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Topic: Hard problem of consciousness

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	Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
		The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms.
		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.
		It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon.
	consc.net /papers/facing.html (11389 words)

	hardprob.evolution
		David Chalmers (1995, 1996) has recently done philosophy the favor of distinguishing the "hard problem of consciousness"&emdash;why it is that conscious phenomena appear in the world at all&emdash;from the "easy" problems such as the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to enviornmental stimuli and the focus of attention.
		If one is not yet convinced that consciousness cannot be explained in physicalistic terms, what follows may be viewed more modestly as an examination of whether evolutionary explanation of consciousness can contribute anything to the solution of the hard problem not already contained in more structurally-based forms of physical explanation.
		In short, biological explanation of the hard problem of consciousness is no more plausible than the physicalistic explanation of the initial appearance of a trait, because the selectional story contributes exactly nothing to the solution of this particular problem, but only tells why such traits would proliferate once they appeared.
	shorst.web.wesleyan.edu /papers/hardprob.evolution.htm (3695 words)

	The hard Problem in Consciousness
		Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.
		The easy problems are by no means trivialthey are actually as challenging as most in psychology and biology-but it is with the hard problem that the central mystery lies.
		The hard problem, in contrast, is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience.
	www.dhushara.com /book/brainp/hard/hard.htm (5339 words)

	John Gregg: The Hard Problem
		In his book, The Conscious Mind, (1996) David Chalmers popularized the distinction between the "easy problems" of cognition (ability to reason, remember, evaluate, report on internal states, etc.) which might be understood in the next century or two, and the "hard problem" of subjective consciousness.
		It is sometimes said that taking the Hard Problem seriously represents a failure of imagination: the fact that I could not imagine traditional science (neurobiology, information theory, physics) explaining what it is like to see red says a lot more about my powers of imagination than it does about the actual limitations of traditional science.
		Loopy as it sounds, consciousness, or something that scales up to consciousness in certain kinds of systems, must be built in at the ground floor, as part of the fundamental furniture of the universe.
	home.comcast.net /~johnrgregg/hardprob.htm (3539 words)

	Solution to Chalmers' hard problem. (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Therefore, my strategy for solving the problem of consciousness (Searle 2000), scientifically known as Chalmers' hard problem (Chalmers 1995), is to find the solution for a specific experience of core consciousness and then, if possible, use that solution as a prototype for solving the hard problem for the case of extended consciousness.
		It is obtained by a two-part analysis of core consciousness during a 10-hour religious experience called purgation: a first-person analysis and its third-person neurophysiological and psychological or behaviouristic correlates.
		A scientific test of this particular solution to Chalmers' hard problem can be made by predicting the directionality of information flow in the neural correlates between the variables of the flow diagram of Figure 2.
	world.std.com /~awolpert/gtr44.html (1843 words)

	Chap 2. The Anomaly of Consciousness
		Today, after thirty years of investigation into the nature of consciousness, I have come to appreciate how big a problem consciousness is for the contemporary science.
		The so-called "easy problems" are those concerned with brain function and its correlation with mental phenomena: how, for example, we discriminate, categorize, and react to stimuli; how incoming sensory data are integrated with past experience; how we focus our attention; and what distinguishes wakefulness from sleep.
		We may not be able to account for consciousness, yet the fact that we are conscious is one thing of which we are absolutely certain.
	www.peterussell.com /SG/ch2.html (2567 words)

	Ken Wilber Online: Waves, Streams, States, and Self--A Summary of My Psychological Model
		The reason that the hard problem remains hard is the same reason that absolute truth cannot be stated in relative words: the nondual can only be known by a change of consciousness, not a change of words or maps or theories.
		That is, consciousness (or experience or proto-experience--or as I technically prefer it, interiority) is an intrinsic, given component of the Kosmos, and it cannot be completely derived from, or reduced to, something else.
		Assuming that the combination problem can be thus solved, the way is open for a holonic model of the Kosmos ("all-quadrants, all-levels"), a subset of which is an integral theory of consciousness.
	wilber.shambhala.com /html/books/psych_model/psych_model7.cfm (1273 words)

	E-sangha, Buddhist Forum and Buddhism Forum -> The Hard Problem of Consciousness
		The Buddhist resolution of such problems is less of a process of intellectual progress as a matter of the 'ironing out' and collapsing of the roots of the issue which are ways of thinking about reality which ultimately are deluded.
		The mind-body 'problem' may be one of the 'easy' problems in the philosophy of consciousness in that it might be perfectly amenable to 'external positivist' methods of investigation.
		And it seems to be a 'hard problem' for Buddhist philosophers, as well, given the number of sources and commentaries on this issue (not to mention all the 'westernized' analyses of same).
	www.lioncity.net /buddhism/index.php?showtopic=24973 (4573 words)

