Hard problem of consciousness
Encyclopedia
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. David Chalmers
contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomena. Chalmers claims that the problem of experience is distinct from this set, and he argues that the problem of experience will "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions
is explained".
The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial and has been disputed by some philosophers . Providing an answer to this question could lie in understanding the roles that physical processes play in creating consciousness and the extent to which these processes create our subjective qualities of experience.
Several questions about consciousness must be resolved in order to acquire a full understanding of it. These questions include, but are not limited to, whether being conscious could be wholly described in physical terms, such as the aggregation of neural processes in the brain. It follows that if consciousness cannot be explained exclusively by physical events in the brain, it must transcend the capabilities of physical systems and require an explanation of nonphysical means. For philosophers who assert that consciousness is nonphysical in nature, there remains a question about what outside of physical theory is required to explain consciousness.
Chalmers stated the problem as "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" in both The Conscious Mind (1996) and in the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995).
James Trefil
notes that "it is the only major question in the sciences that we don't even know how to ask."
Gottfried Leibniz
wrote:
Isaac Newton
wrote in a letter to Henry Oldenburg:
T.H. Huxley remarked:
in neuroscience. Many eminent theorists, including Francis Crick
and Roger Penrose
, have worked in this field. Nevertheless, even as sophisticated accounts are given, it is unclear if such theories address the hard problem. Eliminative materialist
philosopher Patricia Smith Churchland has famously remarked about Penrose's theories that "Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules."
sometimes referred to as Hylopathism
. In the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Chalmers wrote:
Chalmers argues that a ‘rich inner life’ is not logically reducible to the functional properties of physical processes. He states that consciousness must be described using nonphysical means. This description involves a fundamental ingredient capable of clarifying phenomena that have not been explained using physical means. Use of this fundamental property, Chalmers argues, is necessary to explain certain functions of the world, much like other fundamental features, such as mass and time, explain significant principles in nature.
Thomas Nagel
has posited that we can, in principle, never have an objective account of consciousness.
New mysterianism
, such as that of Colin McGinn
, proposes that the human mind, in its current form, will not be able to explain consciousness.
, oppose the idea that there is a hard problem. These theorists argue that once we really come to understand what consciousness is, we will realize that the hard problem is unreal. For instance, Dennett asserts that the so-called hard problem will be solved in the process of answering the easy ones. In contrast with Chalmers, he argues that consciousness is not a fundamental feature of the universe and instead will eventually be fully explained by natural phenomena. Instead of involving the nonphysical, he says, consciousness merely plays tricks on people so that it appears nonphysical—in other words, it simply seems like it requires nonphysical features to account for its powers. In this way, Dennett compares consciousness to magic and its capability to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things.
To show how people might be commonly fooled into overstating the powers of consciousness, Dennett describes a normal phenomenon called change blindness
, a visual process that involves failure to detect scenery changes in a series of alternating images. He uses this concept to argue that the overestimation of the brain’s visual processing implies that the conception of our consciousness is likely not as pervasive as we make it out to be. He claims that this error of making consciousness more mysterious than it is could be a misstep in any developments toward an effective explanatory theory. Critics such as Galen Strawson reply that, in the case of consciousness, even a mistaken experience retains the essential face of experience that needs to be explained, contra Dennett.
To address the question of the hard problem, or how and why physical processes give rise to experience, Dennett states that the phenomenon of having experience is nothing more than the performance of functions or the production of behavior, which can also be referred to as the easy problems of consciousness. He states that consciousness itself is driven simply by these functions, and to strip them away would wipe out any ability to identify thoughts, feelings, and consciousness altogether. So, unlike Chalmers and other dualists, Dennett says that the easy problems and the hard problem cannot be separated from each other. To him, the hard problem of experience is included among—not separate from—the easy problems, and therefore they can only be explained together as a cohesive unit.
A notable deflationary account is the Higher-Order Thought theories of consciousness. Though the most common arguments against deflationary accounts and eliminative materialism
is the argument from qualia
, and that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states - or that current popular definitions of "physical" are incomplete - the objection follows that the one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. Critics of the deflationary approach object that qualia are a case where a single reality cannot have multiple appearances. As John Searle
points out: "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality."
Critics of Dennett's approach, such as David Chalmers
and Thomas Nagel
, argue that Dennett's argument misses the point of the inquiry by merely re-defining consciousness as an external property and ignoring the subjective aspect completely. This has led detractors to refer to Dennett's book Consciousness Explained as Consciousness Ignored or Consciousness Explained Away. Dennett discussed this at the end of his book with a section entitled Consciousness Explained or Explained Away?
David Chalmers
David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher specializing in the area of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, whose recent work concerns verbal disputes. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University...
contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomena. Chalmers claims that the problem of experience is distinct from this set, and he argues that the problem of experience will "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions
Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, they are causal relations to other mental...
is explained".
