: What are the features of consciousness?
First-person and third-person data
Qualitative character
Phenomenal structure
Subjectivity
Self-perspectival organization
Unity
Intentionality and transparency
Dynamic flow
The explanatory question: How can consciousness exist?
Diversity of explanatory projects
The explanatory gap
Reductive and non-reductive explanation
Prospects of explanatory success
Why does consciousness exist?
Causal status of consciousness
Flexible control
Social coordination
Integrated representation
Informational access
Freedom of will
Intrinsic motivation
Constitutive and contingent roles

Quite handy (and basically meaningless) to be in the position that consciousness is itself just a fundamental property of matter.

@Soupie: "I'm now tempted to ask: HCT is a physicalist explanation of what. But no, I don't really want to hear your answer. "

HCT explains phenomenal experience.
NB. Chalmers: "the HP of consciousness is the problem of experience".
Unfortunately he does not qualify "experience" clearly and rather vaguely says that some people use the term "phenomenal consciousness" others "qualia" but I prefer "conscious experience" or simply "experience".
IEP: The HP is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious
IEP: The HP is the problem of explaining why there is "something it is like"
wiki: The HP is the problem of explaining phenomenal experience or qualia
various SEP authors:
SEP: The HP is the problem of explaining the qualitative character of experience or "what it is like"
SEP: The HP is the problem concerning the gap between third-person and the first-person accounts
SEP: The HP is why it is that a person has subjective experience ie. why there is something it is like to be a human being [interestingly the panpsychism entry]
etc..

Take your pick @Soupie . Are you still sure that Chalmers was making sense when articulating the HP? ... Who is talking bs? just remind me again...

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie

Pharoah:
I have never said [HCT explains consciousness].
Hahahah... hahahahahahhahahhaha. Bwahahahahahhaha. :catches breath: hahahahhaha bwhahahaha.

Since we are having a laugh, let's have a quiz.
Who wrote this
"The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists "

SEP:
The words “conscious” and “consciousness” are umbrella terms that cover a wide variety of mental phenomena. Both are used with a diversity of meanings, and the adjective “conscious” is heterogeneous in its range, being applied both to whole organisms—creature consciousness—and to particular mental states and processes—state consciousness

Problems of Consciousness:
The descriptive question: What are the features of consciousness?
First-person and third-person data
Qualitative character
Phenomenal structure
Subjectivity
Self-perspectival organization
Unity
Intentionality and transparency
Dynamic flow
The explanatory question: How can consciousness exist?
Diversity of explanatory projects
The explanatory gap
Reductive and non-reductive explanation
Prospects of explanatory success
Why does consciousness exist?
Causal status of consciousness
Flexible control
Social coordination
Integrated representation
Informational access
Freedom of will
Intrinsic motivation
Constitutive and contingent roles

I agree that the term consciousness covers a lot of ground. However re the hard problem, Chalmers makes it quite clear what problem of consciousness he's after. So I disagree that he is vague and therefore that he purposefully vague.

Quite handy (and basically meaningless) to be in the position that consciousness is itself just a fundamental property of matter.

See above. I too have made it quite clear what aspect of consciousness I seek to understand.

@Soupie: "I'm now tempted to ask: HCT is a physicalist explanation of what. But no, I don't really want to hear your answer. "

HCT explains phenomenal experience.
NB. Chalmers: "the HP of consciousness is the problem of experience".
Unfortunately he does not qualify "experience" clearly and rather vaguely says that some people use the term "phenomenal consciousness" others "qualia" but I prefer "conscious experience" or simply "experience".
IEP: The HP is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious
IEP: The HP is the problem of explaining why there is "something it is like"
wiki: The HP is the problem of explaining phenomenal experience or qualia
various SEP authors:
SEP: The HP is the problem of explaining the qualitative character of experience or "what it is like"
SEP: The HP is the problem concerning the gap between third-person and the first-person accounts
SEP: The HP is why it is that a person has subjective experience ie. why there is something it is like to be a human being [interestingly the panpsychism entry]
etc..

