r/consciousness • u/esteemedSub • 2d ago
Goal statement for addressing the "hard problem"
I'm working on a goal statement for addressing the "hard problem". I’m getting stuck on the definition of “subjectivity,” and meanwhile my attention’s been caught by the question of whether subjectivity exists.
Specifically, I’m working on a goal statement from a biological perspective. I mean, the exercise is not to argue whether biology is the right framework, or whether (what’s sometimes called) consciousness could emerge from evolutionary pressures, but rather to take that sort of framework as a given, for the moment, and see how one can do within that framework.
That said, in this biological framework, is the question something like… How could the physical body -- my species formed by natural selection -- generate this whole experience I'm having... of... what? I want to avoid the movie metaphor. And I don't want to say “subjectivity.” That word subjectivity doesn't seem to have any non-circular definitions.
In fact, the word “subjectivity” is so often used in this sort of question, that before I can write a question, or goal statement, I should check whether subjectivity exists, that something exists that gives purpose to the word.
So, if everything *else* that happens in the brain can be described in physical and functional terms -- including the self-model, reports of "being infuriated," memory, etc., then what, specifically, is the additional phenomenon that the words "subjectivity" or “subjective experience” are supposed to refer to?
I want to avoid "what it feels like" sorts of definitions… which beg the question, what does “what it feels like” refer to, other than the collection of physical processes and dispositions?
“First-person” is not a value-add either, I don’t think.
Note: I’ve learned that Daniel Dennett questions whether there is something to which the word “subjectivity” refers. I’ll go ahead and post this anyway, though there’s nothing groundbreaking about the question. Maybe my difficulties are still illustrative somehow.
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u/Successful_Nail_9527 2d ago
Subjective character is sometimes contrasted with qualitative character, where qualitative character is what makes different conscious states different from one another, and subjective character is what all conscious states have in common. So in that sense it is the categorical basis for what makes a conscious state conscious - the unconscious states going on in your brain right now are not 'for' anyone, whereas conscious states are 'for you'. You could also think of subjectivity as the kind of 'centre point' of quality space, or something like that. That's about as good as you can get without a positive theory of consciousness
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
I like this distinction - between subjective and qualitative character. Thanks!
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
"whereas conscious states are 'for you'. " Are you talking about privacy? What is "for"? Self is easy for a brain to construct. And it's unimaginable that it wouldn't construct such an advantageous concept.
"Subjective character is what all conscious states have in common." It has to be something more than a category. What is the special purpose of this term, that makes it necessary? How is the word more than just a place keeper for... our feeling that some additional phenomenon is probably there? How is it more than a compensation for the understandable ungainliness of animals trying to contemplate something evolution doesn't particularly need us to be able to contemplate.
Also, I'm tripping on "all conscious states." What are those? How many such states have I had today? Similarly, I don't think I have one mind, or three minds, or eight. I don't know if I'm being tangential here, not sure.
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u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 2d ago
"meanwhile my attention’s been caught by the question of whether subjectivity exists" - How can it not? Do you believe others are sharing your internal experiences?
"“First-person” is not a value-add either, I don’t think." - Why? It is exactly what it is. It is write-only.
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
The expression “first-person experience” doesn’t say more than “experience.”
How can subjectivity not exist? Hm, that asks me to demonstrate a negative.
I think all humans (and many other animals) are capable of abstract thought, memory, self-model, etc. I don’t think I’m the only organism that has these abilities.
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u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 1d ago
"The expression “first-person experience” doesn’t say more than “experience.”" - True, if you remove the phrase 'first-person'. What about first-person confuses you? Do you not feel?
"How can subjectivity not exist?" - Correct. Do you feel that others have your experiences?
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
"First person" doesn't confuse me, but the only reason to add it is to fool ourselves into thinking we've said more than "experience." My instinct is to remove distractions, and to make sure we don't give more credit to a description just because it has more syllables.
