Tuesday, June 25, 2019

The “Hard Problem of Consciousness” is actually the “Hard Problem of Now”

Everything meaningful about the hard problem of consciousness (i.e. problems that are actually "hard" or impossible to solve) always boil down to "why is there a now and why is it from my point of view" instead of "why does a brain make a subjective feeling".
  • Qualia are by definition completely utterly undeniable with a 100% chance of existing. That automatically means the past and future already don't qualify. In fact, opponents like Daniel Dennett have done a pretty good job at refuting qualia, but they're refuting the idea of qualia which persists through time. The fact is even when you remember a recent memory, the only sure thing is that you feel like you're remembering a memory. The only thing that's absolutely sure to exist is whatever you're feeling at this very instant. Therefore, qualia only really ever exist in the "present moment".
  • Current formulations of Hard Problem of Consciousness are extremely linguistically ambiguous. One common problem is that opposers will prove that consciousness is not mysterious in the way proposed, and supporters will say "but of course I wasn't talking about that kind of consciousness!" (this is apparent from online arguments as well as the wikipedia page). It is a lot easier and less prone to misinterpretation to reformulate it as a problem of "now". "Now" shouldn't even exist -- there's no objective evidence of it at all. There's nothing physical which denotes this moment in time as a "special point" in the universe. Yet, we can all agree it exists, and in fact is the one sure thing to exist!
  • Even though we can all agree "now" exists, it is physically impossible to agree on when "now" is. Theory of Relativity proves that everyone's "now" must be different because there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity (no one reference point in the universe which says "this is the real now"). The question is why does there appear to be an undeniable singular "now", happening right now, which happens to be from your point of view, when in fact no such thing exists in the objective world.
tl;dr fundamentally Hard Problem of Consciousness is really a question about subjective inner mind vs objective world. It asks why there's a subjective inner mind in the first place. But the subjective inner mind really only ever exists "right now", so the problem should be simplified (and made much less prone to linguistic misinterpretation) by asking "why is there a now" instead of "why is there a subjective side to consciousness".

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