Marc,

I think the answer to your headline question is no, because it is the wrong problem, but I do not think Dehaene has any sort of answer to the right problem - he funks it, like most neuroscientists, on purely scientific criteria.

What has become clear in the last five years or so is that Chalmers's problem is misconceived because it does not address what 'physcial' means. The dictionary tells us that physical means something that gives rise to experience through sensory inputs like vision and touch - something we can 'see' or 'feel'. And that is all it can be expected to mean, so there is no surprise that physical things give rise to experience - because that is what physical means. 

Many people would intuitively say that although this may be the definition of physical for practical purposes, physical means something more than that - real stuff or some such. However, this turns out to be a completely unscientific conception because it is untestable - there is no way of identifying real stuff except through experience. 'Materialism' of this sort is the least scientific position we can take and it is probably not a position that any truly great scientist has ever taken.

The problem Chalmers was trying to get at relates to the fact that although we are familiar with the rules by which distal outside objects give rise to sorts of experience (a chair gives rise to an experience of a chair) as defined using the calibration of  learning to move about in our world and of agreed language use, we have at the moment no clue as to the rules that determine the relation between an experience and the proximal dynamic events in the brian that underlie that experience. We have good reason to believe that when we experience a chair, somewhere inside the brain there are neural events that determine directly the nature, or 'content' of the experience. 

Moreover, if we are going to stick to physics as we know it, rather than switch to some magical (and by and large circular) 'functionalist' explanation, we need the dynamic event that underpins an experience to obey the physical laws of locality. Like most neurobiologists at present Dehaene appears to think he can manage without the laws of physics in this context and have experience arise from distributed combinations of signals. To my mind, as long as neuroscience sticks to this non-physics approach it will get nowhere in solving the real hard problem.

And I don't think computer simulations are going to be much good because the local events bear no relation whatever to those in brains. If physics applies proximally as well as distally there should be no experiences in computers anything like those in brains.

Philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, meditators, ... & many others have speculated about consciousness & the brain for a long time. Science has made amazing advances, but the "believers" in science -- those who do scientific method a disservice by being preoccupied with or dazzled by temporary "facts" -- don't really advance anything with opinions. I guess I'm also one of those people because my opinion is that the best that anyone can do is advance a compelling & plausible argument. But just because something is plausible ... what does that make it? Marc, the initial question you pose is provocative but not answerable in any conclusive way by any branch of science -- for what may be a "real" hard problem for one individual is nothing but a trivial distraction for another. The texts in question are just well-articulated plausible arguments. Opinions by any other description, despite the reasoning. But what Chalmers has to say is interesting to contemplate ... as is Dehaene's counter argument.  Words. But maybe you're not really asking for a scientific answer?

Jon,

Thank you very much for your answer. Actually this is the first one but I hope there will be many.

You ask me whether I was asking for a scientific answer. Of course I am asking for a scientific answer and not for a philosophical answer.

I would like to add the following argument against Chalmers' notion of a "hard problem" of consciousness, still from Stanislas Dehaene 's book as referencing the way modern molecular biology has overthrown vitalism, the author continues: "Likewise, the science of consciousness will keep eating away at the hard problem until it vanishes. For instance, current models of visual perception already explain not only why the human brain suffers from a variety of visual illusions but also why such illusions would appear in any rational machine confronted with the same computational problem. The science of consciousness already explains significant chunks of our subjective experience, and I see no obvious limits to this approach”.

Marc,

I think the answer to your headline question is no, because it is the wrong problem, but I do not think Dehaene has any sort of answer to the right problem - he funks it, like most neuroscientists, on purely scientific criteria.

What has become clear in the last five years or so is that Chalmers's problem is misconceived because it does not address what 'physcial' means. The dictionary tells us that physical means something that gives rise to experience through sensory inputs like vision and touch - something we can 'see' or 'feel'. And that is all it can be expected to mean, so there is no surprise that physical things give rise to experience - because that is what physical means. 

Many people would intuitively say that although this may be the definition of physical for practical purposes, physical means something more than that - real stuff or some such. However, this turns out to be a completely unscientific conception because it is untestable - there is no way of identifying real stuff except through experience. 'Materialism' of this sort is the least scientific position we can take and it is probably not a position that any truly great scientist has ever taken.

The problem Chalmers was trying to get at relates to the fact that although we are familiar with the rules by which distal outside objects give rise to sorts of experience (a chair gives rise to an experience of a chair) as defined using the calibration of  learning to move about in our world and of agreed language use, we have at the moment no clue as to the rules that determine the relation between an experience and the proximal dynamic events in the brian that underlie that experience. We have good reason to believe that when we experience a chair, somewhere inside the brain there are neural events that determine directly the nature, or 'content' of the experience. 

Moreover, if we are going to stick to physics as we know it, rather than switch to some magical (and by and large circular) 'functionalist' explanation, we need the dynamic event that underpins an experience to obey the physical laws of locality. Like most neurobiologists at present Dehaene appears to think he can manage without the laws of physics in this context and have experience arise from distributed combinations of signals. To my mind, as long as neuroscience sticks to this non-physics approach it will get nowhere in solving the real hard problem.

And I don't think computer simulations are going to be much good because the local events bear no relation whatever to those in brains. If physics applies proximally as well as distally there should be no experiences in computers anything like those in brains.

Marc,

There is a similar discussion on this thread:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_to_Solve_Chalmers_Hard_Problem

But I like your question better because accepting to discuss a solution is to admit that the question is a legitimate scientific question. Focussing the discussion on the legitimacy of the notion of hard problem of consciousness  is the way to go. My impression is that it is a fallacious problem.  I will try to demonstrate this in a later post.

Christopher Davia may have an answer.

Jonathan,

I am sorry to say that I don't really understand the meaning of your speech.

be restricted to conscious access and subjective reports, or whether they should extend to other (i.e., inaccessible, unattended, phenomenal) forms of consciousness. Therefore, future research will unavoidably be bound to decide whether neurobiological accounts should take into account or reject the hard problem of understanding a subjective form of conscious experience that cannot be simply defined as conscious access" (S. Kouider, Neurobiological Theories of Consciousness, 2009): do you agree with that?

Dear Marc,

You are sort of asking me to give the opening class in a history of scientific ideas. I could say try reading Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Montaigne, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Maxwell, Kant, Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Bohr, Pauli, Russell, Whitehead, Eddington, Ladyman, Shoemaker ... and you should get what I am saying. Bertrand Russell's Analysis of Matter could be a readable introduction.

I wonder if you are 50 yet? I have been a biomedical scientist all my life and knew virtually nothing of the ideas of the people above until I was 50. Over a period of about fifteen years I have come to understand that my training in science was based on a naive realism that makes no sense in science terms and was never intended by the people who invented science. The twentieth century has been a very ignorant century on fundamental issues.

But to try to et to the nub - you say physical has to do with matter and energy. What are these? All that people like Descartes and Newton claimed they were were patterns of dynamic relation or disposition to dynamic relation (James Ladyman's 'Every Thing Must Go' gives the updated position). Matter includes mass, which is a disposition to resist force or attract other mass. Charge is another disposition. And if you ask what is the gold standard calibration of all these dispositions it is that we get certain sorts of experience (the French for experiment) under certain controlled conditions either directly or indirectly in the context of these dispositions. "Matter' and 'energy' are, in a scientific framework of validation by experiment, merely dispositions to generate certain sorts of experience. They might be other things as well but not in science, because whatever other things they are cannot be tested.

And as Leibniz most clearly formulated in the Enlightenment period, the manifestations of matter and energy we are familiar with are merely well founded illusions that our brains use to work out survival behaviour strategies. He realised that at the fundamental level the dispositional dynamic properties involved must be quite different from balls following trajectories through the air. And now we know he was right because the quantum level is much more like what he proposed must lie underneath - indivisible dynamic relations of 'points of view' to the universe, as rather neatly formulated in the time dependent Schrodinger equation.

I am afraid that I think Sid Kouider misses the point, maybe because he is not familiar with the implications of this basic stuff on the structure of our ideas about matter and experience. He is not 50 yet, if I am not mistaken!

Physics is always an exercise in how dynamic dispositional patterns determine experiences. Most of the time it is concerned with intermediate distal dynamic links in the outside world that we can describe without reference to experience itself by cancelling out the neural components of the chain by calibrating one external event against another with rulers and clocks. But if we are studying the proximal relation of dynamics inside brains to experience we cease to have that option. We need to rely on verbal reports, perhaps of 'double vision'. 

Physics has a basic law of locality, which is in fact quite complex but in simple terms says that an event always happens at the place and time that it happens. Or that occurrences at a place and time are fully sufficiently and necessarily determined by conditions at that place and time. 'A place and time' turns out in modern physics to be not a point but a domain of a dynamic unit, roughly what is called a superposed quantum system but there are complexities there too. If we are dealing with a chain cashed out in experience we either have to say that the rules are the same right down to the most proximal event - the one that determines the experience itself sufficiently and necessarily, or we have to be dualist and say that for some strange reason inside brains experience 'emerges' from distributed events. This is popular in neuroscience but totally in violation of standard physical law. If you think about it, if you allow experience to have a non-local relation to dynamic conditions you rapidly find that you cannot make any predictions because conditions at one place are not sufficient or necessary to tell you what to expect at that place. Why should we allow a teeny bit of non-locality inside brains but nowhere outside? Up until about 1900 this problem was well understood and recognised. It has got buried in the dumbed down culture of applied science practiced by people without a broad education (like me prior to 50).

That's enough for one post.

A good discussion between Marc and Jonathan. It boils down to the distinction of Realism and Phenomenalism in the philosophy of science. I wonder why Jonathan did not make a reference to E. Mach and B. Van Frassen, the champions of his view.