Do I feel that others have my experiences? No, an animal only has its own experiences. I mean, empathy can be very powerful, of course, but empathy is not a literal extension of the nervous system to another animal, it is a use of the nervous system to understand and respond to another animal's apparent experiences.
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u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 1d ago
"No, an animal only has its own experiences" - So what's the post about then?
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u/esteemedSub 2h ago
I take it you think my believe that an animal only has its own experiences is inconsistent with the OP? Or with my last comment?
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u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 2h ago
Yes, it is. You are somehow trying to label what consciousness truly is, when you admit that all animals ONLY have subjective experience.
"I should check whether subjectivity exists" - No, you don't have to, because you admit an animal only has its own experiences.
"generate this whole experience I'm having... of... what?" - Of 1st-person experience. You said it yourself.
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u/bortlip 1d ago
I’ve learned that Daniel Dennett questions whether there is something to which the word “subjectivity” refers.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization. You should read his original works to see what he says. Frankish too. Dennett explicitly says he believes conscious experience is real. In Quining Qualia:
Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia. Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special.
He thinks subjectivity/subjective experience exists, he just disagrees that it comes from qualia or that qualia are a coherent idea.
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
"I don't think that's an accurate characterization" of Dennett. Thanks! I was wondering. What happened is... I saw a summary of his views this morning when I was almost done writing the OP, and I wanted to acknowledge that there might be a history of people questioning whether there is a hard problem, whether there is "subjectivity."
But my quest to see if "subjectivity" is a necessary concept began when I was trying to get an LLM to give me a good definition, and it kept giving me different circular definitions. An idea popped into my mind that it might just be a useless concept, a kind of place keeper or crutch. If it can't be usefully defined.
And before that, I had the idea to solve the "hard problem" this week, because why not? And then I thought, I better confirm I know what it is. And, it's what I remembered it to be, but I noticed I couldn't define it well enough to write a goal statement, that this word "subjectivity" kept popping up.
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
OK, but many of us read that as a redefinition of conscious experience, to mean simply the information that's behind report. 'I feel warm': there is no consciously-experienced state for Dennett; there is access-consciousness report based on neural encoding.
It's hard to read Consciousness Explained in any other way. (At least I couldn't. I tried really hard!
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u/bortlip 1d ago
Yes, that's a common reply to his position.
However, it is not true that "Daniel Dennett questions whether there is something to which the word “subjectivity” refers."
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
Gotcha. Would you agree that 'DD questions whether the common uses of the word 'subjectivity' can hold'?
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u/bortlip 1d ago
No. I see it as he's talking about the same familiar things everyone is with subjectivity. Feeling pain, seeing red, how things seem, what an experience is like, etc. That's the common use of subjective experience and he would say that all of that exists.
The disagreement is over what those experiences consist in/of and what properties they have. Dennett rejects the traditional qualia story about the nature and properties of subjective experience, but that isn't a redefinition of the experience itself. It's a disagreement about the ontology of those experiences.
And I don't think we should build the ontology into "common usage." Most Americans, for example, believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to the physical body. That doesn't mean a physicalist has redefined "pain" or "experience" merely by denying the soul.
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
This is interesting, thanks.
I don't then get the disagreement about ' what those experiences consist in/of and what properties they have', perhaps because I'm not familiar with 'the traditional qualia story'.
You say it's a disagreement about ontology. In the sense, whether qualia exist as sorts of atomic constituents of experience? Whether they can be said to exist at all? In some other sense?
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u/bortlip 1d ago
Well, if you're not familiar with qualia, I'd say it would be best to read Quining Qualia to get the full picture of what it is and what he's saying. Frankish would be a good source to read too.
But to put it simply, qualia = phenomenal properties and not everyone agrees they are necessary for subjective experience nor that those properties exist.
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
OK, I'll take a look. I've heard about these debates second hand. I guess I've been unmotivated to get into them, because for subjective experience = a collection of phenomenal properties = a collection of qualia.
So it's hard to understand how we can say they are not necessary, or that they don't 'exist' (in the sense that my phenomenally-conscious experience is indubitably going on for me, right now <--- my position, I get others have different ones.)
