The problem with the “hard problem”

I think that Feser misunderstands the Hard Problem... that it is entirely related to Materialism / Physicalism proclaiming that everything is material and physicalism or reducible to matter and physics, including mind. The challenge being that Materialism / Physicalism simply doesn't seem to be able to explain away mind or its contents as being epiphenomenal, despite efforts.

It baffles me how so many seem unable to properly comprehend the essences of the Hard Problem, mind-body problem or explanatory gap.

Ah Feser knows there's a gap between the physics-based mathematical description of relations and qualia, he is taking the view that the qualitative aspects simply are a part of the corporeal that math cannot describe.

I think the best argument against this position would be things like color blindness, or synesthesia.

For Feser the most important, immaterial aspect of mind is the intellect's reasoning - using concepts in logical thinking. This is what he believes is beyond any description of matter.

While I agree with him on that, and am open to the idea qualia are just part of the world, I do have to strongly disagree that Intentionality (Aboutness of Thoughts) is material. Feser argues that in the Aristotelian conception matter has final causes, and so the brain can direct the mind to the content of the world...but this seems a bit of a stretch to me. I suppose the brain's Form shapes the material and directs it toward a final cause, but I'm not fully convinced Forms exist in that way...

Ah Feser knows there's a gap between the physics-based mathematical description of relations and qualia, he is taking the view that the qualitative aspects simply are a part of the corporeal that math cannot describe.

I think the best argument against this position would be things like color blindness, or synesthesia.

For Feser the most important, immaterial aspect of mind is the intellect's reasoning - using concepts in logical thinking. This is what he believes is beyond any description of matter.

While I agree with him on that, and am open to the idea qualia are just part of the world, I do have to strongly disagree that Intentionality (Aboutness of Thoughts) is material. Feser argues that in the Aristotelian conception matter has final causes, and so the brain can direct the mind to the content of the world...but this seems a bit of a stretch to me. I suppose the brain's Form shapes the material and directs it toward a final cause, but I'm not fully convinced Forms exist in that way...

Feser's position is an seemingly odd hybrid between Naive Realism and Cartesian Dualism, then, seemingly... in that the purely abstract exists as purely mental, and that anything that is related to qualia or sensory awareness belongs to the material.

But, I guess it makes sense when you look at his worldview of Christianity ~ maybe he is just a Cartesian Dualist in the same sense as Descartes, who believed that only humans had souls, because in his conception, only humans had language, and could thus think, and that animals were just automatons, because they didn't have "language" as Descartes defined it.

Feser's position is an seemingly odd hybrid between Naive Realism and Cartesian Dualism, then, seemingly... in that the purely abstract exists as purely mental, and that anything that is related to qualia or sensory awareness belongs to the material.

But, I guess it makes sense when you look at his worldview of Christianity ~ maybe he is just a Cartesian Dualist in the same sense as Descartes, who believed that only humans had souls, because in his conception, only humans had language, and could thus think, and that animals were just automatons, because they didn't have "language" as Descartes defined it.

Not exactly, it's a bit hard to describe his position of Hylemorphic Dualism but here's some info:

Oderberg on hylemorphic dualism

... I do not in fact think that all forms of dualism are equally defensible. The version I would myself defend is neither Cartesian substance dualism, nor property dualism, nor emergent dualism, but rather hylemorphic dualism, so called because it is informed by hylemorphism, the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic view that material substances are composites of form and matter. (The theory is also sometimes called Thomistic dualism, after Thomas Aquinas, its most significant advocate historically.)

David S. Oderberg (who seems to have invented the label "hylemorphic dualism") is among the view's most skilled contemporary defenders. His 2005 article "Hylemorphic dualism" is must reading for those interested in the subject, and he has recently published another important article entitled "Concepts, dualism, and the human intellect," which is available here. Check it out.

Animals are conscious! In other news, sky is blue, water wet

...The trouble is that there is simply no essential connection whatsoever between affirming the immateriality of the human mind and denying that animals are conscious.  Aristotelians, for example, have always insisted both that animals are sentient -- indeed, that is part of what makes them animals in the first place -- and that human intellectual activity is at least partly immaterial (for reasons I’ve discussed in many places, most recently here).  Descartes’ reasons for denying animal consciousness have to do with assumptions peculiar to his own brand of dualism, assumptions Aristotelians reject.  And they have to do especially with assumptions Descartes made about the nature of matter as much or more than they have to do with his assumptions about the nature of mind -- assumptions about matter that materialists (no doubt including at least some among those scientists cited in the Discovery News article) share...

I will say I find Feser's general criticisms of other positions more convincing than his own position...

Fixed the dead links in my last post if anyone was having issues.

I don't really feel up to absorbing Feser's argument, but as I rule of thumb I'd say that when it takes a long essay to 'refute' Chalmers' HP - which is such a simple and obvious argument - I side with simplicity.

I also have a suspicion that if you use Feser's reasoning you could come up with an argument that human thought was irrelevant because it is all based on emotional attachments to ideas.......

That would of course include Feser himself.

