Here is the abstract of Pharoah's paper, look at it in light of the above:
ABSTRACT: The phenomenon of our experience is the property we identify as consciousness, which is why a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience would seem to explain consciousness – Indeed, Chalmers (1995) has described the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ as the problem of experience. However, the specificity of our conscious identity as distinct from conscious experience in general, tells us that following a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience,
questions must remain regarding personal identity and why each of us happen to be the individual we are, rather than anyone else. In this paper, I explore noumenal consciousness as distinct from the problem of phenomenal consciousness.
Now what this could mean is mistaking what Chalmers means by the hard problem - classing it as one of the "easy problems".
Here is what Chalmers lists as the "easy problems"
- the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to
environmental stimuli;
- the integration of information by a cognitive system;
- the reportability of mental states;
- the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
- the focus of attention;
- the deliberate control of behavior;
- the difference between wakefulness and sleep.
All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.
But all of these things he calls the easy problems: internally accessible, attending and awake. Is this what
@Pharoah and
@Soupie have in mind about consciousness?
If so, Chalmers says:
There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms' contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work.
So Chalmers must mean something else when he talks about the hard problem of consicousness.
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience.
Pharaoh writes:
Indeed, Chalmers (1995) has described the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ as the problem of experience.
So far so good ... so maybe it hinges on what we are calling experience.
Pharoah writes:
However, the specificity of our conscious identity as distinct from conscious experience in general, tells us that following a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience, questions must remain regarding personal identity and why each of us happen to be the individual we are, rather than anyone else. In this paper, I explore noumenal consciousness as distinct from the problem of phenomenal consciousness.
What is the
specificity of our conscious identity as distinct from conscious experience in general? What questions remain regarding personal identity? Isn't that what Chalmers and Nagel mean by being a subject? There is no other way to be a subject - except to have personal identity - otherwise you are an object - that's the whole rhetoric behind Nagel's argument.
Chalmers continues:
When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.
the whir of information processing is what Pharoah calls conscious experience
in general and what Chalmers calls "subjective aspect" (something it is like to be
a "a" - singular, subject is always singular - I can't
plurally be a subject
subject/object singular/plural
... cut my corpus collosum and there aren't two of me, there are two subjects - forever breached (see James' quote in the article) - what Chalmers calls "subjective aspect"
is Pharoah's "personal identity" the noumenal consciousness.
Chalmers again:
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. <--- @Soupie Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life* at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
*smcder - this is my comment what is it to have a
rich inner life emphasis on -
inner - except to be you? Here "inner" doesn't mean in your head (and so also in yours and yours and yours)
@Soupie has a potential contradiction here when he says we can't even know if someone else is conscious - the author says this is unbreachable even by God (or an omniscient science) - here "inner" means unaccessible, truly interior ... even if ESP is true, you only worry about someone knowing your thoughts but
not someone knowing what it is like to be you.
Chalmers
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". Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1995) is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.
*smcder - this may be crucial:
The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon.
Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem - the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author's own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena - of reportability, of introspective access, or whatever.
*smcder - so Pharoah's theory will have to
not be about one of these phenomena
Chalmers
At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched.
*smcder
One last bit:
By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained. (Here "function" is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do, but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)
"performance of functions" - would then be what Pharoah means by conscious experience in general and a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience
Pharoah
However, the specificity of our conscious identity as distinct from conscious experience in general, tells us that following a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience, questions must remain regarding personal identity and why each of us happen to be the individual we are, rather than anyone else. In this paper, I explore noumenal consciousness as distinct from the problem of phenomenal consciousness.
At least I've got something to look for now in Pharoah's noumenal paper and Chalmers and Nagel's orginal papers - and if these do turn out to be different things - then I am very excited to have a new understanding of the hard problem, for which there is a possible solution! and a
new hard problem to think about.
