Phrenology

Why Consciousness is Not a Hard Problem

The “Hard Problem”

Consciousness seems like a very difficult and vexing problem to many. The problem, variously phrased, can be stated this way: in a universe that is so obviously full of things that are objectively observable, how is it possible for there to be a purely subjective, first person experience that only I can experience directly?

How to tackle the consciousness “problem”

To iron this out, we must first focus on the hard facts related to consciousness, as well as the distortions that get in the way of our understanding of what is really going on with us. This, along with a brief discussion of some of the language rules related to consciousness, will make the so-called hard problem of consciousness melt away before our very eyes.

What is consciousness, and am I conscious?

Consciousness is the first-person experience of our internal and external states. It is a byproduct of information processing and integration. It is a hard fact that I am conscious, and it is a hard fact that only I can experience my own consciousness directly.

Phrenology

Are other people conscious?

When we say that another person is conscious, we generally mean that we believe that they are exhibiting a pattern or quality of behavior that suggests to us that they are also, in fact, subjectively conscious. (We are hard-wired for empathy and we are also socialized to accept that apparently conscious beings are subjectively conscious too).

Nonetheless, it is a hard fact that one cannot experience another person’s consciousness directly, or even deduce its existence with certainty.

Are non-humans conscious?

When it comes to non-humans, the rather straightforward rules noted above don’t work very well because there is no consensus about which behaviors would justify calling animals, trees or computers “conscious.”

One of the main reasons for this is that we tend to treat others as conscious only when they exhibit what we consider to be sufficiently human-like behavior, and there is no consensus with regard to the precise contours of such behavior.

So the only hard fact that we can identify with regard to consciousness in non-humans is this: even if we could all agree that non-humans behaved in a conscious-like manner, there would still be no absolute justification for claiming that they were subjectively conscious too. (In this regard, non-humans are no different from humans other than oneself, as noted above).

So why the “hard problem”?

With these rules laid out in a fairly straightforward way, why does consciousness still seem like such a difficult and vexing problem to so many people?

Let’s go through the main reasons for this one by one.

Vexatiousness is out of proportion to the degree of difficulty

As conscious beings, we are aware of, and often preoccupied with, our own conscious experience. So it should come as no surprise that we are sometimes disproportionately vexed by the presence of our own consciousness. But being vexed by something doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a particularly hard underlying problem.

Belief in human exceptionalism

Humans rightly consider themselves to be all alone at the pinnacle of the natural world when it comes to information processing prowess and therefore consciousness. But so what if our information processing abilities are many, many orders of magnitude more powerful than that of even our closest biological relatives? Consciousness compounds exponentially as the ability to process data increases. Our brains, however, just aren’t particularly good at appreciating the magnitudinal effects of these exponential differences.

Manipulation

Over millennia and throughout the world, people have proffered confusing, incoherent and sometimes fanciful theories of consciousness in an effort to justify mistreating, exploiting and controlling others. This further contributed to the illusion in the minds of many that consciousness poses uniquely difficult and insoluble problems.

The consciousness discourse is very noisy

The noisiness of the consciousness discourse further contributes to the false perception that it is a mysterious and insoluble problem. Everyone has a first-person experience of their own consciousness, so one needn’t know much else before opining on the matter!

But the mere fact that so many laypersons, philosophers, theologians, academics and “gurus” choose to perseverate over the phenomenon does not prove that consciousness is a hard problem.

The assumption of agency

We tend to behave as though our conscious selves have agency. That is, we act as if our conscious self is a primary mover of sorts which acts upon the world around it without being definitely and causally compelled by it.

This way of relating to others is absolutely necessary for interpersonal relationships to work effectively. Imagine telling a friend or loved one that in a true and fundamental sense you had absolutely no choice but to hurt their feelings. Things would not go well for the relationship at all. To have a chance at reconciliation, you must take ownership and express remorse, that is, you must claim agency. But saying it doesn’t actually make it so, and without proof of agency there can be no hard problem of consciousness.

Participation question

Do you believe that consciousness is a hard problem? Why, or why not?