Take your pick @Soupie . Are you still sure that Chalmers was making sense when articulating the HP? ... Who is talking bs? just remind me again...

But pharoah, I think the above all target the same problem of consciousness. As @smcder succinctly said above, it's the problem of experience. I would add that it's specifically the problem of experience in a fundamentally material (i.e. Non experiential) world.

 

[Soupie]

This would-be explanation of experiential consciousness does not "explain qualitative/conscious experience" either.

@Pharoah as well

To hold that phenomenal consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality is not, as you say, an explanation of how conscious experience arises from a non-conscious substrate. (Note the in using the term consciousness I am targeting the "what it's like" problem of consciousness.)

However, it is an explanation of how the mind and body are related ontologically.

To suggest that there is something it's like to be quantum fields is not to suggest that quantum fields experience headaches when they stay up late drinking.

I think we agree that possessing a nervous system and brain are requisites for the subjective experiences we and presumably many other organisms constitute.

Furthermore, suggesting that phenomenal consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality is not to suggest that reality possess no physical properties.

Finally, the key is seeing that to suggest consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality and not a secondary, emergent aspect is to see that this is changes nothing about reality. Reality is as it is. What it changes is ones stances towards the presumption that matter/energy—whatever they are—are in sentient.


I'm still searching for a way to illustrate this point but one example might be—and this is probably a bad idea haha—temperature, where temp is the motion of particles, and this motion is on a spectrum from low to high.

Whereas one might say of motionless particles—there's no temperature here!? We might likewise say if base reality—there's no consciousness here!

But as the particles begin to move—and especially when they move at a rate past a certain threshold—it is easy to see that there is temperature. Likewise with consciousness—when the base substrate begins to evolve—and especially when it evolves into the organism threshold bringing with it complex minds—it is easy to see that there is consciousness.

But temperature doesn't go away when particles stop vibrating or slow down, and neither is the existence of consciousness contingent on organisms.

 

[Pharoah]

@Soupie "I agree that the term consciousness covers a lot of ground"—That is why I avoid saying that HCT explains consciousness... because the term consciousness is very broad and inexact.

"Chalmers makes it quite clear what problem of consciousness he's after."
"I think the... below.... all target the same problem of consciousness."
IEP: The HP is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious
IEP: The HP is the problem of explaining why there is "something it is like"
wiki: The HP is the problem of explaining phenomenal experience or qualia
various SEP authors:
SEP: The HP is the problem of explaining the qualitative character of experience or "what it is like"
SEP: The HP is the problem concerning the gap between third-person and the first-person accounts
SEP: The HP is why it is that a person has subjective experience ie. why there is something it is like to be a human being

I could not disagree more. I think that the multiple variations on what people think Chalmers says is the HP indicate that there is no clarity. Yes, these problems are intimately related but they just are not the same thing.

"The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists " was a quote from Chalmers, interestingly after his attempted articulation of the HP in 'Facing up to the P of C'. It's a Freudian insight, because he knows he is struggling to articulate the specifics of his HP himself (imao).

 

[Pharoah]

@Pharoah said "It's a Freudian insight, because he knows he is struggling to articulate the specifics of his HP himself"
You talk such bs sometimes @Pharoah

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie "I agree that the term consciousness covers a lot of ground"—That is why I avoid saying that HCT explains consciousness... because the term consciousness is very broad and inexact.

"Chalmers makes it quite clear what problem of consciousness he's after."
"I think the... below.... all target the same problem of consciousness."
IEP: The HP is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious
IEP: The HP is the problem of explaining why there is "something it is like"
wiki: The HP is the problem of explaining phenomenal experience or qualia
various SEP authors:
SEP: The HP is the problem of explaining the qualitative character of experience or "what it is like"
SEP: The HP is the problem concerning the gap between third-person and the first-person accounts
SEP: The HP is why it is that a person has subjective experience ie. why there is something it is like to be a human being

I could not disagree more. I think that the multiple variations on what people think Chalmers says is the HP indicate that there is no clarity. Yes, these problems are intimately related but they just are not the same thing.

