You've made a huge leap from there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness to there-is-no-consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of being something. I know it exists, because I'm experiencing it right now. The experience is consciousness, despite being illusory in many ways. Even a completely illusory experience is a conscious experience. In no way does it preclude my just being stuff, or other forms of stuff experiencing things too (and thus also being conscious). The mystery is how I can feel anything at all despite being just stuff.
You don't know your own consciousness exists. You can just be experiencing something that is not consciousness but that you think is. That's the ludicrous banality of the Hard Problem.
The key problem of consciousness is not what we have an experience of (eg. "you're a real thing that thinks and feels"). It's the fact that it is possible to have any experience at all.
Yes, it seems quite likely that a great deal of what we are conscious of is an "illusion" created in our brains, albeit some rather handy illusions. But that doesn't get even one step closer to the core philosophical problem of how we (or anything else) is able to experience anything at all (including the illusion of being a real thing that thinks and feels)
This article perfectly articulates my sentiments about the "hard problem of consciousness". It's a made up problem. There is no such thing as consciousness. It's a term we made up to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the matter in the universe because we wanted to feel special. There is no mystery of consciousness, the only mystery is why humans are incapable of accepting the fact that they are just stuff, like any other matter in the universe.
Can we deduce from your comment that you are in fact, not conscious?
We all know what it's like to be conscious (I presume - my theory of mind is intact but may be flawed). It's obviously the quality of being, i.e. experiencing qualia.
And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. (Living) matter that doesn't experience the world, basically. No frame of reference. Unless you believe in panpsychism; then everything is conscious and we can ask ourselves what it's like to be a rock.
It's just that the hard problem of consciousness states that we haven't been able to define this "state" in its exact physical, neural correlates, but just because we haven't been able to do that yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists, because otherwise no one would be there to ask or hear the question to begin with.
And sure, you can try to break it down into behavior and other properties of a living being, but that is simply side-stepping the hard problem and just ignoring the question of qualia.
Then again, there's something like "aphantasia": some people do not have the capacity to mentally visualize anything, and often aren't even aware of that themselves. I can imagine there's something analogous with the quality of consciousness, i.e. literal "NPCs" who do not experience the world from a frame of reference, but are basically non-sentient, human, autonomous agents. That's just a very dangerous line of thought, so don't take that too seriously :)
You're trying to make "consciousness" mean far more than many of the rest of us in this discussion, and then arguing against the definition you're the only one using.
We're not talking about the content of our experiences, and as long as you keep insisting that's somehow part of the picture, we're never even having a conversation. "Consciousness," as we're using it, is the simple fact that you're experiencing at all. Nothing else. Not the content. Not the feelings about the content. Not the "neat, certain rational mirror on top of sensory experience". Just the raw, unfiltered, unqualified fact that you are having an experience at all. Full stop.
Everything else is detail, and can very easily be wrong. The fact that there is an experience happening in the first place, can't.
Otherwise, please explain to me how I can be mistaken about the fact that I am experiencing. Not what I'm experiencing — that I'm experiencing.
Our consciousness is not who we are. Consciousness is only one aspect of the experience, and even if you grasp what causes consciousness, you still haven't addressed what you, the experiencer, are feeling.
"Isn't a thing" is synonymous with "doesn't exist". Pedantry aside, the existence of the hard problem and the existence of consciousness entail the same questions. The general question is simply this: how can we explain our subjective conscious experiences in terms of physical processes?
You seem to be using "the hard problem of consciousness" to mean something different than I've always taken it to mean.
I fully believe I am just a machine; the question is why there are qualia happening. Wipe my memory, change my identity, alter my consciousness – regardless, why, when I'm awake, does my mind seem to be the seat where a subjective experience is occurring?
It's a hard problem because the only appeal I can make for its existence is that it's happening for me. I can't prove it to you; it's conceivable there are p-zombies, who also vigorously assert they have qualia. This makes it seem dubious, a religious matter taken on faith, and yet paradoxically for me it is perhaps the only thing I can be truly certain of.
