What is the Hard Problem, Really?

Philosophy
1

I’m putting this in the Philosophy section, but as I’ll show, it crosses over to science and even pop culture. One of the difficulties of discussing it is semantics. The IEP helps with that.

It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious. And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject. There seems to be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical world and consciousness. All these factors make the hard problem hard.

To argue for consciousness existing in simpler life forms or even at a cellular or near cellular level doesn’t solve the problem for me. Demonstrations of worms or roots appearing to decide to turn one direction or another don’t illuminate the mechanisms in those organisms that create them feeling that they made a decision. Even if it is the same chemical and physical forces that lead me to create something I call “artistic”, the nature of that chemistry and force is still left unexplained. The question remains;

What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?

Rather than attempt to sort out Scientific Reduction, I’ll refer to section 4.4.2 there. And, I acknowledge that reductionism can focus too much on the details and miss the complexity of the whole that arises from the details. However that doesn’t relieve those who claim there is only the “easy problem” of consciousness from doing some heavy lifting to get from lower-level phenomena to the answer.

Since they retain their grip on philosophers, scientists, and lay-people alike, we can conclude that no functional characterization is available. But then the first premise of a reductive explanation cannot be properly formulated, and reductive explanation fails.

Perhaps, the “answer” or the “goal” is where clarity is needed, not unlike the question that was not properly formulated in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We have not defined the mechanisms that create gravity, but we know it is a force and we can use it to land things on distant planets. If we have a formula that explains consciousness or can point out the parts that create it, does that bring us closer to caring about the future of life here on Earth?

2

No time,

The point is that it requires the entire living being engaged with the reality of the moment to feel. matter pushing against matter. What’s missing.

Energy and how biology has learn to manipulate it, is the magic. The moment can be no other way.

Not a single one of those question or observations addressed try reality of the moment and living biological being be a part of it. The difference between a postcard and being there. Feels to me a no brainer.

And I have more than opinions and words, and arguments from credulity.

3

I understand busy. I can’t really grapple with your comments if they are jumbled like this one, not to mention dismissive. It seems you might be arguing with this part of the IEP, discussing the first premise of scientific reductionism:

The first presents a functional analysis of the target phenomenon, which fully characterizes the target in terms of its functional role.

It’s in this entry, and it’s a valid critique that if it doesn’t apply that doesn’t mean we can’t still apply scientific reasoning. Reductionism is only one way of solving a scientific question, and it has its limits. As my last quote above says, the reductive explanation cannot be properly formulated. So, trying to move on from that, what do we do?

This offers some thoughts, but not much specifics. As it says, we may be looking at a phenomena like a cloud instead of one that fits the reductionist model, like a clock. We can’t break it down and then find the mechanisms, it has to be viewed as a whole. Consciousness is mentioned specifically in the list of “other phenomenon where an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own; properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.” And it says these are important concerns to humanity. So, like me, it neither dismisses the science or the search for answers, nor does it give a complete answer.

It concludes,

We need to continue to work within the constraints of reality, as revealed by scientific thinking, while we continue to explore all that has meaning in life along with the meaning of life.

4

Oh the irony of you preaching to me about dismissiveness!

Let me be simpler, …

Please try to better define this “explanatory gap” that sober biological science is failing to get at? Specifically what is missing?

Because all I see hand waving.

5

If I could define it, it wouldn’t be a gap. You’re the one who says there isn’t one.

Here’s a gap

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:1, topic:11866”]

The first thing that tells me is that our body must possess enormous amounts of knowledge, agendas, and strategies totally beyond what my/our introspective mind can possibly comprehend.

[/quote]

Or, those pesky details

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:1, topic:11866”]

What is that even asking? The experience that triggers the thought, the trigger itself, beyond what’s already diagramed? I don’t understand what’s missing, beyond more details.

[/quote]

Or the magic. It’s ironic here how you describe the problem of trying to do scientific reductionism and lose sight of the relevant components. That’s what I just described. That is the hard problem.

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:1, topic:11866”]

It is a thing of awesome complexity, where much of the magic happens down in the microscopic world. The irony being the more we zoom in on one aspect of this spectacle (that is, our thought process), the more we lose sight of other equally relevant components.

[/quote]

Or here, what’s the something?

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:1, topic:11866”]

Evidence for “consciousness” is found in single-celled creatures, indicating that something between awareness and consciousness permeates through all the cells of our body

[/quote]

Or this spectrum. I don’t know of one either. Maybe there isn’t one because it would have gaps

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:1, topic:11866”]

I don’t know of anyone who’s done a simple, but informed spectrum, defining the various plateaus of consciousness — from the awareness in single-celled creatures, on up the biological complexity scale, to arrive at our fantastic memory and introspective consciousness.

[/quote]

6

You don’t need to get silly.

Are you saying philosophers don’t have any duty to define the gap they claim exists?

Not to mention that still doesn’t justify why evolutionary biology is persona non grata at philosophical discussion regarding the supposed question of the reality of our consciousness. Why because grand notions and panpsychism is so much more interesting than figuring out how our body produces our feelings?

I mean is that best philosophers can do is wonder at the “How it feels like something, to be something.” And people are suppose to be satisfied with calling that a mystery, rather than an argument from incredulity - which is what it sounds like to me, especially against the backdrop of all scientists of late have been adding to our understanding.