I am more inclined to the Realist approach and then I see the Hard Problem (HP) as having two sides:

a) It is based on an idea of supervenience that is compromised with Reductive Materialism (RM), the philosophical position that holds that any mental state must be derived from a physical state. If we abandon RM, a part of the HP disappears;

b) Even in non-reductive views, if we refuse substance dualism then the classical problem of how conscious mental states and brain physiological states relate to each other remains. IOW, for any Monist approach it is necessary to explain the experimentally proven relation of body states and mental conscious/unconscious states. Part of this explanation involves the history of science, as Jonathan suggests, but for a different reason. it is not because all great scientists were (implicitly) Phenomenalists, but because the great scientists of the Modern revolution (namely Galileo) thought of "secondary qualities"(color, small, taste, odor, pain, pleasure, etc.) as existing only in the mind of the observer, while "primary qualities" (extension, mass, charge, forces) had a mind-independent reality. Of course, in this kind of world there is no place for 'qualia' in nature. Therefore, to really solve the HP it is necessary to reintroduce secondary qualities in nature. I am working on this problem now.

I am 60, Jonathan, and I confirm your views.

Cheers to Swift!

Dear Alfredo,

I do not think I am advocating phenomenalism, but rather dynamic realism - what is real is dynamic relation. van Frassen I find difficult to follow. Phenomenality, here and now, is always essential to our appreciation of dynamic relations but since phenomenality is indeed always proximal, always here and now, any supposition of phenomenality distally is merely introduced as an optional concession to Ockham, I think. 

Alfredo,

You say "the great scientists of the Modern revolution (namely Galileo) thought of "secondary qualities"(color, small, taste, odor, pain, pleasure, etc.) as existing only in the mind of the observer, while "primary qualities" (extension, mass, charge, forces) had a mind-independent reality. Of course, in this kind of world there is no place for 'qualia' in nature".

I fully agree with "the great scientists of the Modern revolution (namely Galileo)" that qualia such as color, smell, taste, odor, pain, pleasure, etc. exist only in the mind of the involved organism. However I don't understand why this would imply that in this kind of view there would be no place for 'qualia' in nature: could you clarify your point?

Jonathan,

I find your last post very much contemptuous and condescending.

I think a good scientist should not be so proud of himself or of his thoughts (even if he is a veteran). The "great scientists" (to use Alfredo's expression) are/were usually modest (cf. Henri Poincaré, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin etc.).

Moreover your speech is philosophical and very obscure to me. It is not what I call a scientific speech. Actually I don't feel competent enough in the philosophical area to argue with you in this latter area.

I find your speech obscure and likely false as, for instance, you assert that "Like most neurobiologists at present Dehaene appears to think he can manage without the laws of physics in this context and have experience arise from distributed combinations of signals. To my mind, as long as neuroscience sticks to this non-physics approach it will get nowhere in solving the real hard problem".

Could you argue your assertion that Dehaene like most neurobiologists at present manage without the laws of physics?

Jonathan,

In all the sciences, the scientific process is happening within a community of individual in communication.  This collective scientific process involves the communication of scientific models about some aspects of reality.  Although we do not have to understand what consciousness is in order to participate in this process of science, the whole process is occuring within conscious interating/communicating humans.  If  the topic of the study is the electron in specific physical setting.  The model can only be about the relations between external measurables or about internal variable having effect on these exterrnal measurables.  Could a electron model be about ''what is it like to be an electron?'' or about ''what is the experience of the electron?''.  Maybe an electron has a electron-like experience?  Chalmer's hard-easy problem distinction is similar to say that: physicists can only describes electron behaviors but cannot access to electron experience as seen from the inside.  Electron can only express themself through their behaviors.  The same with us, even when we express ourself about how we feel like we express ourself through behavior.  But as human we have access to our experience.  It would be more appropriate to say we access everything though our experience and not the other way around.  So can we express into a scientific model in the communication realm among ourself a description of the medium of access?

Very interesting question, Louis. I do not think this is quite Chlamers's problem, may be more like the epistemic problem that Wittgenstein made a bit of a meal of, but it is intriguing and hardish. I think it is not as unassailable as Wittgenstein thought but for now we can only hope to think about scratching the surface.

It may be a bit hard to start with an electron, which is likely to be very different from the physical substrate of a human experience. I think it may be more hopeful to start with small changes from the human situation. Let us say, for speculation, that a human experience belongs to some rather interesting dynamic mode in a brain with parameters p,q,r,s, and t set to values 4, 2 (whole integers), 3.88, 16.7 x10^9 and 0.00335. Let us say that an anaesthetic tends to reduce the value of r towards 3.2 (when the mode ceases to be stable). Could we investigate this relation? This is not an easy one because if reducing r makes red look more like yellow the brain might still report 'red' because of distal connectivity. We might have to change r for half the domain of the mode and get a report 'false' to the proposal  'these two spots are the same colour' when it would be 'true' if r is consistent. We can only speculate about scratching the surface but I do not think we should be too put off. And if we can establish one step away from our familiar situation maybe we can extrapolate towards an electron with parameters 3, 1, 1.8x10^-30 and 66.2.

And maybe we can make some useful comments about the electron too. My suspicion is that 'an electron' will not have an experience because it is not an entity in modern physics. There is no electron A and electron B, there are only orbitals and other modes of electron type. There is no fact of the matter 'which electron' occupies these modes. And modes probably change rather frequently. The problem with an electron that might have lasted 15 billion years is that we may have to say it only gets one experience in that time because there is no reason why one experience should be followed by 'another'. Orbitals tend to last shorter times, but even so there are probably hydrogen atoms with s orbitals that have been knocking about for a billion or so years. Still, in biological materials there are electron modes that come and go over milliseconds. So if we think consciousness is James's string of pearls then maybe they would begin to resemble our experience at least temporally.

OK, so all of this is just tossing thoughts about. But if we seriously want to pin down the physical substrate of human experiences we need to start looking at such thoughts and deciding which ones might go somewhere and which ones hit a brick wall. For me the idea that a 'person' has experiences in physical dynamic terms is hopeless. I think human experiences of the sort we report must belong to very small domains in brains and there must be lots of them at once in any one brain - for reasons of not contradicting physics, much in the spirit of James.

So I think we may be able to say what it ought to be like for an electron in terms of at least the parameters of its experience. Those parameters would reflect both the quantum dynamics and the 'feel', although just how the feel would end up would I think remain off limits at least until we had bootstrapped from my earlier suggestion about anaesthesia in a way that I guess will take 60 years of science. And after all, my idea of what it is like to be an experiencing domain in the brain of Louis is just as slightly shorter bootstrap into speculation!

Dear Marc,

I am very sorry if you found my message condescending, but you did rather ask for it. You are asking a question in the realm of metaphysics (in the Leibnizian sense of what underlies our ideas of physics). I gave what I consider a reasonable response at that level. Eugene at least agrees and although Alfredo and I have been arguing this out for ten years our positions are very close on many issues.

My speech is not in fact philosophical except in the sense that it is at the level of what we really mean by things like 'matter'. I see no distinction between philosophy and science other than the level of the question. Without the deeper level science is merely engineering - which served me well while earning a salary but I now find hum-drum.

I am sorry if you find my words obscure, but I have tried to be very simple and to the point. I think they are obscure because they are unfamiliar. Leibniz is considered obscure by almost everyone but in my view that is simply because what he is saying is so fundamental that it is too unfamiliar to grasp.

I have given my reasons for thinking Dehaene tries to manage without the laws of physics. William James gives the same reasons in Chapter 6 of Principles of Psychology 1890. It is a well rehearsed argument, with which Alfredo I think agrees, since he tries to solve it with coherent calcium waves. Join the consciousness studies community - it is much the best form of mental gymnastics around.

Jonathan,

You say you "see no distinction between philosophy and science other than the level of the question". 

Of course I disagree with this opinion: a philosopher don't do experiments to try to falsify a philosophical hypothesis. If he did he would be no more a philosopher and would become a scientist. To me a philosophical approach is not a scientific one even if it is a rational approach. I don't find relevant to mix everything.

To my question "Could you argue your assertion that Dehaene like most neurobiologists at present manage without the laws of physics?" you answer "I have given my reasons for thinking Dehaene tries to manage without the laws of physics".

Sorry, but I missed these: could you give me these again? 

I  completely agree "as long as neuroscience sticks to this non-physics approach it will get nowhere in solving the real hard problem" and "there should be no experiences in computers anything like those in brains"

To be honest not sure if they succesfully manage anything except hiding some phenomena. Even simple things cannot be explained in neuroscience without physics see

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Place_cells_What_does_it_prove

Chalmers (1995, http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html) called these problems related to consciousness, the easy problems of consciousness:

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to

environmental stimuli;

• the integration of information by a cognitive system;

• the reportability of mental states;

• the ability of a system to access its own internal states;

• the focus of attention;

• the deliberate control of behavior;

• the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

‘’Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, "easy" is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.’’

‘’To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain’’

‘’The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.’’

I disagree with almost all Chalmers said above.  I find his separation totally false. Most of the so called hard problems can be functionally defined.  And all these problems are not separate problems but interelated to each other.  I cannot understand this paper was even accepted to a conference.

So, Louis, I understand you agree with Dehaene's viewpoint, don't you?

Dorian,

You say that neuroscience sticks to a non-physics approach.

I read the posts in your thread "Place cells : What does it prove?" but I didn't see anything clear about your above assertion: could you develop your point?

Is it a troll?

No, it is not, Eric. People are thinking.

Marc,

was not Einstein philosopher?

