#hardproblem

The Hard Problem of Consciousness 🧠 - why does consciousness exist at all ✨, and how can it be explained?

David Chalmers' answer with the “philosophical zombies” 🧟‍♂️ remains unsatisfactory – but the question remains fundamental. Heisenberg already wrote that physics forces us to acknowledge incompatible findings.

In a Zoomposium interview with Prof. Dr. Gerhard Roth, we discuss the “hard problem,” the nature of consciousness, and the limits of neuroscience.

📺 Watch the interview: youtube.com/watch?v=0LG4gU_jfik

"Is the body key to understanding consciousness?", The Guardian asks

Is the body key to understanding consciousness? | Consciousness | The Guardian Illustration by Paul Tansley/Observer Design. In all the years now spanning more than a decade of fairly concerted personal study of consciousness and all the phenomena by which it expresses, I’ve arrived at that hypothesis as well, i.e. that you can’t think consciousness without taking the entire body into greater…

This might be the best-written, most intedisciplinary summary I’ve ever read on the debate on consciousness throughout history.

Written by the female scientist-artist who I now greatly admire, Margaret Wertheim.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem

How exactly did consciousness become a problem? And why, after years off the table, is it a hot research subject now?

Some quotes:

“Just as art became literal rather than iconic with the advent of modern science, our concept of a moral universe became subject to homogenisation, and finally to a kind of erasure.

Once we take our universe to be a mathematical arena, a question arises as to where in this scheme the realm of the soul might be found”

“For while Descartes championed mathematical science as a way forward for understanding the physical world, as a Catholic, he also insisted on the reality of the Christian soul. Hence his famous dualism, with its two domains of being: the res extensa (the extended realm of matter in motion), and the res cogitans (the realm of thoughts, feelings, emotions and moral action).” 

“Henry James, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka propel us into the unique sensibilities of their protagonists. James, whose writing has been likened to a literary version of impressionism, was deeply interested in representing the consciousness of his characters, while his brother, the psychologist and philosopher William James, gave us the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe the flow of thoughts, feelings and ideas that ramble through our minds. James coined this term in his book The Principles of Psychology (1890), and in the early decades of the 20th century it came to be associated with such quintessentially modernist writers as James Joyce.”

“With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing reality. At the subatomic level, reality appeared to be a subjective flow in which objects sometimes behave like particles and other times like waves. Which facet is manifest depends on how the human observer is looking at the situation.”

“Forty years ago, the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler proposed a series of thought experiments to test if an observer could affect whether light behaved as a particle or a wave and, in 2007, the French physicist Alain Aspect proved that they could. Just this April, Nature Physics reported on a set of experiments showing a similar effect using helium atoms. Andrew Truscott, the Australian scientist who spearheaded the helium work, noted in Physics Today that ‘99.999 per cent of physicists would say that the measurement… brings the observable into reality’. In other words, human subjectivity is drawing forth the world.”

“This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explainsubjective experience? Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained’. In other words, he says, no amount of detail about neuronal potentials and interconnection is going to get us to the essence of subjectivity.Plenty of neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers disagree with him, but I’m on his side”