Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
If you break a random common rock you find, you don't much care. If you break a living person's arm, you do. The reason being that the arm is not just an object but a part of a living person. What makes the difference? Well, clearly consciousness. Some sort of first person perspective that the person possessing the arm has. Some sort of feeling of what it's like to be that person (ouch!!!).
Cause and effect seem to be not just part of logic but part of the material universe. That is to say, a leads to b leads to c. This may be something we input on it (Hume), but that is not the main point I'd like to focus on. The main point is, in the development of the universe, cause and effect creates all sorts of events- world's exploding, atoms breaking apart, chemicals combining and recombining, explosions, compactions, collisions, you name it. However, applied to an entity with a first person perspective and you have "ouch!" "fear!" "excitement!" and so on. Nature doesn't care what object is being ripped apart and recombined. However, the fact that some of those objects have a first person aspect runs up against this general agnostic trend of universal laws and unfolding.
The nexus between an object being bombarded by effects of the universe and and an object being bombarded by effects that matters is consciousness. That is why the hard problem becomes ever so much more than just a hard question. It is the dividing line between an event and an experience.
And experiencing is where all the problems (literally) are generated from. The universe has no problem with heads being ripped off. The universe (that is to say, all the laws that unfold in the universe) are just following the laws. Gravitation is gravitating, EM is electromagnetizing, the strong force is strong forcing, and the weak force is breaking atoms apart. Mass is massing, etc. A rock breaking apart or a head being ripped apart from its body is of no consequence. It is just events eventing. The problems (literally) start with experiences, and mattering. I am not being literary. There are no problems before consciousness.
A p-zombie's head getting ripped off, would only matter in as far as there is an experience of a head getting ripped off. If there is none, it is like a rock being broken, nothing more or less. Rather, it is cultural and habit to care for something that looks like it feels something. It is not actually happening though in the sense of an internal feeling to that p-zombie though.
Cause and effect seem to be not just part of logic but part of the material universe. That is to say, a leads to b leads to c. This may be something we input on it (Hume), but that is not the main point I'd like to focus on. The main point is, in the development of the universe, cause and effect creates all sorts of events- world's exploding, atoms breaking apart, chemicals combining and recombining, explosions, compactions, collisions, you name it. However, applied to an entity with a first person perspective and you have "ouch!" "fear!" "excitement!" and so on. Nature doesn't care what object is being ripped apart and recombined. However, the fact that some of those objects have a first person aspect runs up against this general agnostic trend of universal laws and unfolding.
The nexus between an object being bombarded by effects of the universe and and an object being bombarded by effects that matters is consciousness. That is why the hard problem becomes ever so much more than just a hard question. It is the dividing line between an event and an experience.
And experiencing is where all the problems (literally) are generated from. The universe has no problem with heads being ripped off. The universe (that is to say, all the laws that unfold in the universe) are just following the laws. Gravitation is gravitating, EM is electromagnetizing, the strong force is strong forcing, and the weak force is breaking atoms apart. Mass is massing, etc. A rock breaking apart or a head being ripped apart from its body is of no consequence. It is just events eventing. The problems (literally) start with experiences, and mattering. I am not being literary. There are no problems before consciousness.
A p-zombie's head getting ripped off, would only matter in as far as there is an experience of a head getting ripped off. If there is none, it is like a rock being broken, nothing more or less. Rather, it is cultural and habit to care for something that looks like it feels something. It is not actually happening though in the sense of an internal feeling to that p-zombie though.
Comments (65)
This is plausible but not obvious.
I suggest that the training is much deeper than that. If pushed, then (if we are philosophers) we rationalize this training.
I hope and trust that adult humans would find it difficult to damage an extremely realistic babydoll. I suspect that, even if they rationally knew it wasn't alive, there would be resistance.
In reverse, a computer that passed the Turing test (etc) would be easier to 'kill' because it lacked a lovable relatable mammalian body.
All this makes sense in the light of evolution. Our fancy concepts came last ?