Dear colleagues!

The problem is that we try to explain consciousness by constructions of consciousness. It is the circle.

Regards,

Eugene.

Dear Marc,

We need to  consider the real situation rather than the stereotype. The key players in philosophy of mind are perhaps Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Kant. Aristotle was an empirical biologist, Descartes an empirical physicist and biologist, Leibniz built the first computer to demonstrate a primitive form of the Church Turing thesis, and he was a geologist and mining engineer, even if his major contributions to physics (like those of the paradigmatic scientist of Einstein, and even Newton on Gravity) consistent in solving puzzles raised by other people's data. Locke was a physician who drew on his clinical knowledge of the paradoxes of perception, Berkeley studied perception and built some of the earliest neuropsychology ideas. Kant was an astronomer I think. 

The modern breed of people who call themselves philosophers have contributed pretty little as far as I can see so I do not take much notice of them.

And the irony is that the point of view that I am putting forward is the point of view held by most scientists who are interested in these deeper issues. The 'realist' point of view of 'matter' that maybe Alfredo prefers, although he is not a reductive materialist, is to be found in academic philosophy departments. If you are wanting to think of matter and energy as something more than causal dynamic relations then you are firmly in the philosophy camp rather than the scientist camp I think. SO many of these things turn out to be not the way round we expect.

Dehaene's approach to subjective experience seems to me to be inconsistent. At one point in his new book he denies that there is anything called 'phenomenal experience' to bother about beyond what he sees as maybe a 'biological account'. Then he says that we are well on the way to explaining subjective experience. And his 'biological' account of consciousness that seems not to need 'subjectivity' is 'access to the mind' - but what the heck does that mean!! I get a picture of signals in the brain which once they have got through the turnstile to Zippo's Mind Circus can be gloriously conscious. It seems to me like empty rhetoric.

But to answer your question: Dehaene appears to believe that a distributed array of neural depolarisation events widely spaced across a brain can constitute 'an experience'. Maybe he does not put it like that - he just says they have 'entered consciousness'. But if he thinks we have explained subjective experience then presumably he is suggesting that these distributed events somehow in concert form a 'thought' or perhaps as a clear example an 'image' - like me 'seeing a chair'.

Now physics says that any for observation we make, which will clearly involve an experience by the observer, the content is determined most necessarily and sufficiently by the most proximal ascertainable dynamic conditions. Put simply when I experience seeing a chair a photodetector array laced just in front of my eyes should indicate more necessarily and sufficiently what I see than any chair itself - I might in fact be looking at a very good trompe l'oeil painting. And electrodes in my retina should be even better than the photosensor, because I might have a cataract. And electrodes in my visual cortex should be even better, if we knew how to calibrate the findings, since signlas not reaching cortex tend not to be experienced. In fact this is Dehaene's whole approach - he is arguing that we have to go further forward to some 'turnstile' (and I agree with him) forward of visual cortex where signals have to get to be experienced. 

But if he is going to pursue this analysis of experience in terms of physics he has to finish the job. He cannot say: 'Oh, well once you are past the turnstile that is proximal enough and from then on there is no need to continue until you get to the point where the signal actually arrives at an experience event. In fact he denies there will be any such point - no 'Cartesian receiver' of such signals. Which effectively means he has wheeled in a Deus ex Machina and abandoned the causal dynamics of physics. He is arguing that there comes a point where the most proximal conditions do not necessarily and sufficiently determine what is experienced because there is no proximal - just a lot of events all over the shop that are co-contingent.

Descartes was fully aware of this problem and it is precisely why he proposed that there was a receiving centre in the pineal. He got that wrong, but at least he wanted a story consistent with physics. 

I hope that helps.

To my question "Could you argue your assertion that Dehaene like most neurobiologists at present manage without the laws of physics?" you answer "I have given my reasons for thinking Dehaene tries to manage without the laws of physics".

Sorry, but I missed these: could you give me these again?

Sorry, there is some stuff from your own post at the bottom of mine Marc. I cannot delete it because the software is misbehaving.

Jonathan,

Thank you for your effort trying to explain me your reasons for asserting Dehaene like most neurobiologists at present manage without the laws of physics.

You accuse Dehaene of saying something like "Oh, well once you are past the turnstile that is proximal enough and from then on there is no need to continue until you get to the point where the signal actually arrives at an experience event. In fact he denies there will be any such point - no 'Cartesian receiver' of such signals. Which effectively means he has wheeled in a Deus ex Machina and abandoned the causal dynamics of physics. He is arguing that there comes a point where the most proximal conditions do not necessarily and sufficiently determine what is experienced because there is no proximal - just a lot of events all over the shop that are co-contingent".

I am sorry to appear dumbass's pace of comprehension but I don't understand most of your speech above.

In particular, I would be grateful if you could clarify these sentences:

1. "There is no need to continue until you get to the point where the signal actually arrives at an experience event":

And you add "he denies there will be any such point".

Actually, I don't understand what such a point is and thus what you mean by "the point where the signal actually arrives at an experience event".

2. “He is arguing that there comes a point where the most proximal conditions do not necessarily and sufficiently determine what is experienced because there is no proximal - just a lot of events all over the shop that are co-contingent”:

Sorry, but this sentence is totally incomprehensible to me: what do you mean exactly?

Eric,

Why have you the idea that this thread could be a 'troll' (i.e., a thread "with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response")?   

The old view is that memory is stored solely in synapses (see Kandel, connectivity) and that neurons fire action potentials like stereotyped metronomes (digital action potentials).  No place for any physics once this view was widely spread ,

Even one records only the envelope of an action potential, every action potential carries “imperceptible endogenous waves and oscillations” and resonances generated by molecular structures .Indeed, for us they are imperceptible however such waves are not so imperceptible for surrounding neurons and synapses and can be evidenced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_directivity

Since during an action potential the structure inside the neuron vibrates (resonates) information embedded within molecular structure (e.g. proteins) is carried by electrical waves and integrated in the brain http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636996/

Breaking the myth of stereotyped (digital) action potentials brings physics into neurobiology  (vibration, resonances, waves inside the cell) and caused so much pain in neuroscience and neural computation 

The timing of spikes provides evidence that neurons respond to sensory inputs not that "the coding of sensory input is performed by the timing of spikes" s

With previous hypotheses (digital action potentials, temporal patterns) they  successfully managed to ignore the laws of physics in neurobiology http://neuroelectrodynamics.blogspot.com/p/myths-about-brain.html

Dear Marc,

Thank you for your efforts to understand my criticism of Dehaene. I appreciate that this is not easy. The problem has several traditional names but has a lot to do with what William James called the combination problem. Many people reading James get the idea of the problem straight away, but others may not and I think it is fair to say that although James writes in a very pleasing style he does not lay out the arguments quite as transparently as, for instance, the contemporary philosopher of mind John Heil might do. John Heil's compendium on Philosophy of Mind, which has classic texts with his commentaries could well be the best source to get the feel of what the fuss is about. Heil is one of the few contemporary philosophers I rate highly. This is philosophy in the sense of getting science basics right. Heil would see no reason to see science and philosophy as somehow in competition.

The idea is that a subjective experience ought to be some sort of way-station or point of passage of some sort of causal chain. If not it is hard to see why we evolved to have experiences or how they could cause us to describe them (there are complexities in there but I will leave them out just now). Physics tells us that what is experienced is dependent on what causal influences arrive at some juncture of experience - usually just an observer. So if children A,B,C,D and E are sent to the park to find wildlife, each will observe something different according to where they are. If we go inside a brain the same should apply. Nerve cells A,B,C,D and E should get different experiences because each will have different incoming influences. 

Many people will at this point say that it is the whole person that experiences so there is no reason to ask what cells experience. But the problem is that physics has no such concept of person as unit. It can have a concept of a complex inference computing system maybe but that is not the same as what the inference is available to to experience. And as Chalmers himself and Andy Clark have pointed out the human inference machine is not bounded by the 'person' or body - in some senses it continues out into the world indefinitely, as what they call 'Extended Mind'.

And Dehaene himself quite clearly does not think that experience involves the whole person. He is quite clear that it is somewhere forward in the brain away from primary sensory cortex. But that will be nerve cells A,B,C,D and E all together and there is no sense in physics in which way-points in SEPARATE casual chains can be expected to 'share' an experience, since the causal influences at A should determine experience at A, and those at B etc.... just like in the children. Put another way: if a mother cuddles a baby, her right cortex may be nearer to that of the baby's right cortex than it is to her own left cortex. Causal connections operate between all four hemispheres, some electrical, some acoustic, etc. so there is no special rule in physics to make mum' right and left hemisphere's 'share' a state in a causal chain that could be an experience. 

What is so odd about Dehaene's account is that he pushes locality as far as he can but then claims that there is no way-station where influences actually engender the experience - there is no point on a causal chain. So how does he explain reporting? In fact to build a model of reporting I think we need some very complex causal paths that do not look like what we might expect. One of the important aspects of brain function is that it can recover inputs from outputs through reinforcement loops and so appear to reverse or at least re-run causal chains. But experiences still have to be way-stations on some sort of causal chain if they are to fit within physics.

James decides that experiences must be in individual cells but then says that even a cell is not one way-station in a causal chain. I think he was wrong. At least computationally individual cells do seem to be single  indivisible junctures. There is masses more to this topic but I do not want to wander into specific theories.

I am sorry this has got complicated but despite the apparent simplicity of the problem it does seem hard to put it into simple words.

Dear Marc, you asked: '"I fully agree with "the great scientists of the Modern revolution (namely Galileo)" that qualia such as color, smell, taste, odor, pain, pleasure, etc. exist only in the mind of the involved organism. However I don't understand why this would imply that in this kind of view there would be no place for 'qualia' in nature: could you clarify your point?"

