Hard Problem of Consciousness: Fundamentals and Applications

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Hard Problem of Consciousness

The difficult problem of consciousness investigates why and how humans have phenomenal experiences, also known as qualia. This is in contrast to the so-called "easy problems" of explaining the physical processes that enable humans and other animals the ability to differentiate between things, integrate information, and other similar tasks. The only thing that is required to find a solution to an issue of this nature is to specifically identify the mechanisms that are responsible for carrying out the relevant activities. David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher, contends that even if we find answers to all of the simpler questions regarding the brain and experience, the most difficult questions will still be unanswered.

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Hard problem of consciousness

Chapter 2: Consciousness

Chapter 3: David Chalmers

Chapter 4: The Conscious Mind

Chapter 5: Qualia

Chapter 6: Philosophy of mind

Chapter 7: Epiphenomenalism

Chapter 8: Artificial consciousness

Chapter 9: Explanatory gap

Chapter 10: Panpsychism

(II) Answering the public top questions about hard problem of consciousness.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of hard problem of consciousness in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of hard problem of consciousness' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of hard problem of consciousness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jul 3, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Hard problem of consciousness

The difficult issue of consciousness investigates the reasons and mechanisms behind human qualia.

In his work titled Facing up to the problem of consciousness, David Chalmers presented the first formulation of the challenging issue (1995)

... even after we have explained the performance of all of the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience, such as perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, and verbal report, there may still be a further unanswered question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?

— David Chalmers, Facing up to the problem of consciousness

Chalmers contends that there are two issues at play when discussing the problem of consciousness: the simple problem and the complex problem.

Reductive inquiry may be used to solve issues of a simpler kind. They are a logical consequence of lower level facts about the world, in the same way that a clock's ability to tell time is a logical consequence of its clockwork and structure, or that a hurricane is a logical consequence of the structures and functions of certain weather patterns. They are a logical consequence of lower level facts about the world. The whole of a clock, a storm, and straightforward issues may be deduced from its component components (as are most things).

On the other hand, the challenge is in determining why and how those processes are accompanied by experience. This is a difficult problem. Why, for instance, should the processing of neurons in the brain lead to the sensations that we perceive, such, for example, emotions of hunger? And why should such neuronal firings lead to emotions of hunger as opposed to any other sensation (such as feelings of thirst, for example)?

Chalmers contends that it is not implausible that the relevant behaviors connected with hunger, or any other sensation, may occur even in the absence of that feeling, and he bases this contention on the idea of the possibility of free will. This would imply that experiences cannot be reduced to physical processes like those that occur in the brain. This will be discussed more in the next section.

Chalmers is of the opinion that the difficult issue cannot be solved by first resolving the easier difficulties; in other words, doing so will not result in a solution to the difficult problems. This is due to the fact that the problems that are easy to solve pertain to the causal structure of the world, whereas the problems that are difficult to solve pertain to consciousness, and the facts that pertain to consciousness include facts that extend beyond a simple causal or structural description.

Consider the following scenario: someone trips over their own foot and yells out in pain. In this situation, the issues that are easiest to solve require mechanical explanations that involve the activities of the nervous system and the brain and their link to the surrounding environment (such as the propagation of nerve signals from the toe to the brain, the processing of that information and how it leads to yelping, and so on). The issue of why these processes are accompanied with the sensation of pain, or why these sensations of pain feel the specific way that they do, is a difficult one to answer since it is the hard problem. Chalmers contends that the study of the brain underpinnings of pain and the behaviors associated with pain does not lead to the discovery of facts about conscious experience. Instead, the facts about conscious experience are additional facts, and they are not derived from the facts concerning the brain.

Even if all of the necessary scientific facts regarding brain processing were to be explained, there would still be questions unanswered about what it feels like to be in physical discomfort. This is due to the fact that it is theoretically possible for there to be functions and physical structures of any kind even in the absence of experience. Alternately, they might coexist with a distinct group of experiences altogether. For instance, it is conceivable that a perfect copy of Chalmers may have no experience at all, or that it could have a completely different set of experiences than Chalmers had (such as an inverted visible spectrum, so that the blue-yellow red-green axes of its visual field are flipped).

One cannot make the same argument regarding clocks, hurricanes, or any other existent material objects.

In such circumstances, a structural or functional description is a full explanation.

A clock that is an exact copy of another clock is still a clock, A storm that is an exact copy of another hurricane is nonetheless a hurricane, and moreover.

The distinction lies in the fact that physical objects are nothing more than the sum of their physical components.

For example, water is nothing more than H2O molecules, and understanding everything about H2O molecules is to understand everything there is to know about water.

On the other hand, awareness is not like this at all.

Having complete and comprehensive knowledge of the human brain, as well as any other physical system, to have a complete understanding of all there is to learn about awareness.

So consciousness, then, must include more than just the body.

The concept of Chalmers is in opposition to physicalism (sometimes labelled materialism). This viewpoint holds that everything that there is is a physical or material entity, and as a result, everything can be broken down into smaller and smaller microphysical components (such as subatomic particles and the interactions between them). For instance, a desk is an example of a physical entity since it is nothing more than a complicated arrangement of a vast number of subatomic particles interacting in a certain manner. Everything, including consciousness, can supposedly be explained by appealing to its microphysical parts, if one subscribes to the physicalist worldview. A counterexample to this perspective is provided by Chalmers's hard problem, which argues that consciousness cannot be described in a reductionist manner by referring to its microphysical parts. This view has been shown to be incorrect. Therefore, physicalism must be wrong if the hard issue is a genuine problem; but, if physicalism is correct, then the hard problem cannot be a real problem since it would contradict physicalism.

