[Serious Phil] How Hard is The Hard Problem?

[SWM]

--- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "de.agger" <Philscimind at ...> wrote:
> --- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <Philscimind@> wrote:
> >
> > Another question: What does being aware (awareness) consist of do you think? My view is that it is not necessarily one thing but lots of related features in our mental lives from sensory stimulation/reception to individual memories to the sense of self we have in an integrated way which appears to be made up of a particular collection of memories and current instances of stimulation. That is, I think awareness occurs at different levels but it's not at all clear to me that it is any one thing. 
> > 
> > ========== 
> 
> http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/phil/page27383.html
> 
> I recollect someone who actually attended that Physicalism Conference of 2005 remarking that the lecturers imparted a feeling that there was no consensus on how to define physicalism, with many speakers relying on negative clarifications ("Not dualism, not idealism, not etc.") And others trying to rescue or rise above the situation with amusing stances that amounted to: "We can't agree on a philosophical definition of physicalism, but we all know what we mean by it." 
> 
> Perhaps it's a similar ambiguity with "awareness", especially when the majority considers it synonymous with consciousness, a term that -- according to Christof Koch -- currently defies rigorous definition. Surely that's partly because of consciousness serving as an umbrella label for various features, but also as a circus tent for different schools and approaches for how to classify and relate those. So your "it's not at all clear to me that it is any one thing" would be fitting. Chalmers, of course, is one of those that does makes a distinction between awareness and consciousness: 
> 
> "Another useful way to avoid confusion is to reserve the term 'consciousness' for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term 'awareness' for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about 'consciousness' are frequently talking past each other." 
> 

It's not so much that he makes a distinction, as in recognizing one, but that he recommends we make it. But on what basis does he make the recommendation, especially if he has nothing to offer to replace "awareness" as a useful equivalent term for "consciousness" in most cases?

>From this passage it seems he wants to separate out "consciousness" from "awareness" (as in being conscious of this or that). But without replacing it with something else, he has simply urged us to treat "consciousness" as some special, otherwise indefinable basic and this IS consistent with his view that we need to add an "extra ingredient" in our description of the universe to account for consciousness (his thesis of "naturalistic dualism) but then adopting his recommendation would seem to simply assume his thesis is true. It can hardly help as an argument FOR it. That is, it just seems to reflect an assumption that it's true. 



> His more straightforward phenomena, which the concept "awareness" subsumes, being: 
> 
> "All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake. There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The 
> really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience." 
> 
> With experience here referring to: 
> 
> "When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism ... visual sensations: the felt quality of redness ... Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion ... All of them are states of experience." 
>


All of these descriptions, I would note, appear to be instances of being aware of something, no? So, taking awareness out, what's left in the description of them? How is experience different in this case from a multitude of different awarenesses?

 
> I don't necessarily favor these distractions over qualia and the like, though; this "what it's like to be a conscious organism". For me, experience (as non-Kantians seem to use it today) is primarily just something being present at all, as opposed to no positive evidence of anything before life or after death. Obviously that usual "nothingness" is applicable to conventional materialism beliefs rather than panexperientialism, where something would always potentially be present even minus concomitance with a living, brained organism. If human, the latter's developing thoughts or augmenting interpretations / identifications / speculations about immediate manifestations is the ascending up into cognition -- which the overall universe would lack (if either panexperientially equipped or only orthodox material). 
> 
>

I'm not sure I follow the last paragraph. But what does strike me here is that if one extracts from what you seem to me to be describing (immediately above) all instances of awareness, in all its manifestations, then what's left? Where is the being or experience if it's emptied of all content (what we are aware of, without which, I would say, we can have no awareness at all)?

Are you arguing that being at its core is the absence of all the aspects we recognize in our own state of being? There is a way of looking at things in which being is seen as nothingness of course, though it's arguable whether that isn't just a way of talking, a way of expressing oneself in the face of language's limitations at this level, which is how I'd tend to put it.  

SWM