Yes. In the Modern framework only primary qualities exist in nature. As primary qualities do not logically imply secondary qualities, there is a gap. As secondary qualities exist only in the mind, then the mind is not in nature. The philosophical position resulting from this dichotomy is Descartes' "substance dualism".

How to avoid this view? Reinserting secondary qualities in nature. They were thought to be real in Aristotelian physics (the form of the hilomorphic substance has a quality expressed as a property in human language). 

Dear Alfredo,

You may be right about Galileo, but I am not so sure about Descartes and certainly Leibniz made no distinction between primary and secondary qualities - all apparent qualities, whether colour, passage of time or spaciousness, were well founded illusions for him. Newton at least implies that he agrees in the Scholium on Space and TIme. I have never heard anyone suggest that Descartes indicated that the mind was not in Nature. For Descartes Mind was spirit, like God and since all change or motion was due to spirit (extended matter was entirely inert) it must be pervasive in Nature - pervasive in physics, surely. 

Nevertheless, I agree that reinserting phenomenal qualities, of both sorts, into physics, back where Leibniz and Descartes put them, is the current agenda. But maybe all we need to do is to take note of what these inventors of physics said?

Descartes most important contribution was his analytical geometry and his project to geometrize the wolrld is still the project of science.  But Descartes saw clearly that his thinking ego (the mathematician) was not reducible and so he divided the world between bodies (what is reducible according to geometry) and what is not, the thinking ego.  I do not think Descartes established an ontological dualism, it was an epistemological dualism.  His primary mistake when he was searching for what he should be more certain was to settle for thinking instead of feeling and so he would not have concluded that thinking is possible without body.  It is where he left the body behind.  He left perception and imagination behind with the body. Nowadays we know the sequence of removal he should have followed and it is the reverse sequence of animal evolution leading to us and thinking and language came last and should have been removed first.  But Descartes was right about something very important is that the language of geometry belongs to thinking.  We should say belong to the part of thinking about inanimate objects.  The mathematical language evolved based on what can be expressed for this type of thinking.  It is a part of our theory of mind dealing with inanimate artifact.  We as a species evolved as our access to our first primal language which was a kind of singing dancing collective language which was render possible through the conscious access to our theory of mind which is primary an empathic self-enactment capacities.  So science and mathematic have so far only made use of the object theory of mind, they objectify but they never use, and cannot use, our empathic theory of mind.  They use this part of our theory of mind for the creative part but cannot express anything that is not object like in these languages.  It is why it is so easy to talk about consciousness in our ordinary language which implicitly use the empathic part of our theory of mind but so difficult to translate these insignth into the object like language.  Descartes was right that object like language cannot express what is not object like.  But nature has provided us with a much more rich theory of mind and our natural languages , especially in his poetic forms, and all our other  form of expression gave us access to the power of our empathic self-enactment capacity.  It is related as Alfredo point out to the Aristotle form and their actualization at their highest level, the intellectual level, into the human mind.  But Aristotle was wrong in calling this level, rational level because this level is the human body itself which enact the form.

Dear Jonathan, Descartes and Leibiniz find some unity of minds and bodies by means of a divine action. Isn't this action supernatural? in Modern philosophy only Spinoza placed God in Nature. Now remove God from Descartes and Leibiniz and then minds and bodies are separated entities that may interact contingently.

Dear Louis, although I am very fond of your philosophical inclinations I would disagree about the Cartesian distinction being epistemological and about the possibility of him conceiving feeling as the main sign of human existence.

It is easy to see that his distinction is ontological. When he thinks about thinking he concludes that his existence is necessary (otherwise he would not be able of thinking). The existence of the external world is not necessary, since he could be wrong about it. This situation would not change if he had more knowledge, or less ignorance.

Alfredo,

I am not a scholar of Spinoza nor of Leibniz.  So I will speak of my impressions.

I think that both Spinoza and Leibniz identified God with Nature.  They differ on the nature of nature which was totally deterministic for Spinoza, so it is a God in chains while the God of Leibniz , the ultimate monad is free.  Spinoza"s God is an infinitely complex clock.  Leibniz"s God is at the top of the monad hiearchy that are creating the world.

Therefore Spinoza's God is natural and Leibiniz's God is supernatural (a creator, while the world - other monads - are obeying His harmony)

Dear Alfredo and Louis,

We seem to have hijacked Marc's thread and maybe should move elsewhere to discuss Modern natural philosophers. But I think the discussion highlights how badly these people have been misinterpreted by the academic philosophy community. The recent literature leaves us confused by anachronistic readings.

I do not understand what 'supernatural' would mean to Descartes. For him, the mathematical regularity of the changing contents of his thoughts was the evidence for the existence of a benign God rather than a wicked demon. Surely for him the regular dynamics of physics ARE the ways of God. God is not somebody that interferes with physics from time to time. He is the source of physics. Take away God and there is no 'Natural' left to have. I think we forget that for these people God was just the name for the source of everything apparent to them, not an optional extra who answered your prayers in church.

The difference between Spinoza and Descartes/Leibniz as I understand it from Leibniz's own account of his thoughts after talking to Spinoza is that Spinoza considers there to be just one entity (he is monist in this sense which is not the sense that contrasts with dualist) which may be called Nature or God. Descartes and Leibniz consider that souls are separate entities in their own right (pluralist). I do not think any of them 'placed God in Nature' or indeed placed Him outside Nature. Spinoza does not separate the reason for events from the events themselves God=Nature. Leibniz considers that God is the sufficient reason for the events we call Nature or the Universe. He is not in or out of it - he is the reason for it. Moreover, in contrast to Malebranche, who also makes this separation, Leibniz sees that there must be further individual entities within Nature to account for points of view (experiences). So at a smaller scale the internal principle of the monad is the reason for its entire nature, or biography.

If you remove God from Descartes and Leibniz you have nothing but empty chaos. There would be no reason for any order, any aggregates to form matter, any change, any movement, anything at all. 

I admit that a consistent reading of Descartes's account seems to pose problems not usually seen in the commentary literature but my suspicion is that this is a reflection of the rather low level of academic philosophical commentary over the last 300 years. Descartes clearly states that matter is totally inert, incapable of initiating movement. Yet animals, which for him had no souls, would jump about. That must surely be because of the pervasive presence of spirit in addition to matter, and the pervasive form of spirit that gives rise to predictable changes in Descartes's philosophy is called God. That might seem to make an animal more than 'just a machine' but even a machine like a water mill can only move through the action of pervasive spirit, or God, or in our language the laws of physical dynamics. 

My impression is that Descartes was struggling to make all this make sense, and he admitted when talking to Princess Elizabeth that he found it hard to find a form of words to explain what he thought in ordinary language. Looking back, his account is full of loose ends but at least he tried to formulate a coherent story in which 'God' and 'physics' meant the same thing - anything else would not only have been heresy but against his own deep religious belief. (Note that the only time he uses the word physics in the Meditations it is in the context of not using teleology to understand what we attribute to God.) To my mind Leibniz's strength is that he sits down and irons out all the inconsistencies in Descartes in a brutally logical framework. In doing so he creates a metaphysics that most people find too austere to even contemplate but my impression is that you either think things through properly as he did or stick with a half baked muddle of intuitive realism and anachronistic straw men!

Alfredo,

To my question "However I don't understand why this would imply that in this kind of view there would be no place for 'qualia' in nature: could you clarify your point?" your answer is "Yes. In the Modern framework only primary qualities exist in nature. As primary qualities do not logically imply secondary qualities, there is a gap. As secondary qualities exist only in the mind, then the mind is not in nature. The philosophical position resulting from this dichotomy is Descartes' "substance dualism".

First, I won't dispute Descartes' view with you as, again, I am not a scholar of philosophy.

Second, I don't know what your definition of "nature" is. If for you nature means 'everything in our universe' as for me, I don't understand why the nervous system of an organism who has it would not belong to our universe.

I don't know what is your position about the evolutionary theory but, to me, it is clear that all the present and past organisms which appeared on Earth are the products of a mechanism Guy Hoelzer and I call "level-4 evolution" in our 2013 paper "On the thermodynamics of multilevel evolution".

Thus, to me, there is no need to avoid the view that qualia such as color, smell, taste, odor, pain, pleasure, etc. exist only in what we call the "mind" of a given organism.

Do you mean that you believe that "qualia" may exist outside any organism?  

Marc,

mind (consciousness) is evidently not limited (located) in brain or human body. Brain is computer, but what is computor without algorithms?

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you again for your efforts to complete your explanations about what physics is according to you.

1. You say that "a subjective experience ought to be some sort of way-station or point of passage of some sort of causal chain. If not it is hard to see why we evolved to have experiences or how they could cause us to describe them ".

First, I am not sure to understand your assertion that a subjective experience is some sort of way-station or point of passage of some sort of causal chains. Actually I wonder why it would be necessary to qualify an experience by a given organism as “subjective” as, to me, any experience by a given organism is subjective by nature, i.e., it is only experienced by this particular organism. Thus, to me there cannot exist an “objective” experience by an organism.

Second, your assertion that an experience by an organism should be a point of passage of a causal chain is unclear to me. To clarify it could you give an example of such a causal chain for a given experience?

2. You also say “Many people will at this point say that it is the whole person that experiences so there is no reason to ask what cells experience. But the problem is that physics has no such concept of person as unit”.

I find strange and debatable your assertion that “physics” has no such concept of person as unit”.