Despite the fact that Chalmers is a naturalist and not a physicalist, he opposes physicalism.

There are quotes on Wikiquote that relate to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

The challenging issue of consciousness has academic predecessors that date back a significant amount of time before Chalmers.

In 2016, the philosopher Raamy Majeed proposed an argument suggesting that the difficult issue is connected to two explanatory aims.:

[PQ] The processing of physical information gives birth to experiences that have a remarkable quality.

[Q] These are some of our extraordinary characteristics:.

The first truth relates to the connection between the physical and the phenomenal (i.e., how and why do certain physical states seem like felt states), while the second fact relates to the very nature of the phenomenal itself (i.e., how does the felt state feel like it does?).

Wolfgang Fasching contends that the difficult issue is not one pertaining to qualia, but rather to the what-it-is-like-ness of experience in the sense that Nagel intends it; more specifically, the givenness of phenomenal contents.:

There is a widespread propensity, prevalent in modern times, to simply equate awareness with the qualia.

Nevertheless, it is very evident that there is something here that is not quite right.

We are aware of the itchiness of itches and the hurtfulness of pain, both of which are attributes associated with discomfort.

Therefore, traditional approaches to the study of the mind have a tendency to consider awareness as if it were composed only of the contents of conscious experience (the phenomenal qualities), but what we are talking about here is the awareness of the contents, the sheer givenness of whatever that is given in a subjective sense.

Because of this, the issue of awareness is not so much related to any purportedly mysterious, nonpublic objects, i.e.

items that seem to be visible to just the specific topic they are associated with, but rather to the nature of seeing itself (and in today’s philosophy of mind astonishingly little is said about the latter).

In his article What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, published in 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel proposed that experiences are essentially subjective (accessible only to the individual undergoing them—that is, felt only by the one feeling them), whereas physical states are essentially objective. Nagel made this assertion in response to the question: What is it like to be a bat? (accessible to multiple individuals). As a result, he contended that we have no understanding what it may mean to assert that a condition that is primarily subjective is really a state that is essentially non-subjective (i.e., that a felt state is nothing but a functional state). To put it another way, we have no concept of what the term reductionism refers to.

In 1983, the philosopher Joseph Levine hypothesized that there is a gap in our explanations of both the physical world and consciousness. He argued that this gap exists because our comprehension of the physical world is limited.

An example of a thought experiment that is often brought up in conversations about difficult issues is the philosophical zombie.

Another prominent kind of thought experiment is the knowing argument, which is also often referred to as Mary's Room: A fictitious neuroscientist by the name of Mary has spent her whole life confined to a black-and-white chamber and has never seen the sight of color before. In addition to that, she is an expert on the human brain and how colors are perceived by the eye. The knowledge argument gives the impression that a language of this kind could not possibly exist.

The formulation that Chalmers offered of the difficult issue of consciousness sparked a substantial amount of controversy within the field of philosophy of mind, as well as within the realm of scientific investigation. Some people acknowledge that the issue exists and work toward developing a theory of where consciousness fits in the universe that can solve it, while others try to demonstrate that the problem is not as difficult as it first seems once it is broken down into its component parts. Accepting the existence of the difficult issue but denying that human cognitive capabilities are capable of solving it is a third approach that has been taken.

In a poll conducted by 2020 Philpapers, it was found that 29.72 percent of philosophers feel that the hard issue does not exist, whilst 62.42 percent of philosophers believe that the hard problem is a real problem.

There have been many different ideas put up as potential answers to the challenging topic of consciousness. The first kind of reductionism is called weak reductionism, and it holds that even while there is an epistemological hard issue of consciousness that will not be answered directly by scientific advancement, this is because of the way that we conceptualize things, and not because there is an ontological gap.

Those who subscribe to reductive materialism are divided into two camps: strong reductionists, who maintain that there is no hard problem of consciousness; and weak reductionists, who, while remaining ontologically committed to physicalism, accept an epistemic hard problem of consciousness. Those who hold that there is no hard problem of consciousness are referred to in the following section as strong reductionists..

The concept of dualism refers to the viewpoint that the mind cannot be reduced to the material body.

Panpsychism may be reduced to its most fundamental version, which asserts that all material phenomena have consciousness (though its proponents take more qualified positions), Both objective idealism and cosmopsychism hold the belief that the mind or consciousness is the most basic component of the cosmos. The proponents of this theory assert that it is resistant to both the difficult issue of awareness and the combination problem that is associated with panpsychism. Dissociation, an observed phenomenon in nature, is used as an illustration by Kastrup to demonstrate that several minds, each with their own unique experience and perspective, might coexist inside a single universal mind.

Donald D. Hoffman, a cognitive psychologist, uses a mathematical model that is based around conscious agents, within a fundamentally conscious universe, to support conscious realism as a description of nature. This model is one that falls within the objective idealism approaches to the hard problem, and it states that "the objective world, which is