2019-09-16, 06:36 PM
One science writer finally hit the nail on the head when it comes to the mystery of consciousness. His name was Michael Hanlon, the title of the article is "The mental block -
Consciousness is the greatest mystery in science - Don’t believe the hype: the Hard Problem is here to stay". Too bad the article is posthumous. It was published in 2014, but it is just as valid today. I guess Hanlon still had some scientism in his way of thinking, since the one hypothesis Hanlon didn't cover was that consciousness is simply, fundamentally, unknowable to science because it is basically of another realm of existence. That other ways of knowing must be needed.
On the hubris and failure of modern neuroscience in dealing with this problem:
On qualia:
Conclusion:
Consciousness is the greatest mystery in science - Don’t believe the hype: the Hard Problem is here to stay". Too bad the article is posthumous. It was published in 2014, but it is just as valid today. I guess Hanlon still had some scientism in his way of thinking, since the one hypothesis Hanlon didn't cover was that consciousness is simply, fundamentally, unknowable to science because it is basically of another realm of existence. That other ways of knowing must be needed.
On the hubris and failure of modern neuroscience in dealing with this problem:
Quote:"A triple barrage of neuroscientific, computational and evolutionary artillery promises to reduce the hard problem to a pile of rubble. Today’s consciousness jockeys talk of p‑zombies and Global Workspace Theory, mirror neurones, ego tunnels, and attention schemata. They bow before that deus ex machina of brain science, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Their work is frequently very impressive and it explains a lot. All the same, it is reasonable to doubt whether it can ever hope to land a blow on the hard problem.
For example, fMRI scanners have shown how people’s brains ‘light up’ when they read certain words or see certain pictures. Scientists in California and elsewhere have used clever algorithms to interpret these brain patterns and recover information about the original stimulus — even to the point of being able to reconstruct pictures that the test subject was looking at. This ‘electronic telepathy’ has been hailed as the ultimate death of privacy (which it might be) and as a window on the conscious mind (which it is not).
The problem is that, even if we know what someone is thinking about, or what they are likely to do, we still don’t know what it’s like to be that person. Hemodynamic changes in your prefrontal cortex might tell me that you are looking at a painting of sunflowers, but then, if I thwacked your shin with a hammer, your screams would tell me you were in pain. Neither lets me know what pain or sunflowers feel like for you, or how those feelings come about. In fact, they don’t even tell us whether you really have feelings at all. One can imagine a creature behaving exactly like a human — walking, talking, running away from danger, mating and telling jokes — with absolutely no internal mental life. Such a creature would be, in the philosophical jargon, a zombie. (Zombies, in their various incarnations, feature a great deal in consciousness arguments.)"
On qualia:
Quote:As to where the qualia ‘happen’, the answer could be ‘nowhere and nowhen’. If we do not believe in magic forcefields, but do believe that a conscious event, a quale, can do stuff, then we have a problem (in addition to the problem of explaining the quale in the first place). As David Chalmers says, ‘the problem of how qualia causally affect the physical world remains pressing… with no easy answer in sight’. It is very hard to see how a mind generated by whirring cogs can affect the whirring of those cogs in turn.
Conclusion:
Quote:Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Dennett wrote that: ‘Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.’ A few years later, Chalmers added: ‘[It] may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.’ They were right then and, despite the tremendous scientific advances since, they are still right today. I do not think that the evolutionary ‘explanations’ for consciousness that are currently doing the rounds are going to get us anywhere. These explanations do not address the hard problem itself, but merely the ‘easy’ problems that orbit it like a swarm of planets around a star. The hard problem’s fascination is that it has, to date, completely and utterly defeated science. Nothing else is like it. We know how genes work, we have (probably) found the Higgs Boson; but we understand the weather on Jupiter better than we understand what is going on in our own heads. This is remarkable.
...I think it is possible that, compared with the hard problem, the rest of science is a sideshow. Until we get a grip on our own minds, our grip on anything else could be suspect.