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14 responses to “Why Consciousness is Not a Hard Problem”

  1.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    Ah, I really wish the hard problem of consciousness could be so easily resolved in a single post, but alas! It cannot.

    Of course, the hard problem of consciousness is simply a subset of a larger problem, the mind-body problem. Related debates would need to involve philosophical zombies (Chalmers), what is it like to be a bat (Nagel), the Chinese room argument (Searle), etc. An even broader question is simply: what constitutes fundamental reality – the physical brain, the immaterial mind, both? Is fundamental reality reducible or irreducible to the physical brain?

    Just as a taste as to how thorny this problem is, consider it’s arguable mental states possess features which physical states do not possess:

    1. Mental states have a raw qualitative feel or a “what it is like” to them that physical states do not.
    2. Mental states have intentionality (ofness or aboutness) directed toward an object (e.g. a thought is *about* the moon) unlike physical states.
    3. Mental states are inner, private, and immediate to the subject unlike physical states.
    4. Mental states are constituted by qualitatively simple properties (e.g. being a pain, a sensation of red), while physical states are constituted by quantitative and structural properties (e.g. being a C-fiber firing).
    5. Mental states have a lack of features (e.g. spatial extension, location) that characterize physical states.

    1. Mark Yoffe, MD Avatar

      Great comment. Thank you!

      I’ve never been bothered by the philosophical zombie argument. I can imagine a philosophical zombie, but I don’t believe one is actually possible. If one way or another it can do the necessary computations, then we can hypothesize that it must be conscious.

      I don’t, however, yet know the answer to the qualitative feel issue that you mentioned above (#1). Maybe I’ll “solve” it in another blog post. Haha!

      1.  Avatar
        Anonymous

        Thanks, Dr. Yoffe! I guess that’s why philosophers, theologians, and scientists debate these topics endlessly. For what it’s worth, I think each of the 5 points could be challenged too. I mean maybe the only thing we can know for sure is that there’s going to be someone who disagrees! Lol. Too bad there isn’t a reliable enough best test we could use to rule in/out the differentials in philosophy! 🙂

  2. Siegy Avatar
    Siegy

    Hello All,

    I love this article. I don’t see consciousnesses as such a hard problem as well. I used to. I have epilepsy so for a layperson, I think a lot about neurology. One thing became clear to me, the human mind is a complex “Map” of the reality around us, a model. It’s much like the simple computer programs I work with every day at work but vastly more complex. These computer programs model things too, just not that much. One key element is that the mental model includes a model of a self changing in time. That brute fact, plus its vast complexity, is what makes the model conscious.

    I am a model that is aware I’m typing, I’m aware I have a headache, I’m a bit hungry, etc. These conscious experiences are the model changing through time due to new stimulation. I have a model of what each of these words means, a model of what it is to type, etc. If you build a computer and that computer can describe internal states of mind as richly as a human, is it also not also conscious? It’s describing complex internal states, is it not having them?

    So are animals conscious? Well, I would say less so but more or less yes. They can even, with a much weaker degree of skill, describe their internal states in some cases. Listen to a dog whine for food. I wouldn’t say consciousness as an absolute yes or no. If you shrink the richness of model including the model of the self, when is the model not powerful enough to be considered conscious? I guess it’s kind of like when the energy animating particles in a room is reduced enough to make things cold instead of hot, that’s a topic of opinion. Perhaps one says the model of self must be strong enough to describe the self in high fidelity? But that means language is a necessary thing to be conscious. I’m not sure I like that.

    If you read all this, thank you.
    Siegy

    1. Mark Yoffe, MD Avatar

      Thank you, Siegy, for you thoughtful and detailed comment.

      I agree that our minds, to some degree, are good at creating maps of external reality. Unfortunately, the process is still quite imperfect, and that’s why perspective and diversity of viewpoints (including yours!) are so important!