	The Harder Problem of Consciousness
		Deflationism about consciousness, in which a priori or at least armchair analyses of consciousness (or at least armchair sufficient conditions) are given in non-phenomenal terms, most prominently in terms of representation, thought or function.
		This would not prove that the isomorph is not phenomenally conscious (for example, since the contexts of the neural realizers are different), but it would cancel or at least weaken the force of the reason for attributing consciousness provided by its functional isomorphism to us.
		O, we would be hard pressed to deny that freezing = lattice formation, since the difference between liquid and frozen water is that the former has an amorphous structure and the latter a lattice structure.
	www.nyu.edu /gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/harder.htm (10338 words)

	Is there a "hard problem" of consciousness?
		Consciousness emerges from this network of relations, and not from the "objective", material components out of which the agent is built.
		Consciousness is not some mysterious substance, fluid, or property of matter, but a level of organization emerging from abstract processes and relations.
		People who search for consciousness in elementary particles (a form of panpsychism that has been suggested as a way to tackle the "hard problem"), because they cannot otherwise explain where the consciousness in our brain comes from, are misguided.
	pespmc1.vub.ac.be /HARDPROB.html (700 words)

	Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The term hard problem of consciousness was coined by David Chalmers
		, when he distinguished between "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc.; and contrasted them with the "hard problem" of explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences.
		Article Commentary on Chalmers: Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness by Daniel Dennett
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness (168 words)

	The Virtual Multiverse Theory of Free Will
		I think Chalmers almost hit the mark with his formulation of the “hard problem,” but I think he made a crucial conceptual error that renders the problem, as he poses it, unsolvable.
		A solution to the hard problem of consciousness in terms of a deeper realm may not feel as satisfying as a solution in terms of some “mystery mechanism” that creates experiences from particular physical phenomena.
		So, at best, I have “solved” the hard problem of consciousness by reducing it to the problem of simplicity measure relativity – just as Solomonoff “solved” the problem of induction by reducing it to the problem of simplicity measure relativity.
	www.goertzel.org /dynapsyc/2004/HardProblem.htm (2935 words)

	My Experience, Your Experience, and the World We Experience: Turning 'The Hard Problem' Upside Down, by Roger Shepard ...
		Such an inversion of the "hard problem," is compatible with any scientific knowledge, and has some added virtues: It recognizes that the real mystery is not the familiar (namely conscious experience) but the hypothetical (whether subatomic particles, wave functions, or the like).
		The problem of the existence of other minds is also softened in that by starting with subjective experience (my own) instead of with an independent "objective reality," I begin with something closer to other subjective experiences (such as yours).
		Even if we start with experience, then, we still have the problem of where to draw a line between the physical systems in our experience that are thus accompanied by "their own" conscious experiences and those that are not.
	www.academyanalyticarts.org /hut.htm (2387 words)

	Consciousness and its Place in Nature
		A solution to the hard problem would involve an account of the relation between physical processes and consciousness, explaining on the basis of natural principles how and why it is that physical processes are associated with states of experience.
		Conscious states have structure: there is both internal structure within a single complex conscious state, and there are patterns of similarities and differences between conscious states.
		Type-F monism is the view that consciousness is constituted by the intrinsic properties of fundamental physical entities: that is, by the categorical bases of fundamental physical dispositions.[*] On this view, phenomenal or protophenomenal properties are located at the fundamental level of physical reality, and in a certain sense, underlie physical reality itself.
	consc.net /papers/nature.html (18058 words)

	[No title]
		The easy problems and the hard problem there is not just one problem of consciousness, as “consciousness” is an ambiguous term Begins by distinguishing the “easy” problems from the “hard” problem C.
		What makes the hard problem of consciousness hard is that it is not about the performance of any function (620) 1.
		consciousness is like a communal flboard that various specialized non-conscious processes send information to for the rest of the system to use 2.
	www.iit.edu /~schmaus/Philosophy_of_Mind/lectures/Chalmers.doc (2461 words)

	[No title]
		Chalmer's attempt to sort the "easy" problems of consciousness from the "really hard" problem is not, I think, a useful contribution to research, but a major misdirector of attention, an illusion-generator.
		Crock has made a mistake: he has created an artifactual "hard" problem of perception, not noticing that it evaporates when the piecemeal work on the easy problems is completed.
		He attempts this by claiming that consciousness is strikingly unlike life, and unlike the features of perception misconstrued by Crock: when it comes to consciousness, the hard problem is "almost unique" in that it "goes beyond problems about the performance of functions." Almost unique?
	ase.tufts.edu /cogstud/papers/chalmers.htm (1072 words)