No wonder humanity has turned out to be such a mess.

Define where you perceive an evidence gap at this point in scientific understanding?

7

This is the something according to Dr. Nick Lane and many other researchers:

… Not only is electron transfer to oxygen implicated in consciousness, but the mitochondrial membrane potential is twice that of neural cell membranes, and the convoluted folds of the mitochondrial inner membrane (the cristae) offer a much larger total surface area of charged membrane.

¶9 Moving charge necessarily generates an electromagnetic field, and the mitochondria clearly do so – not only with the transfer of electrons to oxygen but even more dramatically in the circuit of protons across the membrane, looping from the respiratory complexes to the ATP synthase and back round. … Doug Wallace …

… there’s evidence that electrical fields can and do play a direct role in brain function.

…

If so, the key point is that the electrical fields generated by neurons do have motive force**. They are not too weak to change things physically, as long assumed.**

{From here Lane gets into more detail about what’s known and unknown about the source of EEG emanations.}

¶10 This kind of statement might have pushed the boundaries of respectable science until recently, but the extraordinary work of the developmental biologist Michael Levin and others shows that electric fields can control the development of small animals such as the flat worms known as planarians.

I suspect that twenty-first-century biology will be the biology of fields.

So, let’s take it to be possible that the electrical fields generated by mitochondria do have motive force.

What can that tell us about consciousness? …

Well for a start, it might tell us why the brain is so hooked on glucose as a fuel. …

{Thereafter, another dive into metabolism, calcium flux, pyruvate dehydrogenase, Kreps cycle flux, ATP synthesis - this is stuff that powers work, constructing and transforming molecules. Resulting in varying electrical field that create a “unifying force to bind the disperate flowing molecules of a cell together to make a self with moods and feelings.”}

Plainly that powers work, but it also gives scope to the full dynamic range of mitochondrial membrane potential. To the full range of electrical fields. To the full music of the orchestra.

Until now, biology has tended to study the materials that make up the instruments.

The time has come to close our eyes and listen to the music.

I want to suggest to you that this music is the stuff of feeling, of emotion.

What unifies the whole? What coordinates it as a ‘self’?

Once you think about electrical fields, it is hard to imagine anything else.

But then we are faced with another problem. …

Why would electrical fields in mitochondria, generated by flux through the Krebs cycle, equate to the strivings of the self? …

{To learn more you’ll want to read Nick Lane’s The Vital Question}

{Interestingly, mitochondrial membrane’s electrical potential is the same as the plasma membrane of bacteria. This relates to the primal origin of Eukaryotic cells when they engulfed a foreign germ without digesting it.

Instead, a mutual arrangement was evolved, cell provided a home and resources while the mitochondria focuses on becoming a factor to produce fuel and, it turns out, much more.}

Lane asks, “Why would electrical fields in mitochondria, generated by flux through the Krebs cycle, equate to the strivings of the self?”

{Which circles right back around to ramification from mitochondria electrical fields and potentially influencing the entire cell, and beyond, to neighboring cells.}

¶12

{Tells us more mitochondria details covered in detail in Lane’s book “The Vital Question”, including the importance of the membrane separating inside from outside.}

¶13 “Let me give you an example of how important this membrane potential is to bacteria. …”

{ p.216 - I won’t be a spoiler on this story. Too interesting and well told to summarize.

Main character ocean bacteria under attack by bacteriophages, evolved strategies for group survival. For more, there’s The Vital Question}

¶14 I have long wondered if that collapsing membrane potential ‘feels’ like something to a bacterium.

More than anything else, the humming electrical potential on the membrane betokens the living force.

And if it feels like something for a bacterium to die, its living force sucked away, …

… “All operate through much the same mechanisms, collapsing electrical membrane potential to induce death. Presumably, there must also be some ‘pre-death’ state, where the living processes are tenuous.

Beyond that, membrane potential is needed for far more than the basics of ATP synthesis and CO2 fixation. It powers the bacterial flagellum, allowing cells to move around and seek better conditions, as well as pumping all manner of things in and out of cells, maintaining their homeostasis.

Most strikingly, bacteria need their membrane potential to find their own midpoint, to divide in two and generate offspring.

Nothing in biology is more sacred than reproduction, and the simplest form of reproduction does not happen without an electrical charge on the membrane.

All these states of living and dying are linked with electromagnetic fields.

Do they all feel different?

How could they not?

Metabolism and electromagnetic fields on the membranes bounding cells are intimately entwined and intrinsically meaningful.

These are the living states of cells, the stream of consciousness in its most elementary form.”

Now can you define the outline of what you perceive is missing?
Why the philosophical passion to keep our consciousness a mystical unknowable?

8

I defined it by quoting you. “Magic”, “something", “beyond what my/our introspective mind can possibly comprehend”. How are those not “gaps”?

I’ve pointed out how Lane and Solms come up short, by their own admission, but you keep saying I’m the problem.

9

It’s not me. In this post above, you keep saying, “go read the book” just when you get to where you should be the filling gap. The gap is not filled by another electrical field generated by mitochondria. It’s filled when this wondering:

can be replaced by demonstrable evidence. My saying I don’t see that evidence is not holding back the scientific community.

In the link you provide, Nick says, “Bluntly put, we do not know why life is the way it is.” I’ve never seen a quote from that says he has solved the mystery of consciousness. But, you keep referencing him as if he did.