The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial and has been disputed by some philosophers . Providing an answer to this question could lie in understanding the roles that physical processes play in creating consciousness and the extent to which these processes create our subjective qualities of experience.
Several questions about consciousness must be resolved in order to acquire a full understanding of it. These questions include, but are not limited to, whether being conscious could be wholly described in physical terms, such as the aggregation of neural processes in the brain. It follows that if consciousness cannot be explained exclusively by physical events in the brain, it must transcend the capabilities of physical systems and require an explanation of nonphysical means. For philosophers who assert that consciousness is nonphysical in nature, there remains a question about what outside of physical theory is required to explain consciousness.
Formulation of the problem
Various formulations of the "hard problem":- "Why should physical processing give rise to any inner life at all?"
- "How is it that some organisms are subjects of experience?"
- "Why does awareness of sensory information exist at all?"
- "Why do qualiaQualiaQualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...
exist?" - "Why is there a subjective component to experience?"
- "Why aren't we philosophical zombiePhilosophical zombieA philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience...
s?"
Chalmers stated the problem as "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" in both The Conscious Mind (1996) and in the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995).
James Trefil
James Trefil
James S. Trefil is an American physicist and author of more than thirty books. Much of his published work focuses on science for the general audience. Dr...
notes that "it is the only major question in the sciences that we don't even know how to ask."
History
The hard problem has scholarly antecedents considerably earlier than Chalmers.Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....
wrote:
Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception.
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
wrote in a letter to Henry Oldenburg:
to determine by what modes or actions light produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour is not so easie.
T.H. Huxley remarked:
how it is that any thing so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.
Scientific attempts
There have been scientific attempts to explain subjective aspects of consciousness, which is related to the binding problemBinding problem
The binding problem is one of a number of terms at the interface between neuroscience and philosophy which suffer from being used in several different ways, often in a context that does not explicitly indicate which way the term is being used. Of the many possible usages, two common versions may be...
in neuroscience. Many eminent theorists, including Francis Crick
Francis Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson...
and Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose
Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College...
, have worked in this field. Nevertheless, even as sophisticated accounts are given, it is unclear if such theories address the hard problem. Eliminative materialist
Eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
philosopher Patricia Smith Churchland has famously remarked about Penrose's theories that "Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules."
Consciousness is fundamental or elusive
Some philosophers, including Chalmers himself, argue that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe, a form of panpsychismPanpsychism
In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view...
sometimes referred to as Hylopathism
Hylopathism
Hylopathism, in philosophy, is the belief that some or all matter is sentient or that properties of matter in general give rise to subjective experience. It is opposed to the assertion that consciousness results exclusively from properties of specific types of matter, e.g...
. In the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Chalmers wrote:
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?... It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?
Chalmers argues that a ‘rich inner life’ is not logically reducible to the functional properties of physical processes. He states that consciousness must be described using nonphysical means. This description involves a fundamental ingredient capable of clarifying phenomena that have not been explained using physical means. Use of this fundamental property, Chalmers argues, is necessary to explain certain functions of the world, much like other fundamental features, such as mass and time, explain significant principles in nature.
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
has posited that we can, in principle, never have an objective account of consciousness.
New mysterianism
New Mysterianism
New mysterianism is a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by humans. The unresolvable problem is how to explain the existence of qualia.-Name:...
, such as that of Colin McGinn
Colin McGinn
Colin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. He is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, though he has written on topics across the breadth of modern...
, proposes that the human mind, in its current form, will not be able to explain consciousness.
Deflationary accounts
Some philosophers, such as Daniel DennettDaniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
, oppose the idea that there is a hard problem. These theorists argue that once we really come to understand what consciousness is, we will realize that the hard problem is unreal. For instance, Dennett asserts that the so-called hard problem will be solved in the process of answering the easy ones. In contrast with Chalmers, he argues that consciousness is not a fundamental feature of the universe and instead will eventually be fully explained by natural phenomena. Instead of involving the nonphysical, he says, consciousness merely plays tricks on people so that it appears nonphysical—in other words, it simply seems like it requires nonphysical features to account for its powers. In this way, Dennett compares consciousness to magic and its capability to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things.
To show how people might be commonly fooled into overstating the powers of consciousness, Dennett describes a normal phenomenon called change blindness
Change blindness
In visual perception, change blindness is a normal phenomenon of the brain which show in light that the brain does not have a precise representation of the world but a lacunar one, made of partial details...
, a visual process that involves failure to detect scenery changes in a series of alternating images. He uses this concept to argue that the overestimation of the brain’s visual processing implies that the conception of our consciousness is likely not as pervasive as we make it out to be. He claims that this error of making consciousness more mysterious than it is could be a misstep in any developments toward an effective explanatory theory. Critics such as Galen Strawson reply that, in the case of consciousness, even a mistaken experience retains the essential face of experience that needs to be explained, contra Dennett.