David

...What you perceive is still a thought.  It is still your brain producing it from the signals and neurological interpretations of those signals.  We cannot see "out there" because sight is what our eyes, brains and minds collaborate to produce.  There is no distinction between object and observer nor can there be, therefore there is no distinction between mind, and matter and probably no distinction between matter and non-matter generally...

generally yes I can agree to much of that. One is stuck within ones experience... and one can't get outside of Experience... eye's, brains bodies, are also within experience... so too are thoughts, feelings, emotions... everything is within ones experience. Experience = THE RESULT.

When we isolate a tiny section of experience, we get to glimpse the process of the THE RESULT at work... quantum mechanics. Mathematics as a highly rigid language also reveals the structural relationships of the architecture that is involved in generating the THE RESULT.

Common anomalous experiences tell us that the process and the architecture are shared - people recall experiences which are NOT their own. THE RESULT is therefore generated by the group - by us all. Therefore only the matching patterns of the process & architecture can be shared, which produces THE RESULT.

When you write a note to yourself to remind yourself to collect the drycleaning, you use the shared process & architecture to imprint on THE RESULT in such a way that you can be connected to the 'remind yourself to collect the drycleaning' when you re-encounter the note in THE RESULT.

All the tiny things we've found with 'technology' which are inaccessibly close to us, have some symmetry/relationship with all the massive things which are inaccessibly far from us. It seems we Experience, from the perspective of being in the center [at the center] of THE RESULT.

[Laird]

As is typical of Edward Feser's writing, this piece is clear and articulate. That makes it easy to identify where I think it goes wrong: namely, in its conflation of qualities and qualia. The redness of an apple might well be "out there" in the corporeal world as a quality, but it doesn't become a quale unless/until apprehended in consciousness. It is no clearer to me how consciousness can be built up out of or emerge from a corporeal reality which includes unapprehended qualities than it is how it can be built up out of or emerge from a purely reductionist physical reality which does not include such qualities. The hard problem, it seems to me, remains, even on the view expressed in this article.

Perhaps Edward has a rejoinder to this criticism; perhaps he has even expressed it somewhere. I'm simply responding to the article as written.

Incidentally, the paper by Robert Lawrence Kuhn referenced by Edward at the start looks very interesting, and I'll probably give it a read, and maybe even start a new thread to discuss it if it seems worth it after that read:

A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications

As is typical of Edward Feser's writing, this piece is clear and articulate. That makes it easy to identify where I think it goes wrong: namely, in its conflation of qualities and qualia. The redness of an apple might well be "out there" in the corporeal world as a quality, but it doesn't become a quale unless/until apprehended in consciousness. It is no clearer to me how consciousness can be built up out of or emerge from a corporeal reality which includes unapprehended qualities than it is how it can be built up out of or emerge from a purely reductionist physical reality which does not include such qualities. The hard problem, it seems to me, remains, even on the view expressed in this article.

That's probably a good way to look at it, as part of being a quale arguably is presentation to a particular 1st person PoV. 

Additionally non-human animals and humans themselves would then seem to perceive only a subset of possible qualities.

Feser would probably - based on my readings - say color blindness is a distortion of the actual redness (or whatever color) but this seems to leave the question of how the apparently real redness of the rose is transformed into a different quale.

[Laird]

That's probably a good way to look at it, as part of being a quale arguably is presentation to a particular 1st person PoV. 

Yes, that's what i was getting at, although definitively rather than arguably.

Feser would probably - based on my readings - say color blindness is a distortion of the actual redness (or whatever color) but this seems to leave the question of how the apparently real redness of the rose is transformed into a different quale.

I've been thinking about this. I think it's open to him to say that, metaphorically, colour-blindness is like having a physical (really "corporeal" on his terms) filter placed between one's eyes and the rose - a filter like coloured but otherwise translucent paper. How that metaphor would be cashed out in real terms though is unclear. Maybe it would, conceptually, be present within the sense organs (eyes) themselves, or in the optic nerve, or maybe even in the brain itself.

I've been thinking about this. I think it's open to him to say that, metaphorically, colour-blindness is like having a physical (really "corporeal" on his terms) filter placed between one's eyes and the rose - a filter like coloured but otherwise translucent paper. How that metaphor would be cashed out in real terms though is unclear. Maybe it would, conceptually, be present within the sense organs (eyes) themselves, or in the optic nerve, or maybe even in the brain itself.

How would he explain experiences where colour-blind people, on psychedelics, report seeing the colour they are normally blind to? There is no clear or obvious physical cause here making the eyes temporarily able to "sense" that colour, or at least, send any sort of signal relating to it. This strongly suggests that colour cannot be part of the corporeal world. Nor any other qualia.

My current understanding is that the incarnate individual unconsciously has all of the knowledge of how the corporeal form is supposed to function, and what does what and so on, including how the optic nerves correspond to the perceptions of colour. In this model, if something about the optic nerve isn't quite in accordance with the incarnate individual's unconscious knowledge, then it just does with what it knows. A sort of deeper-than-instinctual knowledge prior to behaviour that has to do with how to actually make a physical form function.