Before life perhaps. Problems are in the way, a way. Life is directed toward food and reproduction. [ Don't plants hurt ? I don't know. We don't hesitate to cut and burn them. ]
As I stated here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
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Don't know what this means exactly.
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If plants aren't conscious, do they have "problems"? Does reproduction and fitness not occurring present a problem or another event like a rock breaking? Either way, if the plant doesn't have the first person perspective, what's the "problem" exactly? Something indeed will happen to the plant without food and reproduction. What about reproduction, eating, and death but without a first person perspective makes something valuable or invaluable. I mean, we evaluate it from the perspective of someone who experiences. Does the plant experience no water, or is it simply not having enough water?
Yes, I should have quoted this and worked from it, sorry.
The issue is, in my view, that we don't very well know what we mean by feels something --- except for that (public / external ) cultural habit of doing stuff, of treating stuff kindly. [ Beetles in boxes and all that jazz. ]
It's as if the thought of interior hurt is a mere byproduct of the bodily training, derived from it as a false cause of it.
[s]Most[/s] Some of us tend to treat plants without much care, but my wife is sad when a plant dies though, and she sometimes feels guilt for not watering or sunning it properly.
Granted, but doesn't answer the question :).
I'd say a problem within a teleological projection.
I think we agree that giving-a-damn is central to human being-there. We are temporal because we want stuff, fear stuff, seek stuff. 'Want' and 'fear' are like projections of an interior. So we can say we seek and avoid. We learn from getting hurt, getting food. We 'remember' (find shorter, safer paths, etc.)
Both objects and subjects (i.e. phenomenally self-referring/reflexive objects) are emergent "effects of the universe" ... neither of which "matter" on the cosmic scale. "Consciousness" seems the phenomenal illusion of being 'more than an object', even somehow separate / alienated from the rest of universe of objects more bug than feature; I think, instead of "consciousness", adaptive intelligence (by which knowledge of the universe is created) is the property, or functionality, that distinguishes mere objects from mattering objects.
Do teleological projections have problems, or do agents have problems? Are they agents if there is no perspective there? A machine can be coded thus as you indicated to replicate...
There is a subject this is happening to.. a perspective in the first place.
Correct (doesn't matter on a cosmic scale). That is why I said, to the universe a rock breaking and head rolling doesn't matter (obviously).
Quoting 180 Proof
Does changing the word to adaptive intelligence change much? The hard problem lies in the slippery word "created". That is the hard problem that needs explaining itself. Are we getting diamonds from coal here? Enough computation = subject? What is the dividing line other than what we know on either side of that line (plant / primitive animal perhaps).
A planet exploding matters not to the planet. A black hole sucking in matter matters not to the matter. Space warping matters not to space. A subject however, is where "matter" and "value" come into play. The universe is full of explosions and destruction of objects. It only matters once there are subjects. No problems occur until subjects. Nothing matters in the universe other than some relation to a subject.
And this "matters ... to a subject" doesn't matter.
Obviously I think it does. Consciousness =/= adaptive intelligence, especially in the context in which I've used these terms.
It's just hard to speak for plants. From the outside we can think of their code trying to replicate, colliding with obstacles (rival plants, not enough water,...)
Quoting schopenhauer1
As humans we tend to associate agents and perspectives. We hold agents responsible for claims as well as (other, less explicitly symbolic) deeds.
As I see it, there is a body which is trained into being something like a subject. The world is 'there' for this creature. That's how we tend to understand it --- without having much of a grip, seems to be, on what it means for a creature to be or have its thereness.
We can take an external view and look at patterns that stubbornly resist being erased. The pattern doesn't 'want' to die. It'll sacrifice instantiations. Schopenhauer's insect is ready to die, having laid its eggs.
Or we can try to talk about what it feels like. FWIW, I think I get your point and agree, so I'm only being difficult on the level of emphasizing the slipperiness of these concepts.
It matters to the subject.
Quoting 180 Proof
Doesnt explain how or why that answers the hard problem or explains it away etc.
I like events eventing. It's like the world worlding.
