(July 6, 2025 at 3:13 am)Alan V Wrote:(July 5, 2025 at 8:11 pm)GrandizerII Wrote: I sometimes wonder when people can't see the hard problem, how often is it because they don't understand what the hard problem is about exactly? I can tell some out there appear to get it, but when some of them focus more on why we have consciousness rather than how, I feel like they're not understanding the concern exactly.
The "how" is likely to either be frustratingly technical (if scientists ever unravel it), or just a matter of expanding our understanding of what is possible in a material world. For instance, since we have shown that all sorts of electronic inventions can do some amazing things, why not evolution?
My preferred perspective, which may only be a placeholder, is to say that consciousness emerges from life rather than from non-living matter, and that life obviously evolves into selves. So if we break the hard problem down into more and more evolved steps, each of which seems more probable, we are slowly chipping away at it.
It may well be the case that eventually down the line, we will finally figure this out, perhaps by first figuring out the individual steps along the way. The issue is it just doesn't seem this way currently, considering how our conscious experiences seem so qualitatively different from the underlying processes happening in the CNS. And considering how we can't even come up with a potential account of the mechanism that's satisfactory and coherent (and that doesn't go beyond materialism).
