There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.

Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.

You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.

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thepasch an hour ago | parent [-]

Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind?

Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"

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trane_project an hour ago | parent [-]

What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.

But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.

Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.

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thepasch an hour ago | parent [-]

> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience.

Two things here:

1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind?

2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not a satisfactory answer to you?

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trane_project 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.

As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.

I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.

Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.

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thepasch 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.

So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.

> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?

How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?

> The simplest answer is that it is not

You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.

> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water

At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.

	▲	trane_project 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is. > How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language? The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language. > At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying. Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind. Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.