What you are saying is almost tautological, which doesn't mean it's not worth saying. We could also just talk of the possibility of feeling hurt. Feeling is first. But feeling is 'under' or 'other than' concepts. So it's difficult to say it. Maybe this is why Schopenhauer claimed we knew the heart of reality directly.
Magical thereness generated like the engine that could something out of nothing. Illusions that are not explained etc.
A replicating thing that has patterns has a thereness (as in a point of view?). What makes it different than other events in the universe if it is just patterns without an internalness to it?
Yes true. He does put primacy on the internal aspect. The subject for object, object for subject etc.
I get what you are trying to say and mostly agree. It's because we give a fuck that we have problems.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Things tend to fall apart, but here we are, strange primates, increasing in complexity, godlike cyborgs, now creating synthetic brains better than our own. Even from the outside, we are not drifting spacerock.
Slightly more complex enduring patterns. Why give primacy to photosynthesis over the strong force? What did electromagnatism and gravity and basic elements and molecules ever do that make them less than photosynthesis?
Even here we are mostly on the same page. The hard problem is interesting, but I think there's a semantic problem which gets taken for granted : people don't know what they mean by 'consciousness' in a metaphysical context.
...it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
It's a hard problem in that we know that there are things that don't sense the sky as "blue" or sense at all and we know there are things that sense. Barring p-zombies and behaviorism, we think that needs something that explains it.
Interesting question. I'm not a physicist, but I think it'd be about drawing a thermodynamic boundary. So it's hard to call the universe an organism, because it has no environment. Life climbs a ladder. It 'shits' more disorder than it creates. We are flowers of the death of the sun.
I don't think we know this, but most of us feel/think it in some sense. We nurture our young. Our doings are deeper than our rationalizations.
No I get that this may be a definition of life, but I mean, what makes it have more primacy than any other event?
This is obfuscating. What do you mean we don't "know" this?
We say it does because it matters that our babies get milk and are kept warm. We also love puppies and squirrels.
Like I said, semantic problem. You can check out my 'the being of meaning' thread for more, if you are curious.
I can talk the usual sloppy talk in ordinary life, but I think Hegel and Heideggar are right. There's a blurry average intelligibility that mostly doesn't notice its lack of grip. One emits the usual platitudes, appeals to the obvious, without hearing that one's thinking is being done for one, by one [ das Man ].
Philosophy makes darkness visible, drags ignorance into the light, wakes up the marching zombie.
Yes animals with a first person perspective, but of anything else? Photosynthesis?
Not sure why this is a bigger deal. We usually say that some things can sense and be aware of things and some things can't. You disagree? On a sort of panpsychist ground? Or if not, how?
This is an empirical question. Some humans nurture plants and beetles. Few if any nurture rocks.
No. I don't disagree. I just don't think we know very well what we mean.
Humans do, because the feel something towards those plants. The plants don't feel something though. Or are you saying they do besides the events of reproduction and homeostasis, which isn't feeling.
I don't know what it means to say so. Yes, I can talk the usual fuzzy talk. That's why I say look to deeds. We incinerate the dead, anesthetize the living for root canals.
You'd have to explain how we don't know very well what we mean. Examples or something of the sort.
But we don't incinerate the living (or we shouldn't) and anesthetize the dead :smile:.
Sure !
But the use of 'but' doesn't make sense here, because you are merely expanding my point.
And thus simply reproducing and homeostasis can't be the dividing line of what matters as that is misapplying. Rather, feeling or awareness, etc. And here, I can agree that we have fuzzy words. Sensation, "what-it's-like-ness". This would be misapplied perhaps to non-animals, even living things, as much as our heart goes out to the little buggers (because it matters to us). It may even be misapplied to uni-cellular and very primitive animals. At that point, what is simply events eventing (behaviors all the way down), and what is "feels-likeness"?
The boundary is rough, uncertain, controversial.
I grant you that it's only things that give a damn that can have problems (and tentatively project giving a damn with all its problems on other things.)