To address the question of the hard problem, or how and why physical processes give rise to experience, Dennett states that the phenomenon of having experience is nothing more than the performance of functions or the production of behavior, which can also be referred to as the easy problems of consciousness. He states that consciousness itself is driven simply by these functions, and to strip them away would wipe out any ability to identify thoughts, feelings, and consciousness altogether. So, unlike Chalmers and other dualists, Dennett says that the easy problems and the hard problem cannot be separated from each other. To him, the hard problem of experience is included among—not separate from—the easy problems, and therefore they can only be explained together as a cohesive unit.
A notable deflationary account is the Higher-Order Thought theories of consciousness. Though the most common arguments against deflationary accounts and eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
is the argument from qualia
Qualia
Qualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...
, and that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states - or that current popular definitions of "physical" are incomplete - the objection follows that the one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. Critics of the deflationary approach object that qualia are a case where a single reality cannot have multiple appearances. As John Searle
John Searle
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
points out: "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality."
Critics of Dennett's approach, such as David Chalmers
David Chalmers
David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher specializing in the area of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, whose recent work concerns verbal disputes. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University...
and Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
, argue that Dennett's argument misses the point of the inquiry by merely re-defining consciousness as an external property and ignoring the subjective aspect completely. This has led detractors to refer to Dennett's book Consciousness Explained as Consciousness Ignored or Consciousness Explained Away. Dennett discussed this at the end of his book with a section entitled Consciousness Explained or Explained Away?
See also
- Artificial consciousnessArtificial consciousnessArtificial consciousness , also known as machine consciousness or synthetic consciousness, is a field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics whose aim is to define that which would have to be synthesized were consciousness to be found in an engineered artifact .Neuroscience...
- BlindsightBlindsightBlindsight is a phenomenon in which people who are perceptually blind in a certain area of their visual field demonstrate some response to visual stimuli...
- CausalityCausalityCausality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
- ConsciousnessConsciousnessConsciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
- Consciousness causes collapse
- Explanatory gapExplanatory gapThe explanatory gap is the claim that consciousness and human experiences such as qualia cannot be fully explained just by identifying the corresponding physical processes. Bridging this gap is known as "the hard problem"...
- ExternalismExternalismExternalism is a group of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that the mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the nervous system but also of what either occur or exist outside the subject. It is often contrasted with internalism which holds that the mind emerges out of...
- Functionalism (philosophy of mind)Functionalism (philosophy of mind)Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, they are causal relations to other mental...
- Knowledge by acquaintanceKnowledge by acquaintanceThe contrasting expressions "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description" were promoted by Bertrand Russell, who was extremely critical of the equivocal nature of the word know, and believed that the equivocation arose from a failure to distinguish between the two fundamentally...
- MindMindThe concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
- Mind-body dichotomyMind-body dichotomyThe mind-body problem is a philosophical problem arising in the fields of metaphysics and philosophy of mind. The problem arises because mental phenomena appear to be qualitatively and substantially different from the physical bodies on which they appear to depend. There are a few major theories on...
- Mind-body problem
- Philosophical zombiePhilosophical zombieA philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience...
- Philosophy of mindPhilosophy of mindPhilosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
- Problem of other mindsProblem of other mindsThe problem of other minds has traditionally been regarded as an epistemological challenge raised by the skeptic. The challenge may be expressed as follows: given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The thought behind the question is that no matter...
- Reverse engineeringReverse engineeringReverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object, or system through analysis of its structure, function, and operation...
- SentienceSentienceSentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think from the ability to feel . In modern western philosophy, sentience is the ability to have sensations or experiences...
- SolipsismSolipsismSolipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from Latin solus and ipse . Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not...
- Two dimensionalismTwo dimensionalismTwo-dimensionalism is an approach to semantics in analytic philosophy. It is a theory of how to determine the sense and reference of a word and the truth-value of a sentence...
- Strange loopStrange loopA strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started.Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox...
- Turing testTuring testThe Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...
External links
- Journal of Consciousness Studies Symposium on the Hard Problem
- Online papers on the hard and easy problem of consciousness
- Online papers on Higher-Order Thought approaches to the hard problem of consciousness
- The Objective Consciousness Revisited - Understanding the Nature of Consciousness by Robert G. Heyward
- The Hard Problem Is Dead by Teed Rockwell
- You can't argue with a Zombie by Jaron LanierJaron LanierJaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality .A pioneer in the field of VR, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves...
- Looking to systems theory for a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience and evolutionary foundations for higher order thought Pharoah, M.C. (online). Retrieved Jan.03 2008.
- The Hard Problem of Consciousness and Two Arguments for Interactionism by Vadim Vasilyev
- Correlation vs. Causality: How/Why the Mind/Body Problem Is Hard by Stevan HarnadStevan HarnadStevan Harnad is a cognitive scientist.- Career :Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University's Department of Psychology...