  3. Rodney Wilson Avatar
    Rodney Wilson

    My understanding of the Hard Problem is not so much that we cannot tell who is conscious and who is not, but rather that there is no conceivable way that mindless matter, atoms and molecules, could organise themselves to create such a non-measurable, non-physical phenomenon as subjective consciousness. No amount of arranging lifeless particles, in however complex a pattern, provides a discernible pathway to creating subjective experience or self-awareness, or mechanical robots with attitudes or opinions completely of their own, such as whether two tones at particular slightly different frequencies create a harmonious or disharmonious sound effect.

    1. Mark Yoffe, MD Avatar

      Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Rodney!

      Your assertion that there is no conceivable or discernible pathway from molecules to consciousness is an argument from incredulity (“I cannot imagine how this could be. So therefore it cannot be!”). However, our inability to imagine how something is the way it is doesn’t make it a problem, hard or otherwise. It makes it, at best, a very interesting question.

  4. Blair Sadewitz Avatar
    Blair Sadewitz

    The “qualitative feel issue” _is_the hard problem! That is _all_ it is. It is not that consciousness “is a hard problem”.

    I suspect that what you were aiming to write has already been written:

    https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm
    (The verb “to quine” means to deny the importance or existence of something that everyone seems to think is obviously real)

    This is not the last word! If you are interested, I’ll get you more references. By the way, we do have agency because we _are_ agents. To deny that we have agency is to engage in purposeful behavior … maybe I’m dense here, but isn’t it a performative contradiction to argue otherwise?

    1. Mark Yoffe, MD Avatar

      Thank you for your interesting post, Blair.

      Consciousness is real only in a mental and linguistic sense of the word. It is not, however, real in the same sense in which we speak of material things as being real. For example, unlike consciousness, material things can be directly observed by others and can occupy a distinct place in 3-dimensional space. Quale, the way things are subjectively experienced or felt, is similarly real only in a mental and linguistic sense.

      Also, purposeful behavior is not the same as agency. Saying that someone engaged in purposeful behavior is simply an assertion that a particular behavior was intended to serve the interests of one entity or another. It is not an assertion about consciousness or agency.

  5. Charles H Bagley,MD Avatar
    Charles H Bagley,MD

    The consciousness you refer to is the ordinary consciousness of daily life. Medical doctors such as yourself and myself, a neurologist, appreciate the spectrum of conscious states that exist within a hospital population From stupor and coma to various states of disorientation and hyper conscious states of manic or schizophrenic pathologies, dream states, psychedelic states etc. These phenomena indicate consciousness is not a single phenomenon. Buddhist and Yogi meditation masters, psychics, medical intuitives, near death phenomena, evidence of reincarnation, all point to a state of consciousness which is expanded and perhaps does allow for the experience of the consciousness of other conscious beings, i.e. the objectification of consciousness outside of oneself.

    1. Mark Yoffe, MD Avatar

      Thank you, Dr. Bagley, for this insightful comment!

  6. Marc Avatar
    Marc

    To me as a scientist, what sets phenomenal consciousness apart from the rest of the natural world is that it seems to be an aspect of reality that can only be known by being experienced directly.

    This was the whole point of Thomas Nagel’s paper: “What is it like to be a bat?”.
    We now know a great deal about what is going on in the brain of a bat sending out ultrasounds and yet we don’t know what the bat experiences subjectively while doing so.
    What is more, even if we were to understand much better the physical and chemical processes going on within the bat’s brain (even to the point of perfectly understanding them), it seems that we’d still be utterly clueless when it comes to what it is like to be a bat in such a situation.

    Would you deny that intuition and say that if we perfectly know the processes in the brain of the bat, we’ll perfectly know its subjective experience without having to undergo it ourselves?

    Cheers.

    1. Mark Yoffe, MD Avatar

      Hey Marc,

      I’d agree to the extent that consciousness is seemingly unique. Only I can directly perceive my own sense of self, and apparently only a bat seems to know exactly what it’s like to be a bat. These are just statements about how things seem to be. True, I sometimes share with others feelings of awe and wonderment that these facts engender. But, to me, that doesn’t mean that there is an underlying problem or contradiction here that needs to be solved.

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