I've been attending a couple of online Q&A's by Evan Thompson, who's a philosopher and phenomenologist, one of the co-authors of the influential book The Embodied Mind. He is exploring 'biopsychism' - the question of whether all life is sentient. One of his other books is Mind in Life.
He has a paper suggesting that qualia - broadly speaking, knowledge of good and bad - comes into existence with any form of living organism. There's nothing good or bad in chemistry or physics - stuff just happens. But as soon as there's a living organism, even the most rudimentary, then that organism has to navigate away from what harms and towards what helps. So the emergence of sentient life-forms is the emergence of a dimension of being that is not possible in the inorganic domain.
The video is here. The paper is linked in the description. (Yet another hour-long youtube video, of which there are now millions :yikes: )
Very good, this is why I was arguing in some other thread, that 'judgement' is fundamental to living systems. This perspective gives us a different way of looking at the reality of free will.
It totally makes sense that life responds differentially and can (must ? ) be interpreted as seeking and avoiding.
But qualia are slippery eels.
I've noticed that the term is only ever used in discussions connected to a particular clique of American academic philosophers - the usual suspects of Dennett/Churchlands/Rosenberg - who, I think, introduced it to be able to argue the case on their own terms in terms of an obscure piece of specialised jargon. (You would never encounter it in daily speech, or general literature.)
But the way to simplify it, is to think of it simply as 'quality' - being or consciousness has a qualitative dimension (Chalmer's awkward phrase 'what-it-is-like-ness'). This brings to mind the book Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M Pirsig, which has a lot to say about 'the metaphysics of quality'. I asked our friendly bot to summarize that for us:
[quote=ChatGPT]In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig distinguishes between two modes of understanding the world: the classic and the romantic. The classic mode of understanding is based on the rational and analytical approach of traditional philosophy, while the romantic mode is based on intuition and direct experience. According to Pirsig, these two modes of understanding are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary, and he believes that they can be integrated through a metaphysics of quality.
Pirsig sees quality as a kind of objective reality that is independent of subjective perceptions or preferences, and that is inherent in all things. He believes that the pursuit of quality is what gives meaning and purpose to human existence, and that it is the key to a fulfilling and satisfying life. The metaphysics of quality that Pirsig proposes is an attempt to reconcile the classical and romantic modes of understanding by recognizing the importance of both reason and intuition in the pursuit of quality.[/quote]
Now, notice how this stands against David Hume's original formulation of the 'is/ought problem' which articulates the problem of how to derive the qualitative 'ought' from the quantitative 'is'. And around that, revolves one of the principle problems of modern ethics. This is the tip of a large iceberg so I won't elaborate it here.
To distinguish between what is to be sought, and what is to be avoided, is to make a distinction of kind, which is to categorize, and this is a qualia based judgement.
In careful, technical conversation, it's hard to make sense of qualia. It's hard to even point out the logical difficultly to people, because our ordinary way of talking obscures the issue. This is the Motte and Bailey confusion as explored by Ryle. So people don't 'get' Wittgenstein's point. There is 'obviously' something like 'direct experience.' One says so and one agrees. Of course. But not of course. The problem of the meaning of such signs is overlooked. One has bills to pay, places to be, more visceral myths to elaborate, something juicier to chew on.
I say : so you assume. So you happen to interpret, projecting expired metaphysics on our fellow mammals.
Even thermostats respond differentially, categorize. Check Sellars maybe on what it might mean to really apply a concept and not just react to the presence of X.
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:fire: :100: I'm jazzed by the way you dance!
As I discern things, there is no "hard problem" for scientists, just another hard confusion that semantically bewitches philosophers.
@schopenhauer1
Quoting 180 Proof
I agree. But what do you make of 'wondering at a tautology' ? Do you see/feel why this confusion is tempting ? I love music. Feeling is first in some sense, but feeling is also senseless or aconceptual, but that too is nonsense. See what I mean ? Have you wrestled with this eel ?
I like the addition of [ just ] to 'drifting spacerock.' Well played.
More context plesse.
I suspect you agree with Freddy ...
