The problem with the “hard problem”

[Laird]

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.

Isn't it open to him on the "filter" metaphor I suggested to say that the psychedelics temporarily remove that filter? Yes, it's again unclear how to cash out the metaphor, but this does seem open to him if we accept that metaphor in the first place.

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.

I'm not 100% sure I understand your model, but I'm curious in any case to know how it explains how psychedelics temporarily unblind a colour-blind person.

Isn't it open to him on the "filter" metaphor I suggested to say that the psychedelics temporarily remove that filter? Yes, it's again unclear how to cash out the metaphor, but this does seem open to him if we accept that metaphor in the first place.

Perhaps, but it seems like a strange inversion... that colour is part of the corporeal world, but we have a filter that blinds us to the colour... I fail to understand how the physical aspects correlated to vision work, in such a case... so, the metaphor still technically works, yes, but it feels much less intuitive than if colour is something that arises out of sensory interpretation of noumenal properties.

It seems to return us to the question of what wavelengths of light are... is redness really a true property of a wavelength of light? Is the wavelength of light itself actually red? If so, how? I'm not Feser could explain that.

I'm not 100% sure I understand your model, but I'm curious in any case to know how it explains how psychedelics temporarily unblind a colour-blind person.

It's a model derived from psychedelic journeying... well, more from heightened intuition from that. The concept came to me at some point, and I found it oddly satisfying.

In the model, molecular structures act as symbols that are interpreted by the unconscious. If everything is how it should be, then we receive a properly human perspective of the world with a full spectrum of human perceptions. If something is distorted or missing, due to DNA, physical degeneration, etc, etc, then the mind has no knowledge of what to do, not normally. So, we will have colour-blindness in lieu of what should be normally.

Psychedelics weaken our mind-brain filters temporarily, allowing for our minds to expand and perceive beyond the familiar structures. So, psychedelics fill in that knowledge gap. It's perhaps vaguely similar to NDE OBEs where the NDEr is perceiving the physical world without a filter, without any physical medium. Which led me to the model of resonance ~ our minds take on the shape and structure of the physical form, in a sense, so when we leave it, the memory of the shape remains for a good while, though still weakened due to lack of the structure proper.

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

Human thought, in the sense of conceptual thought, is the central argument for Feser that the mind is immaterial and immortal.

As for the simplicity of Chalmer's argument, I would tend to agree that *if* the modern conception of the "physical" is true then it just makes sense. However, even Chalmer's argument is weak in the sense that it focuses solely on Subjectivity and claims - mistakenly - that Reason and Aboutness of Thoughts can be explained under materialism.

[Laird]

Perhaps, but it seems like a strange inversion... that colour is part of the corporeal world, but we have a filter that blinds us to the colour... I fail to understand how the physical aspects correlated to vision work, in such a case... so, the metaphor still technically works, yes, but it feels much less intuitive than if colour is something that arises out of sensory interpretation of noumenal properties.

Yes, it does seem strange, and maybe it's not the approach that he would take to explaining colour-blindness and its sometime temporary correction on psychedelics. We could always ask him.

It seems to return us to the question of what wavelengths of light are... is redness really a true property of a wavelength of light? Is the wavelength of light itself actually red? If so, how? I'm not Feser could explain that.

That would be another good question to ask him.

It's a model derived from psychedelic journeying... well, more from heightened intuition from that. The concept came to me at some point, and I found it oddly satisfying.

In the model, molecular structures act as symbols that are interpreted by the unconscious. If everything is how it should be, then we receive a properly human perspective of the world with a full spectrum of human perceptions. If something is distorted or missing, due to DNA, physical degeneration, etc, etc, then the mind has no knowledge of what to do, not normally. So, we will have colour-blindness in lieu of what should be normally.

