This talk by David Chalmers on the relationship between consciousness and moral status is pretty interesting. You don’t have to watch the video to …
— Philosophy day!
It is interesting to me what assumptions go into philosophy as though philosophy is a “total category” of activity. So many philosophers feel not need to tell us what they are up to. They just assume a common context of communication.
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Chalmer’s “Hard Problem” of consciousness is actually only a Very Difficult problem. In this way, Chalmer’s is really only asking difficult questions, which, in comparison to the actual Hard Problem, is kind of easy. Chalmers, and others, are not actually thinking very much by taking the easy road of consciousness. In this way, it is no different that modern scholasticism.
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The Hard Problem is consciousness is: why should consciousness should have anything to do with a brain. Which is to say: What reason is there to understand other preoples brains have anything to do with consciousness?
This is a very different formulation of the problem of consciousness, Because, where the former, Chalmer’s Very Difficult Problem, is involved with given conditions which it is not concerned with or it figures is beneath or beyond contemplative worth.
The Hard Problem (not Chalmer’s version) is concerned with what actually presents itself without assumptions. This latter requires one to actually think about things that are not already given to the issue. Things that are, for a term, denied by what is assumed. The Hard Problem considers things without bias.
Why should consciousness have anything to do with a brain?
4 responses to “Consciousness and the Hard Problem”
Consciousness to the brain is like wet is to water. Insomuch as consciousness and water are emergent properties, there is no there there to find.
Lol. I love that as an analogy to the economy of discourse. But I’m kind of saying that there is no reason why consciousness is attached to the mind, anymore than consciousness is attached to that tree over there. For Shirley sometimes I have water on the brain, or I have wet brain. Just like I might have a wet Guitar Pedal (wet is the name of a Guitar Pedal Reverb).🙂. And I’m sure I could speak of water as being dry in some metaphorical context. And of course, depending on what accent I have upon the English language, I’m sure I could ask you: wet you been?
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I am a guitarist, so I get the reference. 😉
I am also aware of the D2O argument for water.
Funny you mention it and as off as it might seem, a lot of water feels ‘dry’ (rather astringent) when I drink it. Of course, wine can be ‘sec’, too.
As you ‘know’, I’m not particularly a dualist and an ‘out there’ and ‘in here’. I understand that some people have claimed that the universe has consciousness, but this feels more akin to overfitting the model than accurate signal.
Don’t even get me started on English accents and dialects. haha I’d have written mony posts by know if the area weren’t so covered on the Youtubes. 😉