[quote=On the Genealogy of Morals]But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed the deed is everything.[/quote]
Philosophers, more than most, are 'bewitched by language', no?
:cool:
Sure. A bouquet of W quotes:
It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
...
The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.
To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
Yes. The doer is a fiction, so even 'deed' is no longer the right word. But taking phrases as tools, as flags being waved, screwdrivers being twisted, I answer yes.
Doers are fictional / conventional (essentially social) foci of responsibility.
Oh that's a tough one.
Yes, if we focus on how useless these philosophers are, how much fun they have splashing around in their confusion. Regular folks (almost by definition) just use the usual word tools in the usual ways.
No, if we acknowledge how much better a strong philosopher is at 'hearing' the hollowness of ordinary usage.
A good philosopher might be defined in terms of an extreme sensitivity to semantic and inferential norms. But we got to make room for Nietzsche: strong philosophers are possessed. They think because they feel the world differently. I love John Coltrane. I can think of a chain of words from a beloved philosopher as another kind of music that moves through time. (Hobbes' chapter 'Of Man' is like this for me.)
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:up:
Could you elaborate on the bold part ? I think I grasp the underlined part.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Folks can't say what p-zombies are supposed to lack. The consciousness we can talk about is 'material' in the sense that we have public criteria for its application.
Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.
Searle / Sarl
...if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have...
Clearly the human in this case is the relatively stupid meatbot while instruction book hosts / performs most of the intelligence. It's weird that Sarl thought this proved that computers don't 'really' think. This is maybe the problem of the meaning(lessness) of being again in the more typical first-person register (which dilutes it by taking too much for granted.) 'Thrusting against the limits of language. '
You might like this:
[i]folly -
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what is the word[/i]
http://www.samuel-beckett.net/whatistheword.html
Thermostats don't seek and avoid. Any categorizing involved with a thermostat is done by the engineers who produce the design. Categorizing is a distinguishing of different types. A thermostat is designed to work within the parameters of one type.
Hey, I lost the thread of this thread I think.. So we are discussing various things. I see the word tautology and another one contradiction, etc.
So I think we all know what it is to sense something. It is wrapped up with our very awareness. There are people- @apokrisis comes to mind, that I think believe that sensation is a matter of learning (distinguishing one thing from another) and here I think is where
comes into play. We know blue because it's not blue, etc. But I think this just skips over the actual part we are interested in. It is saying we know the sensation of blue because we know we can distinguish it from not blue. Let's say a baby's rods and cones aren't developed enough to "see blue", that doesn't get us any closer to understanding how it is that when the rods and cones are developed enough "see blue" happens. By abstracting it to simply "it makes a distinction" we are simply adding in a process as the phenomenon and calling it good. Adding more computation does not necessarily equal the fact of sensation itself.
That's just it.
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We want to say something that can't be said. Aconceptual or subconceptual thereness of the bloody glowing redness of the rose. Or simply the scream and nausea of there being a here here in the worst placed. It's as if a chandelier of concepts was dipped in vat of nectar.
It's the feeling of hot water in the bath tub after hours of being sweaty outside. Not inferences and differential response but the ineffable Feeling.
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Imagine the above was written by a bot asked to explain what it was missing out on. Maybe I'm a Darwinian bot that only thinks I know what I'm talking about.
I don't think it's that slippery a concept. People make it so because it doesn't fit in their schema of how things are..
You see molecules, neurons, laws of the universe, thermodynamics, information. But none of it get at it. They are great for explaining p-zombies though.
What ends up happening is the dualists/panpsychists put into the equation "property" (of the universe like mass or strong force). The sensation of blue is that way because this phenomena carries with it thus property. But that has many of its own problems.
You have brute properties and computational p-zombies. Oh my.
That's the problem, differentiating ourselves from p-zombies, so sure there is Something ---but this Something is Magically Private.
I use capitals to emphasize a kind of mysticism that resents being questioned. I can speak with the vulgar of sensations and feelings, but here I'm trying to think with those who question to the end.