Psychedelics weaken our mind-brain filters temporarily, allowing for our minds to expand and perceive beyond the familiar structures. So, psychedelics fill in that knowledge gap. It's perhaps vaguely similar to NDE OBEs where the NDEr is perceiving the physical world without a filter, without any physical medium. Which led me to the model of resonance ~ our minds take on the shape and structure of the physical form, in a sense, so when we leave it, the memory of the shape remains for a good while, though still weakened due to lack of the structure proper.

Got it, I think. Just to clarify though: you're not saying that - except in, say, NDE OBEs - the (noumenal) molecular structure is perceived directly by the senses, are you? You're allowing that that structure is communicated by various media, such as sound waves for hearing, light waves for sight, etc - correct?

@sbu

Human thought, in the sense of conceptual thought, is the central argument for Feser that the mind is immaterial and immortal.

As for the simplicity of Chalmer's argument, I would tend to agree that *if* the modern conception of the "physical" is true then it just makes sense. However, even Chalmer's argument is weak in the sense that it focuses solely on Subjectivity and claims - mistakenly - that Reason and Aboutness of Thoughts can be explained under materialism.

I freely admit that after downloading Feser's argument to my Kindle, I baulked at actually trying to read it - so I wasn't aware that Feser isn't a materialist. For anyone who is not a materialist, I don't see the importance of the HP anyway - except to say "Yah boo!" to materialists.

Surely the HP applies to all aspects of mental life - not just seeing colour. For example, someone may be presented with a series of slides showing the proof of Pythagorus' theorem. A vital component of this should be when the student has an Aha! moment and actually understands the proof.

David

Yes, it does seem strange, and maybe it's not the approach that he would take to explaining colour-blindness and its sometime temporary correction on psychedelics. We could always ask him.

That would be another good question to ask him.

Probably not. Would be interesting to hear his perspective.

Got it, I think. Just to clarify though: you're not saying that - except in, say, NDE OBEs - the (noumenal) molecular structure is perceived directly by the senses, are you? You're allowing that that structure is communicated by various media, such as sound waves for hearing, light waves for sight, etc - correct?

Not directly, no. That wouldn't make sense when the majority of NDE reports describe a very human set of perceptions, albeit freshly unbounded from the physical human structure, which would explain why many report sharper, heightened senses.

Which might somewhat explain perception in-body... vision is perhaps not caused by the physical structure of the eyes, not directly... it simply describes how the mind should be seeing. Though how that relates the brain signals sent, I am unsure. Perhaps it is simply mental unconscious stuff that the brain structure is then used to coordinate the rest of the body to react to, if necessary.

I freely admit that after downloading Feser's argument to my Kindle, I baulked at actually trying to read it - so I wasn't aware that Feser isn't a materialist. For anyone who is not a materialist, I don't see the importance of the HP anyway - except to say "Yah boo!" to materialists.

Surely the HP applies to all aspects of mental life - not just seeing colour. For example, someone may be presented with a series of slides showing the proof of Pythagorus' theorem. A vital component of this should be when the student has an Aha! moment and actually understands the proof.

David

I agree that the grasping of a proof is something beyond the realm of materialism/physicalism. Apparently of the three major aspects of mind - Subjectivity, Aboutness of Thoughts, and Reason - only the application of Reason is of interest to Feser as a clear proof of the soul's immortality.

I do think it's interesting that what makes the mind immaterial to the ancients and medievals doesn't really seem focused on the Hard Problem of modernity. The West in antiquity seems to have focused on Reason, and I know at least some of the ancient Indians focused on the Self-Reflexivity of Consciousness.

Admittedly the Hard Problem doesn't seem like a guarantee of immortality, as there are Idealists who don't believe in Personal Survival. Aboutness of Thoughts also seems to be a defeater for materialism rather than a [definitive] argument for immortality.

Our grasp of Reason means grasping certain Eternal Universals, which does lead to the question of what it means to have a mind that can grasp that which is Eternal. For Plato this was the sign of the soul's immortality, though one might question the original argument he made I do think there is merit to this idea...

[Laird]

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.

