The Mystery of Consciousness = The Mystery of Matter
This article flips the conventional hard problem of consciousness on its head by suggesting that it is not so much the hard problem of consciousness that is the issue as is the hard problem of matter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html
This is a refreshing perspective on this most fundamental of all questions and one that I sympathise with.
The hard problem concerns how conscious experiences and raw conscious sensations can arise from physical matter, when the more our knowledge of the brain and its mechanistic function grows, and the more detailed our knowledge of matter becomes, the harder it is to see “where” consciousness resides or “what” role it has or “how” it exists “atop” a physical substrate that appears to have no need of it.
As the article points out we’re caught in an incredibly strong belief that we actually know more about the physical, about matter, than we really do. As powerfully descriptive and predictive as our neuroscience, biology, chemistry, and ultimately physics is, none of it tells us anything about the intrinsic nature of the matter that comprises physical structures. Of course, there is a separate debate here about how we interpret, and how we trust the tools and models with which we probe reality. The hard problem is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is, what the physical is.
I disagree with the article where the author claims there are two groups of people: dualists who believe consciousness is non-physical stuff and eliminativists who believe everything is physical and deny the existence of consciousness. For years I’ve thought both positions are absurd and that there is a third option: everything is physical but our knowledge of the physical, of the fundamental properties of matter, is woefully incomplete, that there is something else about matter, about the physical that is responsible for – or just is – consciousness.
Of course this third option is that which is promoted by the author and the reason this piece resonated with me. And it was this third option that I was getting at, that I was attempting to articulate (poorly) in my previous essays on consciousness here https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MarkBruce/posts/3FA1C5xWg1B and here https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MarkBruce/posts/gEce5bdDjGt and which some people thought worthy of derision if not ridicule.
The piece doesn’t mention panpsychism at all but it is certainly a related philosophical concept. I’ll finish with a few choice quotes from the piece:
We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is.
The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff.
“We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events, except when these are mental events that we directly experience.” – Bertrand Russell
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html