First, it is strange because you consider “physics” as it were a person. To me all concepts, in particular the one of “physics” come from human culture. “Physics” as such doesn’t exist in our universe. This concept has been progressively constructed by our species to try to define what exist first in our local environment and much later on more distally in what we can perceive from our universe.

Second, it is debatable because it is perfectly sound, scientifically speaking (I should specify “biologically” speaking), to consider a given organism as a relevant unit, particularly according to the evolutionary theory.

3. Finally you assert that “Dehaene himself quite clearly does not think that experience involves the whole person”. I am not sure this assertion is correct: could you reference it?

Marc,

Chalmers took a number of wrongly conceive problems about consciousness and wrongly divided them into two categories: hard and easy.  I do not whish to comment further on Chalmers's vision because I tries in general to comment on positive aspect of people reseach and avoid criticizing.  Since I do not see anything positive to say then I have nothing to say and will let people finding positive things to express themself.  I have nothing positive to say about Stanislas Dehaene although we agree that we have nothing positive to say about Chalmers's approach. 

Jonathan,

We have to remember the politico-religious context when Descartes wrote ''Méditations Métaphyique''.  Galileo had been silenced.  Descartes was educated and adviced by Jesuites.  Jesuites had and still have a double politic: absolute submission to the pope and the church position and belief in science.  How to conciliate the two: by separating them as much a possible.  So Descartes could not say: God is the depth of Nature although it is my interpretation of his position.   Descartes saw the immense potential of the scientific investigation of the world for humanity and he saw the explanatory power of mathematics.  He did not saw all the details of the development that will take place but he saw the limits such development could go and he saws this limit did not reach the mathematician.  It is my personal interpretation that he did not see this limit as a limit of nature but a limit for the expression of mathematic as he conceived it.  Kant's noumenal in my interpretation is a better expression of the limit of expression of this type of language.  The vision of the two realms: mind and body was politically correct at the time: let the church rule the mind and spiritual domain and let science rule the spatio-temporal body domain and the more separate these two and the more piece we will get.  Scientists can work in piece with no pretention to tell the church what to think and Church can rule how we should live our lives without worry about what science say.  It was a shrude Jesuit politic for the time.  At the time, what God is was intimatly linked with politic and so a vision of science that would mixed God with Nature would become mixed with politic.  That was not good and so separating the two in principle, putting a wall was politically correct.  Descartes believed into the origin of earth and the solar system from a primordial nebula.  Do you think he was not able to draw the conclusions of such a view that life on earth had to evolve.  He shutlt his mouth on this the sake of keeping the veil of a fake separation.  Darwin tried to shutt his mouth as long as he could.

Louis,

You say that you have nothing positive to say about Stanislas Dehaene: could you develop your view somewhat?   

Marc,

I know almost to nothing about Stanislas Dehaene.  Yesterday , I saw his name and look at the wikipedia page on him but from that page I saw nothing that draw my interest.  So I am nothing to say but it is not a judgement of someone that really know what he is saying.  

Jonathan,

I am also searching a physical approach to cognition. I agree with your overall conception of what ''physical'' mean.  I am sure we would disagree about the details but I am the impression we agree for the big picture.  I interpret Eddington's position in the book: the nature of the physical world http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/Physworld.pdf, as trying to articulate a similar view as many other but their collective voices are still very weak now and the view is still very diverse and blurry.  I also think like you that Leibniz has a lot to say about how to articulate this view.  I will stop here and continue the discussion on threads which are related to this topic.

Louis,

You seem to understand Jonathan's notion of 'physics': perhaps you could contribute to my understanding of it in addition to Jonathan's explanations.

You talk about Arthur Eddington's position in his 1928 book "The Nature of the Physical World".

Actually, I like the following passage in this book: "There is a doctrine well known to philosophers that the moon ceases to exist when no one is looking at it. I will not discuss the doctrine since I have not the least idea what is the meaning of the word existence when used in this connection. At any rate the science of astronomy has not been based on this spasmodic kind of moon. In the scientific world (which has to fulfill functions less vague than merely existing) there is a moon which appeared on the scene before the astronomer; it reflects sunlight when no one sees it; it has mass when no one is measuring the mass; it is distant 240,000 miles from the earth when no one is surveying the distance; and it will eclipse the sun in 1999 even if the human race has succeeded in killing itself off before that date".

Well, I don't see in such a realistic view anything which looks like the notion that an experience "is some sort of way-station or point of passage of some sort of causal chains".

Marc,

Jonathan did a better job at explaining to you than I can. I think I can understand you because you have a vision of science that I had and I am painfully trying to escape its attraction for half my life.  I do not think that a few lines here and there is able to pull you away from the common view unless you really feel the need in the first place.

Dear Marc,

Happy to clarify further.

Firstly I agree that ‘subjective’ experience is redundant. I only introduced the subjective word because you had quoted it from Dehaene.

But where I disagree is that an experience is ‘experienced by an organism’. Note that Dehaene denies that there is any need for anything ‘to experience’ an experience. It just happens. He says that it is a foolish myth to think that there is some Cartesian entity ‘to which the experience occurs’ or which ‘has the experience’. So maybe Dehaene’s view is very different from yours?

The problem for me is different. I accept that something must experience an experience by I see no reason for it to be a multicellular 'organism', which is a colony of living units with some common survival interests. Organism or person is the way we talk about socially but if we are talking biophysics it makes no sense. My liver and toenails have nothing to do with my visual experiences. And having an experience, if it is to mean something in physics (causal dynamics) presumably must mean that what has the experience is being influenced in some way by some incoming signals. And we know very well that in this case we are talking about some small part of the brain receiving signals. Dehaene sets the scene for that and then denies that any receiving occurs.

This to me is important because the objection to Descartes’s soul in neurology is usually given as the fact that there is no one unique place in a brain where things come together. What tends to get forgotten is that that is true because there are lots and lots of places where things come together (cells). So we should expect lots and lots of copies of experience in a brain. In my view that must be the case. The fact that an individual experience does not include any sense of being one of many is easily explained because there is no Darwinian advantage in having such a sense and anyway it is an oxymoron to experience other experiences.

There are a lot of unfounded assumptions around here.

My waystation in a causal chain is very simple. If I see a red rose and say so, my experience is a waystation on a causal chain that includes the fusion of hydrogen to helium in the sun, the emission of photons, the reflection by the rose, passage of photons through cornea to retina, neural impulses, movement of tongue and lips and larynx. All I am saying, and I think this is hard to deny in a physics based account is that an experience should be somewhere along such a chain. Dehaene insists that to be an experience there must be events somewhere forward of the visual cortex. I agree, but the problem is that he wants the experience to be determined in some 'sharing' way by several parallel chains and physics has no precedent for that.

I do not consider physics as a person. I consider it as a body of theoretical proposals. And as such it does not include ‘person’ as a relevant unit when considering the dynamics inside brains. Of course person is a useful concept if we are talking about natural selection, because death of one bit tends to mean death of a whole functional unit. But if, like Dehaene, we are trying to track down the difference between unconscious and conscious brain processes then by definition we are at a different level – person is no longer relevant. This was Gilbert Ryle’s mistake. He criticizes Descartes for inventing a ghost in the machine but it is Ryle who gets things wrong by inventing a ghost outside or encompassing the machine. Persons, as far as I can see have nothing to do with experiences. Andy Clark is interesting on this. He says that functional mind goes beyond the body into the world, but conscious mind is something very small deep within the brain. I agree. To be relevant we have to be at the relevant level.

I cannot reference Dehaene saying ‘I do not think experience involves the whole person’. However, he makes it very clear that he does not think signals in brain stem and primary visual cortex are involved in conscious experience. What we call our experiences for him require signals further forward in the brain. I am sure that Dehaene does not think experience involves liver, kidney, toenails etc., nor indeed retina, except as a site of causal precursor events that correlate well with experience but are not actually necessary or sufficient for that experience. Dehaene also makes it clear that neither the person or anything else in his view ‘has the experience’, as indicate above. I am afraid I do not now have the book as I am a book review editor and the copy I received went out to a reviewer. However, he talks about this in the early part where he lays out his general views on the (putative) errors of Descartes etc.

I realise that the idea that 'persons have experiences' is deeply rooted in culture. It has been bolstered by Varela on 'autopoiesis' and 'systems theory' in general but scientifically I cannot see any place for it. I don't think Dehaene would support it either. Quite how he explains why one experience is distinct from another, rather than there being one universal experience, I do not know, but I am afraid when it comes to the deeper questions I rather think Dehaene has not got his bathing suit wet yet, let alone gone swimming.

Dear Marc:

In the Cartesian framework, and also (it seems to me) in Chalmers' Property Dualism, if a property is mental then it is non-physical. Therefore, if secondary qualities are only in the mind, they are not physical.

For me (like you), being mental does not imply being non-physical. Therefore, secondary qualities in the mind of animals can be called "physical". The problem is to reinsert them in physical science. For instance, you will find in physics textbooks that color is a mental property, while light in a wavelength is physical. How could color be inserted in physics?

Jonathan,

1. You assert (without, any quotation from Dehaene’s texts I notice) “that Dehaene denies that there is any need for anything ‘to experience’ an experience. It just happens. He says that it is a foolish myth to think that there is some Cartesian entity to which the experience occurs or which has the experience”.

I don't know from which Dehaene’s texts you infer your interpretation of Dehaene’s view of experience. Actually Dehaene wrote the following: “We introduced the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) model as an alternative cortical mechanism capable of integrating the supervision, limited-capacity, and re-entry properties” and “Dehaene and Naccache (2001) postulate that this global availability of information (…) is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state“ (Dehaene and Changeux, 2011). Clearly this view is the opposite of your interpretation.