I read those two linked papers by David S. Oderberg, although I skimmed or skipped some of the more tedious, technical discussion in the second paper related to concepts and their relationship with the mind, as well as a lot of the rest that essentially recapitulated the contents of the first paper.

Here's what I've concluded:

Hylemorphic dualism is a strange mix of neutral monism, materialism, and dualism, bigoted against non-human living beings, but with an interesting take on the relationship of the human soul to the human person.

The neutral monist part of the mix is that it posits that everything is comprised of "primordial matter", which, depending on the form it takes, can, it seems, be either non-conscious, conscious, or even immaterially conscious (that's us, guys).

The materialist part of the mix is that except for us humans, conscious beings are also wholly material. Note that materialism in the sense of an ontological monism is denied with such quotes (shortly preceding the Fido one below) as “The hylemorphic theory is dualistic with respect to the analysis of all material substances without exception, since it holds that they are all composites of primordial matter and substantial form.” This is not, however, an ontological dualism that most of us here would recognise as meaningfully defeating a charge of monistic materialism, and the Fido quote below in my opinion supercedes it in establishing the materialistic component of hylemorphic dualism.

The dualist part of the mix is that humans have an immaterial soul, in (a nuanced) relationship with a material body, which can survive biological death.

Here are a couple of quotes from the first paper to back all of that up:

“There is no space here to enter into a detailed explanation and defense of primordial matter: for our purposes, it is enough to know that although I have called it a something, it is, in the well-worn phrase, not a something but not a nothing either. It is the closest there is in the universe to nothingness without being nothingness, since it has no features of its own but for the potential to receive substantial forms. There has to be something to which form unites, and primordial matter is the only thing that can fill that role.” –pg 85

“The soul of Fido, for instance, is wholly material — all of Fido’s organic and mental operations are material, inasmuch as they have an analysis in wholly material terms. The soul of a person, on the other hand, is wholly immaterial, the argument for this being that a person has at least some mental operations that are not wholly explicable in material terms — and we can deduce what a thing’s nature is from the way it necessarily acts or behaves.” –pg 86

Ethically, the human exceptionalism and bigotry against non-humans are already deal-breakers for me, but ontologically, the materialism behind that bigotry is the deal-breaker: the hard problem, it still seems to me, remains with respect to the non-humans, which are explicitly acknowledged as having minds capable of feeling pain, but which are also asserted to be wholly material - "conscious matter" in other words, an utterly absurd contradiction in terms.

This all comes about from the flawed propositions that (1) of all conscious attributes, conceptual thought alone is immaterial, and (2) only humans are capable of such thought.

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...

In that post, he goes on to defend the possibility of (non-human) consciousness being material using the same "qualities exist in the corporeal world" contention that still seems fatally flawed to me in the way in which I pointed out in post #17.

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

Likewise.

[Laird]

Not directly, no. That wouldn't make sense when the majority of NDE reports describe a very human set of perceptions, albeit freshly unbounded from the physical human structure, which would explain why many report sharper, heightened senses.

Which might somewhat explain perception in-body... vision is perhaps not caused by the physical structure of the eyes, not directly... it simply describes how the mind should be seeing. Though how that relates the brain signals sent, I am unsure. Perhaps it is simply mental unconscious stuff that the brain structure is then used to coordinate the rest of the body to react to, if necessary.

Just to sort of double back and clarify my original request for clarification: were the "molecular structures" to which you referred in the post of yours on which I was seeking clarification those of the sensed objects out in external reality? That's how I'd interpreted that post, but the above makes me wonder whether maybe you meant the internal molecular structures of the sense organs, or of the passage of sensory data (as molecules) through them.

Just to sort of double back and clarify my original request for clarification: were the "molecular structures" to which you referred in the post of yours on which I was seeking clarification those of the sensed objects out in external reality? That's how I'd interpreted that post, but the above makes me wonder whether maybe you meant the internal molecular structures of the sense organs, or of the passage of sensory data (as molecules) through them.

The internal molecular structures of the sense organs.