"The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists " was a quote from Chalmers, interestingly after his attempted articulation of the HP in 'Facing up to the P of C'. It's a Freudian insight, because he knows he is struggling to articulate the specifics of his HP himself (imao).

Let's agree to disagree. I think chalmers articulation if the hp is clear. The hp can be articulated in different ways of course but the central question remains: how come consciousness from a nonconscious substrate.

 

[Pharoah]

Let's agree to disagree. I think chalmers articulation if the hp is clear. The hp can be articulated in different ways of course but the central question remains: how come consciousness from a nonconscious substrate.

Yes fine.
But how consciousness comes from a non-conscious substrate in my book is Levine's 'explanatory gap' 1983 and is not the same thing as the problem as to why we have qualitative experiences and why particular qualities feel as they do.

 

[smcder]

Explanatory gap - Wikipedia

Explanatory gap
"In philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the difficulty that physicalist theories have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced. It is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine.[1] In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels.

The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem".[2]

 

[smcder]

"Levine and others have wished to either remain silent on the matter or argue that no such metaphysical conclusion should be drawn.[1] He agrees that conceivability (as used in the Zombie and inverted spectrumarguments) is flawed as a means of establishing metaphysical realities; but he points out that even if we come to the metaphysical conclusion that qualia are physical, they still present an explanatory problem.

While I think this materialist response is right in the end, it does not suffice to put the mind-body problem to rest. Even if conceivability considerations do not establish that the mind is in fact distinct from the body, or that mental properties are metaphysically irreducible to physical properties, still they do demonstrate that we lack an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical."

 

[smcder]

Levine's 1983 paper is online in PDF

 

[smcder]

The Explanatory Gap: 30 Years after - ScienceDirect

 

[Soupie]

Conscious spoons, really? Pushing back against panpsychism

It is Anil Seth who I've mentioned does a good job of walking the scientific and philosophical tight rope of consciousness studies, meaning he appreciates the reality of the hp but remains a dogged materialist in practice.

 

[Constance]

"Our goal is to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social. By nature we understand here a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality.

With respect to physical nature, critical thought brings a well-known solution to this problem: reflection reveals that physical analysis is not a decomposition into real elements and that causality in its actual meaning is not a productive operation. There is then no physical nature in the sense we have just given to this word; there is nothing in the world which is foreign to the mind. The world is the ensemble of objective relations borne by consciousness.

It can be said that physics, in its development, justifies de facto this philosophy. One sees it employing mechanical, dynamic or even psychological models indifferently, as if, liberated from ontological pretensions, it were indifferent to the classical antimonies of mechanism and dynamism which imply a nature in itself.

The situation is not the same in biology. In fact the discussions concerning mechanism and vitalism remain open. The reason for this is probably that analysis of the physico-mathematical type progresses very slowly in this area and, consequently, that our picture of the organism is still for the most part that of a material mass partes ex partes. Under these conditions biological thought most frequently remains realistic, either by juxtaposing separated mechanisms or by subordinating them to an entelechy.

As for psychology, critical thought leaves it no other resource than to be in part an "analytical psychology" which would discover judgment present everywhere in a way parallel to analytical geometry, and for the rest, a study of certain bodily mechanisms. To the extent that it has attempted to be a natural science, psychology has remained faithful to realism and to causal thinking. At the beginning of the century, materialism made the "mental" a particular sector of the real world: among events existing in themselves {en soi), 3 some of them in the brain also had the property of existing for themselves {pour soi). The counter mentalistic thesis posited consciousness as a productive cause or as a thing: first it was the realism of "states of consciousness" bound together by causal relations, a second world parallel and analogous to the "physical world" following the Humean tradition; then, in a more refined psychology, it was the realism of "mental energy" which substituted a multiplicity of fusion and interpenetration, a flowing reality, for the disconnected mental facts. But consciousness remained the analogue of a force. This was clearly seen when it was a question of explaining its action on the body and when, without being able to eliminate it, the necessary "creation of energy" was reduced to a minimum:2 the universe of physics was indeed taken as a reality in itself in which consciousness was made to appear as a second reality. Among psychologists consciousness was distinguished from beings of nature as one thing from another thing, by a certain number of characteristics. The mental fact, it was said, is unextended, known all at once. More recently the doctrine of Freud applies metaphors of energy to consciousness and accounts for conduct by the interaction of forces or tendencies.