2. I totally disagree with your assertion that “we should expect lots and lots of copies of experience in a brain. In my view that must be the case. The fact that an individual experience does not include any sense of being one of many is easily explained because there is no Darwinian advantage in having such a sense and anyway it is an oxymoron to experience other experiences”.

Actually I don’t understand your logic: why Darwinian evolution would have selected a system with “lots and lots of copies of experience in the brain”? It would be an energy and information wasteful system. All the scientists in the neuroscience area instead know that the nervous system works in such a way as to make savings on energy and on storage of information.

3. As an example of your notion of a waystation in a causal chain you say: “if I see a red rose and say so, my experience is a waystation on a causal chain that includes the fusion of hydrogen to helium in the sun, the emission of photons, the reflection by the rose, passage of photons through cornea to retina, neural impulses, movement of tongue and lips and larynx”.

Well, I understand much better now what you mean and I must admit that I am totally amazed by such a view! I am sorry to say that this makes no sense to me.

I stop here because I think that my comments show sufficiently that there is a great gap between us in our interpretation of not only Dehaene’s views but also of experiences by organisms.

Reference:

Dehaene S, Changeux J-P. Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing. Neuron 2011;70:200-226.

Alfredo,

I don't understand your problem. I have the impression that it is the same false problem as Chalmers' hard problem.

You say "The problem is to reinsert them in physical science. For instance, you will find in physics textbooks that color is a mental property, while light in a wavelength is physical. How could color be inserted in physics?".

To me it is clear that a given organism integrates signals from its local environment (e.g., photons) through its senses (e.g., eye and retina) and its nervous system (e.g., optical and non optical pathways) into a physical medium that allows the organism to make savings on energy and on storage of information as much as possible.

In the example of vision the photons of course are not stored in our nervous system as such. But this doesn't mean that the information transmitted by the photons is not stored in a physical medium. This physical medium is represented by networks of nervous cells and synapses.  

Dear Marc:

You are confusing "being physical" with "being explained by scientific physical theory".

Of course everything in nature is physical or contains a physical aspect. Howeverm only a narrow range of physical phenomena is explained by physical theories. The main reason for this limitation is that modern science considered that only primary qualities should appear in physical explanations. This was a philosophical assumption that needs revision if we are going to face the real side of the hard problem.

By the way, the root of the hard problem is the so-called hypothetical-deductive reductionist model of scientific explanation. Combined with the restrictive ontology of modern science, this model leads scientists to the impossible task of deductively explaining qualia from primary qualities under physical forces and laws. While Chalmers assumes that qualia supervenes from these physical properties, he wisely concludes that the deduction does not exist. However, he was naive to assume that that supervenience does exist. It does not, because the ontology of modern physics does not contain the "seeds" of qualia. 

Therefore, to solve the hard problem it is necessary:

a) to show that in a broader, non-reductive model of scientific explanation (beyond Ernet Nagel's) such a deduction is not necessary;

b) to insert the seeds of qualia back in the science of nature (physics) to make possible the supervenience of the conscious mental from the physical.

Stop citation, begin thinking, Marc.

Alfredo,

colors can be well operated. Why are they worse, than the wave lengths?

Alfredo,

I understand that you believe that Chalmers' hard problem is real.

I think it is more a belief than a rational position based on scientific arguments as your arguments are mainly philosophical or make reference to philosophers of science. Then it it is difficult to me to discuss them.

However, regarding Ernest Nagel I like this passage of his 1961 book "The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation":

"However acute our awareness may be of the rich variety of human experience, and however great our concern over the dangers of using the fruits of science to science to obstruct the development of human individuality, it is not likely that our best interests would be served by stopping objective inquiry into the various conditions determining the existence of human traits and actions, and thus shutting the door to the progressive liberation from illusion that comes from the knowledge achieved by such inquiry".

Dear Eugene, color is the subjective feel that we experience when exposed to the photonic field with a wavelength. We can technologically operate on the wavelengths, but the step from the photonic field to the feel is still not known. The key issue is: how is color "encoded" in the wavelength and how is it "decoded" by our brains?

Dear Marc, if we do not discuss history and philosophy of science you the hard problem may seem false as it appears to you.

Ernst Nagel is a reductionist who sought of reducing "phenomenological" theories (as thermodynamics) to "foundational" theories (like classical mechanics). The reductions had to be by means of logical deduction. The reduced theory would be the conclusion of an argument departing from the foundational theory and auxiliary hypotheses, using the rules of classical logics. Only this kind of explanation would count as scientific.

As it obviously does not work for the mind-body problem, Davidson, Kim and other philosophers of mind coined another concept, supervenience. Materialist philosophers claim that the mind supervenes on brain activity, although they concede that mental properties are not deducible from physical properties. Chalmers studied with a materialist philosopher (Dennett) and concluded that this state of knowledge is not satisfactory, them naming the problem a hard problem.

The hard problem has a false side, the assumption that nomological deductive method (e.g. Ernest Nagel's approach) is the standard for science. This approach has been questioned e.g. by biologists and complexity scientists (chaos theory).

However, it also has a true side, that I described above. For brains to "decode"qualia from physical stimuli, it is necessary to have the quale message in the physical signal. How to solve this part of the problem? Please see discussion of my question "How to solve Chalmers' hard problem?" here in RG...

Dear Alfredo,

we can objectivly produce one color by superposition of others, we can order them and so on. What is subjective here? On the other hand concepts of EM field, wave length and so on are the products of human mind. I am speaking about key philosophical problems, not about peculiarities.

Contrary to Ernst Negel, I don't think, that Classical Mechanics are more fundamental, than Thermodynamics. According to objective logical and linguistic critaria they have common structure and comparable significance.

Regards,

Eugene.

Dear Marc,

There is indeed a gap, and as Louis says, that gap only gets crossed when people are ready to cross it.

I explained why I cannot give you the page number for the quote from Dehaene – I sent the book out for review – but it will be somewhere in chapter 2 I think. Do have a look. I agree that Dehaene makes throwaway statements like ‘we subjectively experience’ as well. This is the whole problem. He accepts these social phrases and then denies that there is any biophysical equivalent.

His model is derived from Bernie Baars. Both claim that experience is the ‘broadcasting’ of signals in a workspace. They deny that anything ‘experiences’ these signals in the sense of receiving them. Baars gives the analogy of a spotlight on an actor on stage declaiming to the audience. But Baars says the audience consists of thousands of unconscious cells. I find this bizarre because ‘experience’ in all normal contexts means something that happens to some thing via receiving signals from the environment. If ‘I’ experience then presumably I get some signals about something. So I would have to be in the audience, not the actor. The experience of a broadcast is had by the people who receive the broadcast.

And multiplicity is just a fact of neurology. Most brain neurons have about 10,000 branches to their axons – so they send their signal to 10,000 places – i.e. there are 10,000 ‘copies’ of this piece of information. That is all I mean and it is undisputed anatomical fact. There I no reason to think that ‘experiencing’ takes any more energy than the signals sending and receiving we know is there.

But I guess that if it makes no sense to you for an experience to be an event in the sense of some stage in a causal chain then we are unlikely to converge any further. Maybe a good reason for agreeing that Chalmers got the problem wrong is that Newton said it much better: '… to determine by what modes or actions light produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour is not so easie'.

Alfredo,

Regarding the colors I suppose you know that there are three types of cones sensitive to three different spectra (S, L and M cones), resulting in trichromatic color vision. The opsins, (photopigments) present in the L and M cones are encoded on the X chromosome and defective encoding of these leads to the two most common forms of color blindness.

I think this answers the first following question: How does our retina encode the physical stimuli represented by photons into nervous signals?

Then, coded nervous signals are transmitted and processed by the nervous pathways and networks to allow our conscious perception of qualia of colors.

Where is the hard problem here?

Jonathan,

When you say "if I see a red rose and say so, my experience is a waystation on a causal chain that includes the fusion of hydrogen to helium in the sun, the emission of photons, the reflection by the rose, passage of photons through cornea to retina, neural impulses etc." why not come back to the origin of the universe in your causal chain?

Why is that the photons your retina perceives have their origin in the sun has any impact on the way your retina actually perceives these?

Because phenomenal descriptors and physical descriptors occupy separate descriptive domains, a formal identity cannot be asserted when describing any instance of a subjective phenomenal event in terms of an instance of an objective physical event. We are forced into accepting some descriptive slack. I think this epistemological slack is the basis of the so called "hard problem". On the assumption that the physical world is all that exists, and if we cannot assert an identity relationship between a first-person event (a conscious event) and a corresponding third-person event (a brain event), we need a bridging principle to to close the explanatory gap. This situation is discussed in "A foundation for the scientific study of consciousness" on my RG page.

8 minutes ago

What is hard for one person, is easy for another.

If an artificial consciousness has a subjective experience, that is functionally equivalent to a human subjective experience, it should not matter that both are inaccessible to objective science.

Graeme,

Are you aware of any present artificial consciousness somewhere?

Alfredo,

When you are talking about the ''Hard problem'', do you talk about all the problems that Chalmers 1995 put in the hard-problem bin? How do you define (not how you solve it) the hard-problem of consciousness?  

Graeme,

Why do you use the expression ''subjective experience''? Is there an experience which is not subjective?

Graeme, Marc, Louis,

exists the opinion, that artificial consciousness (intellect) is devil's idea.

