RobbBB comments on Building Phenomenological Bridges - Less Wrong

56 Post author: RobbBB 23 December 2013 07:57PM

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Comment author: RobbBB 24 December 2013 07:05:41PM *  3 points [-]

I guess I think it is distracting. Someone like Chalmers is unlikely to be convinced

Convinced of what? The only thing the paragraph you cited mentions is that (a) the hard problem concerns bridge hypotheses, and (b) the hard problem arises for minds (and not, say, squirrels or digestion) and is noticed by minds because minds type their subprocesses differently. Are those especially partisan or extreme statements? What would Chalmers' alternatives to (a) or (b) be?

I bring up the hard problem here because it's genuinely relevant. It's a real problem, and it really is hard. It's not a confusion, or if it is then it's not obvious how best to dissolve it. If the framework I provide above helps philosophers and psychological theorists like Chalmers come up with new and better theories for how human consciousness relates to neural computations, so much the better.

Comment author: HoverHell 13 January 2014 04:21:17PM 1 point [-]

It's not a confusion, or if it is then it's not obvious how best to dissolve it.

Note that there are many views and formulations that are all called “the hard problem of consciousness”, even though some of them are sufficienty different to need separate consideration (and sufficiently different for one formulation to need a conclusion and other one to need dissolution).

Also, I suspect that least one formulation that is called “hard problem of consciousness” can be interpreted as “figuring out the most plausible bridge mapping (given a physical world) for myself”.