Thus, among contemporary thinkers in France, there exist side by side a philosophy, on the one hand, which makes of every nature an objective unity constituted vis-a-vis consciousness and, on the other, sciences which treat the organism and consciousness as two orders of reality and, in their reciprocal relation, as "effects" and as "causes." Is the solution to be found in a pure and simple return to critical thought? And once the criticism of realistic analysis and causal thinking has been made, is there nothing justified in the naturalism of science—nothing which, "understood" and transposed, ought to find a place in a transcendental philosophy?

We will come to these questions by starting "from below" and by an analysis of the notion of behavior. This notion seems important to us because, taken in itself, it is neutral with respect to the classical distinctions between the "mental" and the "physiological" and thus can give us the opportunity of defining them anew.3 It is known that in Watson, following the classical antinomy, the negation of consciousness as "internal reality" is made to the benefit of physiology; behavior is reduced to the sum of reflexes and conditioned reflexes between which no intrinsic connection is admitted. But precisely this atomistic interpretation fails even at the level of the theory of the reflex (Chapter I) and all the more so in the psychology— even the objective psychology—of higher levels of behavior (Chapter II), as Gestalt theory has clearly shown. By going through behaviorism, however, one gains at least in being able to introduce consciousness, not as psychological reality or as cause, but as structure. It will remain for us to investigate (Chapter III) the meaning and the mode of existence of these structures."

MP, author's general introduction to The Structure of Behavior, published three years before the Phenomenology of Perception, available online in the English translation at:

https://monoskop.org/images/a/aa/Merleau_Ponty_Maurice_The_Structure_of_Behaviour_1963.pdf

 

[Constance]

continuing with the introduction to the first chapter, concerning reflex behavior:

"I. REFLEX BEHAVIOR
Introduction

The scientific analysis of behavior was defined first in opposition to the givens of naive consciousness. If I am in a dark room and a luminous spot appears on the wall and moves along it, I would say that it has "attracted" my attention, that I have turned my eyes "toward" it and that in all its movements it "pulls" my regard along with it. Grasped from the inside, my behavior appears as directed, as gifted with an intention and a meaning. Science seems to demand that we reject these characteristics as appearances under which a reality of another kind must be discovered. It will be said that seen light is "only in us." It covers a vibratory movement, which movement is never given to consciousness. Let us call the qualitative appearance, "phenomenal light"; the vibratory movement, "real light." Since the real light is never perceived, it could not present itself as a goal toward which my behavior is directed. It can only be conceptualized as a cause which acts on my organism. The phenomenal light was a force of attraction, the real light is a vis a tergo. This reversal immediately poses a series of questions.

From the moment that light is defined as a physical agent which makes an impression on my retina, one no longer has the right to consider the characteristics which belong to phenomenal light as given in the former. The stimulus which we call "spot of light" is decomposed, for scientific analysis, into as many partial processes as there are distinct anatomical elements on my retina. In the same way, if one treats it as a reality beyond my consciousness, the enduring action of the luminous spot on my eyes is resolved into an indefinite succession of physical facts; with each moment of time it must be renewed, as the Cartesian idea of continuous creation expresses it so well. Again in the same way, the movement of my eyes which fixate the luminous spot posed no problem to naive consciousness because this movement was guided by a goal. But now there is no longer any terminus ad quem; if my eyes oscillate in such a way that the luminous spot comes to be reflected in the center of my retina, it is in the antecedent causes or conditions of the movement that one must find the sufficient reason for this adaptation. There must be devices at the point of the retina where the luminous spot is first formed, which appropriately regulate the amplitude and the direction of my fixation reflex. One would say then that each place on the retina has a determined "spatial value," that is, that it is united by pre-established nerve circuits to certain motor muscles such that the light, in touching it, only has to release a mechanism which is ready to function. Finally, if the luminous spot moves and my eye follows it, I must here again understand the phenomenon without introducing into it anything which resembles an intention.

