I hesitate to call it a problem because, by the way it’s defined, subjective experience is innately personal.
I’ve gotten into this question with others, and when I began to propose thought problems (like, what if we could replicate sensory inputs? If you saw/heard/felt everything the same as someone else, would you have the same subjective conscious experience?), I’d get pushback: “that’s not subjective experience, subjective experience is part of the MIND, you can’t create it or observe it or measure it…”.
When push comes to shove, people define consciousness or subjective experience as that aspect of experience that CANNOT be shown or demonstrated to others. It’s baked into the definition. As soon as you venture into what can be shown or demonstrated, you’re out of bounds.
So it’s not a “problem”, as such. It’s a limitation of our ability to self-observe the operating state of our own minds. An interesting question, perhaps, but not a problem. Just a feature of the system.
That’s just ridiculous imo, it seems like they’re afraid of the idea that maybe we’re just automata with a different set of random inputs and flaws. And to me, that’s the kind of idea that the problem of consciousness is trying to explore.
But if you just say, “no, that’s off limits,” that’s not particularly helpful. Science can give us a lot of insight into how thoughts work, how people react vs other organisms to the same stimuli, etc. It can be studied, and we can use the results of those studies to reason about the nature of consciousness. We can categorize life by their sophistication, and we can make inferences about the experiences each category of life have.
So I think it’s absolutely a problem that can and should be studied and reasoned about. Though I can see how that idea can be uncomfortable.
But it’s still relevant for neuroscience since we need to understand how brain chemistry impacts the mind to create effective treatments. So not knowing how the mind works is a problem that may limit our ability to solve problems. But there’s plenty we can and have done without understanding where consciousness comes from.
Again, to be clear, I don’t think this is a fundamentally scientific question.
If you show a philosopher how a rose activates the retina and sends signals to the brain, you’ll get a response like, “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…
If you show a philosopher the retinal signals activate the optical processing capabilities of the brain, you’ll get “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…
If you show a philosopher how the appearance of a rose consistently activates certain clusters of neurons and glial cells that are always activated when someone sees a rose, you’ll get a response “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…
Show the philosopher that the same region of the brain is excited when the person smells a rose or reads the word “rose”, and they’ll say, “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…
To the philosopher, they have posed a question about “what it’s like to experience a rose”, and I suggest that NO answer will satisfy them, because they’re not really asking a scientific question. They’re looking for, as the SEP puts it, an “intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or ‘what it’s like’ consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain”. But, science isn’t under any obligation to provide an inituitive, easy-to-understand answer. The assemblage of brain & nerve functions that are fired when a living being experiences a phenomenon are the answer.
Current science does a pretty good job of explaining the what, and sometimes the how. But it doesn’t do a good job of explaining the “why”, or in other words, why do we like certain experiences and dislike others?
There’s also a gap in explaining how much our consciousness contributes to observable behavior. Like why do some people feel stress when others might feel excitement by the same stimuli? How much of behavior is explained by chemical processes in the brain, and how much relies on “personality”?
Some of that is closer to science, and some is closer to philosophy, but I do think science has a role to play in helping to guide philosophical thought.
I hesitate to call it a problem because, by the way it’s defined, subjective experience is innately personal.
I’ve gotten into this question with others, and when I began to propose thought problems (like, what if we could replicate sensory inputs? If you saw/heard/felt everything the same as someone else, would you have the same subjective conscious experience?), I’d get pushback: “that’s not subjective experience, subjective experience is part of the MIND, you can’t create it or observe it or measure it…”.
When push comes to shove, people define consciousness or subjective experience as that aspect of experience that CANNOT be shown or demonstrated to others. It’s baked into the definition. As soon as you venture into what can be shown or demonstrated, you’re out of bounds.
So it’s not a “problem”, as such. It’s a limitation of our ability to self-observe the operating state of our own minds. An interesting question, perhaps, but not a problem. Just a feature of the system.
That’s just ridiculous imo, it seems like they’re afraid of the idea that maybe we’re just automata with a different set of random inputs and flaws. And to me, that’s the kind of idea that the problem of consciousness is trying to explore.
But if you just say, “no, that’s off limits,” that’s not particularly helpful. Science can give us a lot of insight into how thoughts work, how people react vs other organisms to the same stimuli, etc. It can be studied, and we can use the results of those studies to reason about the nature of consciousness. We can categorize life by their sophistication, and we can make inferences about the experiences each category of life have.
So I think it’s absolutely a problem that can and should be studied and reasoned about. Though I can see how that idea can be uncomfortable.
Well, it’s a “problem” for philosophers. I don’t think it’s a “problem” for neurology or hard science, that’s the only point I was trying to make.
Ah, I thought you were talking about philosophy.
But it’s still relevant for neuroscience since we need to understand how brain chemistry impacts the mind to create effective treatments. So not knowing how the mind works is a problem that may limit our ability to solve problems. But there’s plenty we can and have done without understanding where consciousness comes from.
Again, to be clear, I don’t think this is a fundamentally scientific question.
If you show a philosopher how a rose activates the retina and sends signals to the brain, you’ll get a response like, “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…
If you show a philosopher the retinal signals activate the optical processing capabilities of the brain, you’ll get “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…
If you show a philosopher how the appearance of a rose consistently activates certain clusters of neurons and glial cells that are always activated when someone sees a rose, you’ll get a response “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…
Show the philosopher that the same region of the brain is excited when the person smells a rose or reads the word “rose”, and they’ll say, “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…
To the philosopher, they have posed a question about “what it’s like to experience a rose”, and I suggest that NO answer will satisfy them, because they’re not really asking a scientific question. They’re looking for, as the SEP puts it, an “intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or ‘what it’s like’ consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain”. But, science isn’t under any obligation to provide an inituitive, easy-to-understand answer. The assemblage of brain & nerve functions that are fired when a living being experiences a phenomenon are the answer.
Current science does a pretty good job of explaining the what, and sometimes the how. But it doesn’t do a good job of explaining the “why”, or in other words, why do we like certain experiences and dislike others?
There’s also a gap in explaining how much our consciousness contributes to observable behavior. Like why do some people feel stress when others might feel excitement by the same stimuli? How much of behavior is explained by chemical processes in the brain, and how much relies on “personality”?
Some of that is closer to science, and some is closer to philosophy, but I do think science has a role to play in helping to guide philosophical thought.