	Message Forum: Re: The Hard Problem of Consciousness
		The far more difficult problem lies in fully describing states of subjective experience: this is known as the "hard problem".
		By locating the neurons in the cerebral cortex that correlate best with consciousness, and figuring out how they link to neurons elsewhere in the brain, we may come across key insights into what David J. Chalmers calls the hard problem: a full accounting of the manner in which subjective experience arises from these cerebral processes.
		We commend Chalmers for boldly recognizing and focusing on the hard problem at this early stage, although we are not as enthusiastic about some of his thought experiments.
	www.rinkworks.com /rinkforum/view.cgi?post=26772 (2196 words)

	Consciousness- the hard problem
		David Chalmers, philosopher at the University of Arizona and Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, describes what is to him the central mystery and Hard Problem of conscious experience:
		This is clearly a different problem than the mind-brain duality or binding problem, that can rather easily be understood as a natural effect of sensory perception in general.
		The sad news therefor it seems, is that a science of consciousness has no other choice than to study physical reality, matter and brains as it is represented "in the mirror", i.e.
	home.planet.nl /~ver00143/hardproblem.htm (736 words)

	David Chalmers: the hard problem of consciousness and the brain.
		David Chalmers: the hard problem of consciousness and the brain.
		He calls the first the 'easy' problem and the second, which is the real focus of his attention, the 'hard' problem.
		The real point, in any case, is his view of the 'hard' problem, and here the unusual thing about Chalmers' theory is the extent to which he wants to take on two views which are normally seen as opposed.
	www.consciousentities.com /chalmers.htm (1997 words)

	CONSCIOUSNESS, INFORMATION AND PANPSYCHISM
		The hard problem of consciousness, according to David Chalmers, is explaining why and how experience is generated by certain particular configurations of physical stuff.
		The easy problems would be ones like 'how/why do gases expand when heated', 'why/how does pressure increase with increasing temperature', etc. By contrast, the hard problem would be to account for the generation of thermodynamic properties by the 'thermodynamically blank' particles which form the subject of statistical mechanics.
		The generation problem has been around for along time; a very clear formulation is given by John Tyndall (as quoted by William James): 'The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable.
	members.aol.com /NeoNoetics/CONSC_INFO_PANPSY.html (9014 words)

	LRB · Jerry Fodor: Headaches have themselves
		Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable.
		Consciousness might emerge from matter because matter is the sort of stuff from which consciousness emerges.
		I would prefer that the hard problem should turn out to be unsolvable if the alternative is that we’re all too dumb to solve it.
	www.lrb.co.uk /v29/n10/fodo01_.html (2409 words)

	Color Realism: Toward a Solution to the "Hard Problem".
		The problem, however, is not that Descartes' arguments for dualism were so persuasive, and convinced so many people, that materialists have been a lonely minority fighting an uphill battle ever since.
		The defects of his position, particularly but not only the seeming impossibility of mind-body interaction, were well known to his contemporaries, and despite his continuing influence, materialism has now long been the dominant position, at least amongst analytical philosophers, scientists, and the scientistically inclined.
		This is the notorious "hard problem": It seems impossible to understand why a brain state or process should embody one quale rather than another, or, indeed, how it might embody any quale at all: after all, brain states are physical states like any others, and are thus to be described entirely in terms of
	www.imagery-imagination.com /col-real.htm (2750 words)

	David Chalmers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Before he moved to the Australian National University in 2004, Chalmers was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona and prior to Arizona he taught at UC Santa Cruz.
		He is the author of the book The Conscious Mind (1996), which discusses consciousness, arguing that reductive explanations describing consciousness in terms of physical processes do not hold.
		He is best known for his support for the notion of the hard problem of consciousness in both his book and in the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (originally published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/David_Chalmers (547 words)

	David Chalmers: The Problem of Consciousness
		He is one of today's leading figures in the quest for a comprehensive theory of consciousness.
		The second part of the audio is a conversation between WIE editor Craig Hamilton and Dr. Chalmers, in which they discuss the hard problem of consciousness, free will, and the materialist view of reality.
		It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe....We have good reason to believe that consciousness arises from physical systems such as brains, but we have little idea how it arises, or why it exists at all.
	www.wie.org /unbound/media.asp?id=77 (378 words)

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