On my retina, considered not as just any kind of screen, but as a receptor or rather as an ensemble of discontinuous receptors, there is not properly speaking a movement of light. A wave is not an individual except for the man who regards it and sees it advancing toward him; in the sea it is nothing but the successive vertical rising of portions of the water without any horizontal transference of matter. In the same way the "movement" of the luminous wave on my retina is not a physiological reality. The retina registers only a successive excitation of points across which the wave passes. In each of these, acting on a distinct nerve element, it can evoke a fixation reflex similar to that described above; it is because of this that my eye seems to "follow" the light. In reality its movement is the integration of a series of partial adaptations, just as walking is reducible to a succession of recovered falls. To generalize, physical agents cannot affect the organism by their properties of form, such as movement, rhythm and spatial arrangement. The spatial or temporal form of a physical event is not registered on the receptor; it leaves no other trace there than a series of stimulations external to each other. It is only by their punctual properties that excitants can act. Thus, as soon as one ceases to place confidence in the immediate givens of consciousness and tries to construct a scientific representation of the organism, it seems that one is led to the classical theory of the reflex—that is, to decomposing the excitation and the reaction into a multitude of partial processes which are external to each other in time as well as in space. The adaptation of the response to the situation would be explained by pre-established correlations (often conceived as anatomical structures) between certain organs or receptor apparatuses and certain effector muscles. The simplest nerve functioning is nothing other than the setting in motion of a very large number of autonomous circuits. The reflex would be, one could say, a "longitudinal" phenomenon. It is the action of a defined physical or chemical agent on a locally defined receptor which evokes a defined response by means of a defined pathway.

In this linear series of physical and physiological events the stimulus has the dignity of a cause, in the empirical sense of a constant and unconditioned antecedent; and the organism is passive because it limits itself to executing what is prescribed for it by the place of the excitation and the nerve circuits which originate there. Common sense believes that one turns one's eyes "in order to see." Not only is this "prospective activity"1 banished to the anthropomorphic data of internal observation, but it does not even exist except as an effect of the reflex mechanism. Not only does spatial perception not guide the fixation movement of my eyes, but it must even be said to be the result of it. I perceive the position of the spot because my body has responded to it by adapted reflexes.2 In the scientific study of behavior, one must reject every notion of intention or utility or value as subjective because they have no foundation in things and are not intrinsic determinations of them. If I am hungry and, absorbed in my work, I extend my hand toward a piece of fruit placed near me by chance and lift it to my mouth, the piece of fruit does not act as an object invested with a certain value; what releases my motor reaction is an ensemble of colors and lights, a physical and chemical stimulus. If, because I was inattentive, I put my hand on one side of the "goal," a second attempt at prehension should not be related to some permanent intention but explained simply by the permanence of the causes which had evoked the first. If behavior seems intentional, it is because it is regulated by certain pre-established nerve pathways in such a way that in fact I obtain satisfaction. The "normal" activity of an organism is only the functioning of this apparatus constructed by nature; there are no genuine norms; there are only effects. The classical theory of the reflex and the methods of realistic analysis and causal explanation, of which the reflex theory is only an application, alone seem capable of constituting an objective and scientific representation of behavior. The object of science is defined by the mutual exteriority of parts and processes.

But it is a fact that contemporary physiology has gone beyond the classical theory of the reflex. Is it sufficient to amend it or ought one to change methods? Might mechanistic science have missed the definition of objectivity? Might the cleavage between the subjective and the objective have been badly made; might the opposition between a universe of science—entirely outside of self—and a universe of consciousness—defined by the total presence of self to self—be untenable ? And if realistic analysis fails, will biology find its method in an ideal analysis of the physico-mathematical type, in Spinozistic intellection? Or might not value and signification be intrinsic determinations of the organism which would only be accessible to a new mode of "comprehension"?

 

[Pharoah]

Explanatory gap - Wikipedia

Explanatory gap
"In philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the difficulty that physicalist theories have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced. It is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine.[1] In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels.