Alfredo,

''The key issue is: how is color "encoded" in the wavelength''

Colour perception in general is not a property of a single point of the visual field.  The visual system do not attribute colour to points of the visual field.  The visual field is first separated into different surfaces and objects and colour fill-in these boundaries.  Then the process of attribution of coulour will make use of information on the whole visual field taking into consideration the effect of the illuminant and many other factors.  It is an complex measurement process.  We can get intersubjective agreement in between normal vision observers prooving that the process of colour attibution is a measurement process.  The problem for many philosophers to accept it as a measurement process is that they do not have an independent instrument which is able to perform the measurement process because we do not yet understand it and so we cannot explain what property of the world that the intersubjective agreement is pointing to.

Eugene,

We cannot exclude  the possibility of the existence of conscious beings that do not have a biological body.  What is a conscious body?  The answer to this question will allow to either accept this possibility or reject it.  

Louis,

are You a specialist in colour seen?

Eugene,

I studied the topic for five years.  After my degree in Engineering I was interested in AI and computational vision.  My master degree project was about the visual recognition of ripe tomatoes for a robot harvesting robot in outdoor lighting conditions.  I had no idea that the colour perception problem would even be an issue, I thought it would be trivial but it end up to be the central problem.  I did most of my master on it and continue two years in the Ph.D. on it then I dropped the whole topic but kept an interest.

Louis: "What is a conscious body? The answer to this question will allow to either accept this possibility or reject it."

My answer is that a conscious body is a living body with a brain that can represent the world from a privileged egocentric perspective. What are the other answers to this question?

Yes, it is complicated problem, Louis.

The other answer is real Humanoid, Arnold.

Yes there are artificial Consciousnesses out there, but I am not sure they are functionally equivalent to human consciousness. The closest I have heard of is Franklin's Robots Alisa and Lisa, which have a rudimentary "Functional Consciousness" according to Bernard Baar's theory. They claim to have access consciousness.

Arnold,

''My answer is that a conscious body is a living body with a brain that can represent the world from a privileged egocentric perspective.''

There are many other answers as you know. I personally departs from your above answer with the word ''represent''.  I disagree that our brain represent the world.  Why our brain would bother with ''Re-present'' .  IOur  nervous system is controling our bodily interaction with the world, it is part of our body,  The body (which include our nervous system) IS  the ''I' in interaction'' .  Our entire body structure is a reflection of the world we interact with.  It does not need to create a little space within it where the world is re-presented because the whole body is in the image of this interaction and is constantly modified while our interaction (insight) evolves.  In a few words, our approaches depart right at the beginning. Lets say I agree that God (the world) created (evolution as mirroring) humans at his own image.

Louis: "Our entire body structure is a reflection of the world we interact with."

If X is a reflectionof Y, wouldn't it be correct to say that X represents Y? You agree that our body interacts with the world outside of our body. I assume that you would agree that the interaction is systematically constrained by the physical properties of the world that surrounds our body -- it is not a random interaction. So what biological mechanisms in the body beside its sensory transducers and brain give the body a proper representation/reflection of the relevant properties of the world with which it interacts?

I think I'm right: this question is a troll, because the 78 responses in 5 days attest it.

Well, I'll still bring my little stone to the troll, because I find it regrettable that such a question is as successful as it is not entirely scientific. The question of consciousness is philosophical, metaphysical, religious, but not scientific in any way. As summarized well Eugene F Kislyakov: "The problem is that we try to explain consciousness by constructions of consciousness. It is the circle."

The struggle between realists and idealists (phenomenalists) is very ancient. It is found from the earliest times in India with Buddhist schools Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Yogacara, and Madhyamika. The Greeks took over the problem, and later Western philosophers (Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl) too.

The status of consciousness is not scientific because it leads to an undecidability: any demonstration of a world outside consciousness (realism) will certainly take place in a consciousness, because consciousness is the only thing that we can know (idealism). But from the idealist position, of which the main demonstration is Husserl's transcendental epoche, we get a pure idealism and solipsism. The solipsistic position is solved by applying the transcendental epoche to consciousness itself, the ego, which leads to the transcendental ego. Transcendental ego, which itself carries an epoche and so on, which leads to undecidability on the side of idealism too: consciousness itself is in doubt.

The annihilation of both realism and idealism positions leads to vacuity (emptiness): the suspension of all conception about reality or consciousness. Thus, we see obviously that this question of consciousness is NOT scientific!

Anyway, to answer the Marc Tessera's question specifically, the status of "easy" and "hard" problems is not scientific because both problems are conceived in one (or more) consciousness, a consciousness which has no ontological foundation.

Finally, let us beware of the stars of science that engage in metaphysics! Written by a Nobel prize, a book will always be edited with a lot of marketing, but this is not a warranty that what is written in this book has any scientific value (I'm not talking about Dehaene specifically, but I think to other authors...). Here we touch on the argument of the master which is not a good argument in science.

Eric,

What is your definition of a troll when applied to a question?

Eric,

Another question to you: what do you think of the experiments in neuroscience? Do you think they try to answer metaphysical questions?

Eric: "The question of consciousness is philosophical, metaphysical, religious, but not scientific in any way."

I disagree. Consciousness is a fundamental scientific problem/question, and it can be answered within scientific norms. The validity of a theoretical explanation of consciousness, like any other theory in science, will be judged by its success in explaining/predicting previously inexplicable conscious phenomena. For example, see the SMTT experiment in "Space, self, and the theater of consciousness" and "Where Am I? Redux" on my RG page.

Here is a critical experiment that anyone can perform. It is taken from *The Cognitive Brain* (MIT Press 1991), p. 92:

……………………………………………………………..

Cut out a 1-inch square of black construction paper, and paste it on a sheet of unglossed white poster board. At a normal reading distance, fixate the center of the black square for approximately 1 minute under bright uniform illumination. This will induce a bright after-image of the square on your retinas. If you now shift your gaze to a different region of the poster board, you will see a square image that is brighter than the surrounding surface. Move the poster board farther away, and the square will appear to grow larger. Move the poster board closer than the original fixation distance, and the square will appear to become smaller in size. You can change the perceived shape of the square by tilting the surface of the poster board after the retinal after-image has formed. If you tilt the fixation surface (the poster board) away from you on a horizontal axis, the square after-image appears to assume a roughly rectangular shape elongated on the vertical axis. If you tilt it on a vertical axis, you will see a rectangle with horizontal elongation. If the after-image is sharp enough, careful observation reveals that the shape transformations are not quite rectangular; an edge that appears on the near surface of the posterboard is somewhat shorter than its opposite edge on the far surface.

…………………………………………………………

Notice that the retinal after-image remains constant in size and shape during all manipulations of the blank fixation surface, yet there are striking changes in your various conscious experiences of the fixed after-image on the retina. The significant point is that all of the transformations in your conscious perceptions that occur in this demonstration are *predicted and explained* by the neuronal structure and dynamics detailed in the retinoid model of consciousness. The challenge is for competing theoretical models of consciousness to demonstrate comparable (or better) predictive power.

Is Chalmers’ “Hard problem” real—you ask. To answer this I will briefly outline my view.

1. The “hard vs. easy” has been variously interpreted usefully. It becomes a scale for the variously “hard” and only somewhat “easy” problems out there in the science of consciousness.

2. Ontology. The really, really “hard problem” is the ontological question—the question of the ultimate ontological nature of consciousness: immaterial or material or just a function of a material brain. We should face it: These are metaphysical assertions beyond the scope of science as we now know it. They should be distinguished from theoretical assertions imputing causality to consciousness that can be causally modelled and empirically evaluated.

3. Construction. The really “hard problem” is how some particular neural network with its activation and neurotransmitters constructs a specific conscious state.

4. Neural identification. Also a “hard problem” today. We have a vast vocabulary of specific conscious states. We may grant the value of brain imaging for differentiation among classes of mental activity, even classes of conscious state (such as facial and locational)--when we know the stimulus. But with the present limitations of technology, we lack the specificity of assessment to identify specific conscious states. We have fMRI for patterns of voxel activation, ERP for a maximal positive or negative activation within a few hundred milliseconds, etc.

5. Neural correlates. Of specific conscious states, if technology should reach that stage? This still could provide a “neural explanation of consciousness”—in that limited sense. But correlation establishes neither causality nor ontology. It would still be consistent with any of the classical positions on the mind brain problem—material or nonmaterial ontology, parallelism, or interactionism.

6.Theory of the interrelations among conscious states, with states mapped most productively into phenomenal reports and prior instructions. T This can be productive in a science of consciousness, but is not an “easy problem.” It calls for a logic of competitive support for theory and mapping validities—network logic, Duhem-Quine thesis, and Bayes. But this has been elaborated in papers, 2014, 2012, 2011 and earlier--now recently on ResearchGate.

Donelson,

I think there is a deep gap between an identification of some signals in the brain and the understanding of their function. What we lack is a theoretical understanding of consciousness and qualia. 

So we need both, a theory (or better ones) and better experimental conditions.

Dear Marc and All:

Marc wrote: "Coded nervous signals are transmitted and processed by the nervous pathways and networks to allow our conscious perception of qualia of colors. Where is the hard problem here?"

Alfredo: The problem with this and all other qualia and feelings is that we know too well all these mechanisms, and we also know that qualia and feelings are produced or instantiated by them, but we do not know how they supervene from them.

As I wrote in a previous post (lost in the avalanche), the true part of the hard problem is to explain how qualia and feelings supervene from the activity of physical mechanisms

Alfredo,

I think there are two questions. The first question is for a theory of qualia and the second is how is it realized in the brain.