Perhaps qualia (subjective experience) is merely a feature of our universe: wherever structure arises, the universe experiences itself (in some commensurate way).
I haven't made the experiences you made, so maybe we can't discuss it in a meaningful way. My thought would be that what you call awareness is just an illusion. Put in another way, I deny that "I think therefore I am" proves the existence of consciousness.
Physics does explain why "we" have experiences. An experience is just an interaction of matter or information. Admittedly, I don't know what matter is, there is of course something about physics we can not understand (to me, so far, the ultimate question is, what does it mean that something exists). But that is another problem than the consciousness issue, in my opinion.
Heh you are right :) Consciousness really needs a three-part explanation because of the hard problem question. The debate usually goes like this:
A: Consciousness is X
B: But why must X feel like anything.
A: Erm..
That's mean posed as the Hard Problem of Consciousness - why does it feel like anything?
I'll argue there's also the Invisible Problem of Consciousness -- who is feeling it? that virtually no one asks because their theories are so imprecise and not computationally defined that it's impossible to even fathom we are close to asking that question. But we are.
Coming back to the conclusion as axiom:
What this is getting at is that X (the consciousness explanation) really has to do a couple of things because there are no turtles all the way down.
X has to offer a model of consciousness, X has to explain who experiences it, and X must also explain why this results in something we (the answer to the 2nd part) recognize as feeling or inner life.
So the bullet-list really is an answer to the 2nd and 3rd parts of the question here. Who's feeling it, and why does it feel like anything? The "I" and the "It" emerge together, so there's something neat to having the axiom prove itself for the first part of this question. The longer answer is in the book!
Consciousness does exist in some form though. The "experience" of sensations that we're both having right now is what many would label being conscious surely? I too don't think it's anything necessarily magical or separate from physicality about it, but it certainly exists.
Consciousness is something some beings experience. We have direct knowledge that it exists because we experience it. We can assign a word to this experience, but we can't define it objectively such that a non-conscious being would understand it. That doesn't mean it's useless to talk about this real experience we have. It just means we can never be entirely sure we're talking about the same thing.
If you were to examine the contents of your awareness systematically you would have "subject" after "subject", and you could make sentences about them (there are thoughts and feelings which lack names but these would still be subject to your awareness.)
But there is always this other "thing", the awareness, that can never quite be subject to language. (In other words, if you were not "aware" there is no way I could describe awareness to you. It has no qualities.)
So this is the first aspect of the "Hard Problem of Consciousness": the foundational fact from which flows the veracity of all others is this indescribable "self" that is "aware", what is it?
The second aspect is the puzzle of "why qualia?" What the heck is "red" anyway? The subjective experience of "red" (and all the others) is kind of impossible. Yet there it is.
It's like a paradox. One the one hand, there is no doubting that our organs mediate the contents of awareness. But on the other hand subjective experience seems impossible.
Anyway, all that to say, in order to make sense of people who flat out claim that the brain generates or creates consciousness, I have recently begun to entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, they don't have the experience.
What I mean is that self-awareness is not automatic. You have to notice it, then work at it. So maybe the reason they don't see the hard problem of consciousness is that they don't see the hard problem of consciousness.
The hard problem of consciousness is actually a misnomer. It should really be the impossible problem of consciousness. The former (mis)leads some people into believing that there's a scientific (i.e. in the realm of nature) solution. There's no way to objectively experience consciousness, by that I mean, you can plug an organism full of sensors to try to map its experience of reality, but you still aren't experiencing what they themself are. It's a philosophical/metaphysical blackbox. There's no way to know if/what an AI experiences. Our current best theories on consciousness, although divergent, suggest that it likely doesn't.
The problem is this is self evident and doesn't explain anything. Saying that consciousness is the only thing that exists is like saying God created the universe. Well then who created God? We have to try to explain what all this is through our conscious experience, and if it happens to be that it's impossible for us to do so, we'll have to re-evaluate our options then. I personally don't believe this to be the case - I think everything exists and consciousness is only one way too perceive that everything, but that's another debate I guess
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