The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem".[2]

Ah. The HP is the explanatory gap. Why oh why didn't Chalmers just say that in the first place... "read Levine"—he could have said. IEP, WIKI, SEP: "The HP, first articulated by Levine as "the explanatory gap", is... [fill in spaces as required]"

The reason why I think of them as separate problems is because HCT does not address the explanatory gap directly but does tackle the issue of why phenomenal experience must evolve in a physical objective world and be 'qualitative' and subtle. Explaining how physiological/ organic mechanisms etc do 'the phenomenal thing' is not what HCT attempts. So, they must be separate problems. Perhaps this is why @Soupie is vexed with HCT for not tackling this, what I would classify as, 'secondary' problem.
My current paper (currently with Biosemiotics Journal) has two key concepts in it to address the problem of phenomenal experience... I simplified the paper to just two concepts because when I started providing an account of how HCT might help with the explanatory gap there was too much 'confusion' for reviewers (and that part of it is far more speculative anyway because it requires empirical verification). I cut out all the stuff to do with how physical mechanisms might give rise to phen exp in order to simplify things.
Just as consciousness can be subdivided into 25 or so areas for which we might want answers, I think the HP is an umbrella concept that itself can be subdivided into several areas for which we might want answers. What I think would be helpful would be to come up with HP subdivision list, but since very few people see any division necessary or see all problems to be basically the same problem but worded differently, drafting such a list would be like bashing the head against a wall... hmm that's sounds fun.

 

[smcder]

Chalmer's comments on Levine (in Facing Up To The Problems of Consciousness)

"A technical note: Some philosophers argue that even though there is a conceptual gap between physical processes and experience, there need be no metaphysical gap, so that experience might in a certain sense still be physical (e.g. Hill 1991; Levine 1983; Loar 1990). Usually this line of argument is supported by an appeal to the notion of a posteriori necessity (Kripke 1980). I think that this position rests on a misunderstanding of a posteriori necessity, however, or else requires an entirely new sort of necessity that we have no reason to believe in; see Chalmers 1996 (also Jackson 1994 and Lewis 1994) for details. In any case, this position still concedes an explanatory gap between physical processes and experience. For example, the principles connecting the physical and the experiential will not be derivable from the laws of physics, so such principles must be taken as explanatorily fundamental. So even on this sort of view, the explanatory structure of a theory of consciousness will be much as I have described.)

 

[smcder]

And I've posted this too...I think in a slightly different version(?)

Consciousness myth – TheTLS

 

[Pharoah]

Chalmer's comments on Levine (in Facing Up To The Problems of Consciousness)

"A technical note: Some philosophers argue that even though there is a conceptual gap between physical processes and experience, there need be no metaphysical gap, so that experience might in a certain sense still be physical (e.g. Hill 1991; Levine 1983; Loar 1990). Usually this line of argument is supported by an appeal to the notion of a posteriori necessity (Kripke 1980). I think that this position rests on a misunderstanding of a posteriori necessity, however, or else requires an entirely new sort of necessity that we have no reason to believe in; see Chalmers 1996 (also Jackson 1994 and Lewis 1994) for details. In any case, this position still concedes an explanatory gap between physical processes and experience. For example, the principles connecting the physical and the experiential will not be derivable from the laws of physics, so such principles must be taken as explanatorily fundamental. So even on this sort of view, the explanatory structure of a theory of consciousness will be much as I have described.)

Yes
"this position still concedes an explanatory gap between physical processes and experience", but with HCT the gap is certainly bridgeable but requires empirical work.
"For example, the principles connecting the physical and the experiential will not be derivable from the laws of physics, so such principles must be taken as explanatorily fundamental." does not apply to HCT.
"or else requires an entirely new sort of necessity that we have no reason to believe in" does not apply to HCT (I don't think... if I understand this correctly... which may well not be the case because I'm rubbish at understanding these kinds of things... but given that Chalmers indicates that 'people'—unnamed—misunderstand a posteriori necessity, it sounds like I'm not alone). Why post this note from Chalmers @smcder?