What is the hard problem of consciousness?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
I am sorry. This can be explained in three parts.
The very existence of experience, the nature of that experience, the existence of conscious experience, nature of that conscious experience and the relation of that conscious experience with physical. So, as we are making robots, machines, robots, computers that are increasingly advanced, we can, a new course, make things which will be, so we could conceivably have computers that do the same thing that human brains do, but without experiencing anything. So, we could have, we could develop, conceivably, that our brain, without going into artificial intelligence, we could say that our brains can develop everything without necessarily, our brains could do everything without necessarily experiencing anything at all.
So, all that we do in our day-to-day lives, if we had machines of sufficient sophistication that we could do, but say for example, you might see red, but we don’t have to experience red. Why do we experience that red? So, why is there, what purpose does conscious experience serve at within existence? If we are just biological robots designed to survive, then there is no reason for consciousness to exist. So, that is the first point is the existence of conscious experience itself.
The second is that we need to consider the nature of conscious experience. That means that, so when we see a red object, now why do we experience it to be red? And why not experience it to be blue? Because at one level, the experience itself is transcendent, is within the conscious observer, but it is, third point is that, that physical properties are essentially relational and dispositional. Say for example, if we say something is soft, that just means that it will get deformed when pressed against something.
So, now physical properties are experienced within consciousness, but there is an element of conscious experience that is beyond those physical properties. That’s for example, if you have come out of the cold weather into our home and somebody gives us a drink, this is so hot, which is so good, but if we have come from a hot place, the same drink, if we wear hotter than that drink, then we will experience that as cold. So, all physical properties exist in relationship with something, but beyond such relationships, there has to be something primary.
If you consider that we have a spreadsheet with a program wherein every cell, the value of what it contains is related to other, to the values of all other cells, but we need to enter something at least in one cell, then all other values will be determined in other cells. So, if you define everything in terms of relational, dispositional properties, then ultimately we have not defined anything. So, we need to see that there has to be consciousness which has its ontological primacy and every scientific observation is essentially a description of how a particular experience, a particular event, a particular property will affect us in our conscious experience, but there is a component of conscious experience that is entirely different, that is not, that is more than the effect of that stimuli of those physical properties on us, observers.
So, if we see the interference pattern in a double slit experiment, now seeing that interference pattern affects us, but if we make a groundbreaking discovery on seeing an interference pattern, we see it in somebody else’s reality, that person may have not, nothing registered in the registration, it has gone on just in the information processing, it is again sort of conscious experience, we feel elation, we feel joy. So, we could have made the discovery without feeling that joy also. So, basically, if you understand that normally there is a bigger category, we cannot fit in a smaller category, because if we say we want to put Arizona within America, that is possible, we want to put America within Arizona.
So, trying to reduce consciousness to matter is categorically stupid, because consciousness is a bigger category and matter is a smaller category, its physical properties are not needed to explain consciousness, consciousness is needed to explain physical properties. So, we have a Kant who said long ago that consciousness doesn’t exist in space and time, it is space and time are parts of conscious experience. And if we want to comment on these two lines in consciousness, we can open lines of research that will provide answers to present questions, not only present questions about the nature of the relationship between consciousness and physical properties, but in the nature of consciousness itself and that will answer not just present scientific questions, but also present ethical and existential questions, ethical is what we are doing to make an existentialist, why we exist at all.