Dear Wilfried, you are right, but Chalmers did not make the first question. It is interesting to mention that he used the Kantian term (phenomenal) to qualify conscious experience. It was previously used by Ned Block to distinguish the experience of qualia from other modalities of consciousness (focusing attention, controlng action, etc.). Before Ned, the term was used by the "Phenomenologists" (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), and now is used in Neurophenomenology. There are several issues about qualia. Tim Crane has a classical paper on "The History of Qualia" (link below), beginning with the Empiricists who believed that science builds on "sense data". This historical fact indicates the familiarity of the problem with philsophy of science

http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/the_origins_of_qualia.pdf

Arnold,

The body structure (everything is include here) is made for the interaction and yes it is implicitly structure as the interaction.  Notice that I refuse to use the word "represent"".  

I agree but I do include inside the body all that interact in two way: extension of the body or merging of bodies.  Bodies are not defined spacially but functionally.

>  I agree

 Remember, I am saying it is not a representation.  What is necessary is a mechanism of interaction whose structure matche the structure of the interaction.  A trivial example is : to see a circle you just need to have a circle detection mechanism, you do not need a circle building mechanism.  The circle is not represented, it only need to be detected and the circle detection mechanism exist because they are circles to be detected.

I am trying to catch up after a gap.

Marc,

I think you have got the wrong end of the stick. I am not implying that where photons come from affects the way they are received by the retina. In fact I earlier gave an analogy of a trompe l'oeil picture of a chair as an indication that this would not be the case. The fact that you find my causal waystation metaphor absurd suggests to me that you have misunderstood what I mean by it. I simple mean that an experience is an event with causes and effects like any other event in physics. But it has to be a single event because if you start allowing events at different paces and times to 'add up' you violate the whole structure of physical laws and end up with insoluble infinite regresses, overdetermination and all sorts of horrible things.

On the issue of 'subjective experience':

I think we all agree that the subjective word seems to add nothing to our usual idea of experience, but I do not actually think it is redundant. I think this phrase is a way of saying 'experience considered in terms of its subjective aspect'. That allows us to contrast it with considering experience in terms of the causal physical dynamics involved, so that we can consider how they might correspond. 

Another small but maybe central point. People are, like Chalmers, asking HOW qualia arise from or supervene on physical dynamics. I think that this may overblow the question. If we accept that science has no commitment to any intrinsic properties and only deals with the causal dispositions that we can predict and confirm then all we can ask is 'what are the rules of correspondence' between qualia and the dynamic relations with which they are instantiated. Physics is just a set of rules of correspondence that apply to what we call causal relations. So it is not just correlates, we do require cause, or necessity, but it is just a set of rules, with no answer to 'how come?', I think.

Jonathan,

Let’s us say there was a misunderstanding about your notion of a waystation in a causal chain.

Now, I understand you dispute Dehaene’s approach because you consider that Dehaene “wants the experience to be determined in some 'sharing' way by several parallel chains and physics has no precedent for that”.

Let’s try to summarize the Global Neuronal Workspace theory proposed by Stanislas Dehaene with Lionel Naccache and Jean-Pierre Changeux .

According to Sid Kouider (Kouider, 2009) “this theory is a perfect example of the neurobiological extension of a cognitive theory, that of a global workspace, originally proposed by Bernard Baars in 1988”.

“Dehaene’s theory assumes that neurocognitive architecture is composed of two qualitatively distinct types of elements:

In addition, for a mental object to become conscious, it is not sufficient that its activity gives input to the global workspace. Two other conditions have to be met. One is that the content of the mental object must be represented as an explicit firing pattern of neuronal activity, that is, a group of neurons that unambiguously indexes its relevant attributes. A final and important condition is that the top-down amplification mechanisms mobilizing the long-distance workspace connections render the content of consciousness accessible, sharpened, and maintained. A mental object, even if it respects the two first conditions (explicit firing and accessibility to workspace neurons) will still remain buffered in a ‘preconscious’ (and thus a nonconscious) store until it is attended to and its neural signal amplified. Therefore, top-down attention in this framework is a necessary condition for consciousness”.

Well, from this presentation of the Global Neuronal Workspace theory, I suppose you dispute it because such a global neuronal workspace must involves multiple cerebral modules for a mental object to become conscious and you consider that physics has no precedent for that: is that what you mean?

Louis: "A trivial example is : to see a circle you just need to have a circle detection mechanism, you do not need a circle building mechanism. The circle is not represented, it only need to be detected and the circle detection mechanism exist because they are circles to be detected."

How can you possibly see and detect a circle out there in the world if the circle is not somehow represented on your retinas and in your brain's egocentric space to be consciously located in front of you and detected by your circle-detection mechanism?

Donelson,

You raise interesting questions and make useful comments:

Personally I am not interested in ontological questions when dealing with a scientific issue because they are metaphysical questions. However, I am aware that I take the philosophical option that everything accessible to homo sapiens’ mind can be analyzed through the scientific approach. To me consciousness can be seen as a scientific concept and thus analyzed through the scientific approach.

Well, Dehaene has the same concern when he says “Brain imaging is only correlational in nature, and leaves open the possibility that distributed ignition involving prefrontal cortex is a mere epiphenomenon or a consequence of conscious access, rather than being one of its necessary causes. Causality is a demanding concept that can only be assessed by systematic lesion or interference methods, which are of very limited applicability in human subjects. Nevertheless, one prediction of theGNW model is testable: lesioning or interfering with prefrontal or parietal cortex activity, at sites quite distant from visual areas, should disrupt conscious vision. This prediction was initially judged as so counterintuitive) as to be immediately refuted by clinical observations, because frontal lobe patients do not appear to be unconscious. However, recent evidence actually supports the GNW account. In normal subjects, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over either parietal or prefrontal cortex can prevent conscious perception and even trigger a sudden subjective disappearance of visual stimulis during prolonged fixation, change blindness, binocularly rivalry, inattentional blindness, and attentional blink paradigms” (Dehaene and Changeux, 2011).

I don’t really understand your point 6, i.e., “Theory of the interrelations among conscious states, with states mapped most productively into phenomenal reports and prior instructions”: could you clarify it?

Louis,

From an old news report:

"Last week Portland, Ore. saw a sculpture show extraordinary. All 17 pieces of sculpture at the Portland Art Museum—a few animals but mostly heads and portrait busts of people—showed curious distortions, strangely lengthened necks, prominent ears and teeth, projecting lips, bulging shoulder blades, mouths agape. Though some of the eyes in these strange statues were small and some large, all were closed.

These sightless figures were made by sightless sculptors."

This is a good example the production of a "copy" of something that the sculptors could not see, but could only represent in their imagination. 

In one sense Stanislas Dehaene is quite right, especially as Chalmer’s “hard” problem admits a simple solution.  What an observer sees depends on his/her vantage point.  So we, each of us, can perceive our own internal thoughts, hopes, aspirations —“the way things feel” (to copy Chalmer’s phrase), because we observe ourselves from a ‘personal view’.  But we can observe other people only in ‘camera view’ and therefore cannot perceive how “things feel” to others.  But in another sense the “hard” problem is truly hard, because the opportunities for relating the subjective aspects of personal view to camera view are very few. 

“The problem posed by consciousness now stands like this. There are two quite distinct viewpoints from which a person’s behavior might be experienced. There is the personal viewwhich is private to the individual, not accessible by any other observer, and there is the objective camera view from which everyone else regards that individual’s actions (but not itself accessible to the individual in question). Consciousness, in the sense in which it constitutes a philosophical problem, is tied to the private, personal, view; scientific study, on the other hand, is equally firmly rooted in the objective, camera, view. What then can we say about consciousness?

“The answer is “Nothing,” except to the extent that we can relate the personal experience of consciousness to the camera-view regime of scientific observation. Then, and only then, might we be able to translate the phenomena of consciousness into some objectively observable correlate. That is the aspect of the problem to which experimental psychology uniquely contributes. The author of an experiment with human participants might equally be a participant in his or her own experiment, and a good professional psychologist will indeed serve as a pilot participant in his or her own experiment for the sake of whatever intuitions that experience might deliver. We must therefore inquire what parallels can justifiably be drawn between subjective experience on the one hand and scientific observation on the other, justified by correlating experience as both experimenter and as participant in the same experiment.”  (D. Laming, Understanding Human Motivation, pp.69/70).

Donald,

A few thousand years back humans were using natural languages but did not developed yet a mathematical-scientific language for expressing camera-viewpoint or objective viewpoints.  The camera-viewpoint is a transformation of the natural languages so that certain aspects of the personal viewpoint can be communicated unambiguously among humans.  Numbers are just such coding.  When I see two apples on the table, it is entirely a personal experience but one which can be communicated unambiguously among people knowing counting and able to translated the sentence into a personal imagined experience.  How this is done requires specigying the evolution of apes to humans but the point is that the camera viewpoint is a sub-set of the personal viewpoint, the subset that can be expressed in scientific language.  The whole evolution of science and mathematics is the creation of a language that gives the impression that it is not subjective because the expression is unambiguous.   There are two domains of language but there are no two domains of experiences: personal - camera.  The Camera one is just a formatted subset of thepersonal one and cannot exist without personal consciousness making sense of it.

''What then can we say about consciousness?'' 

A lot in our natural language but not much into the way we have so far constructed our mathematico-scientific one.  I think that the next step will consist in extending the mathematico-scientific language into a new realm of intersubjectivity, one that is not currently possible to express into the current math-science language. I think we first have to clarify the relation between the current math-science language with its origin in our object part of our theory of mind and to see how we can build a intersubjective language on the part of the theory of mind that is deal with people and animals, those things that have consciousness.

Donald:" We must therefore inquire what parallels can justifiably be drawn between subjective experience on the one hand and scientific observation on the other, justified by correlating experience as both experimenter and as participant in the same experiment."

In the light of what you have written above, what do you make of the seeing-more-than-is-there (SMTT) experiment described in "Space, self, and the theater of consciousness" on pp. 324-325 on my RG page?