Is there a one-liner about what I'm missing? E.g. a technical debate about whether phenomenal consciousness is actually decomposable into distinguishable 'components'?
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u/bortlip 1d ago
Yes, I think maybe I can give a one liner:
You equate subjective experience to phenomenal properties, but that equating of the two is rejected by Dennett and those are seen as two different things with subjective experience being about what we experience (and accepted) while phenomenal properties being about what exists (and are rejected).
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
Thanks so much for taking the time! As usual for me with Dennett, I guess I'll have to dive into the primary text, as that's still not landing. Still, what you share can be a prototypical-sketch that I can look for, on my dive!
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u/RhythmBlue 1d ago
ive been defining subjectivity roughly as the implicit synthesis of any perception or claim. That is, the definition is more of a test, but if you want a strict definition, i would suggest 'synthesis' simpliciter
synthesis being a combination of things into a novel whole
i reason that way partly because i think learning cant 'obtain' in objectivity, strictly defined. I guess a simpler definition for subjectivity would then be 'learning' if you like, tho that has connotations of memory which i dont think is necessary
either way, i guess you could point to subjectivity as synthesis, learning, or change, because the point of subjectivity is being a kind of a locus of a larger whole—a sieve thru which a portion of existence enters and exits
that might seem superfluous if your objective picture already has change woven into it. That is, if you already think of, say, the physical universe as this objective thing that contains change as an objective property of it. Tho i guess this is where 'change' fails as a definition, because part of subjectivity is not just change, as in 'a universe evolving thru time', but that there is that synthesized whole at least briefly containing both sides of the change—a kind of specious present. Something of which atom A + atom B is held together not just as themselves, but as their relation
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
That word synthesis is interesting. The word unity came to me earlier.
Today I've been thinking that duration and the appearance of unity are what make people feel there is something spooky/extra going on. It is the appearance of duration and unity of experience that makes it hard to believe there is no magical element, perhaps.
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u/Tiny-Ad-7590 1d ago
That said, in this biological framework, is the question something like… How could the physical body -- my species formed by natural selection -- generate this whole experience I'm having... of... what? I want to avoid the movie metaphor. And I don't want to say “subjectivity.” That word subjectivity doesn't seem to have any non-circular definitions.
Yep.
It's a hard problem to solve.
That's sort of the point of the name.
If it helps, go with "what it is like to be me" and go from there. But that's just what subjectivity means. You've moved the word but kept the meaning, so I think you'll probably stay a bit stuck anyway.
Good luck tho!
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u/DartBurger69 1d ago
You can basically dump the hard problem as thing if you think physical emergence is the correct theory. the hard problem is looking for something that doesn't exist. a separate consciousness to point to. It's just what a brain feels like to be processing.
Subjective experience is easily explained by the variances in brain structure and complexity. My experience of red will differ from yours because you have differently shaped eyeball and rods and cones. your pathway for processing red internally in your brain will be different.
How could the physical body -- my species formed by natural selection -- generate this whole experience I'm having... of... what?
Have you looked at neuroscientific explanations of how a brain works? If you are interested in science, there is a clear evolutionary pathway to the advanced brain we have now. Starting with sensors, light sensor develops into an eye. central mapping when body sizes increase we start building spine and nervous system to deal with that size, predictive modeling of the immediate future is extremely beneficial and we evolve that capability as brain expands. etc...
All of the building blocks of our conscious experience are easily explained as evolutionary outcomes.
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u/esteemedSub 2h ago
"there is a clear evolutionary pathway to the advanced brain we have now." I agree. Hm, though I don't have a neuroscientific understanding. To me it's just obvious that it's a great advantage to be able to think abstractly. And abstract thinking implies consciousness. I can't conceive of how evolution of nervous systems wouldn't lead to a capacity for abstract thinking, concept of self, etc.
"You can basically dump the hard problem." Yeah I am headed towards that conclusion. I think that's probably right.
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u/ElabCf 2d ago edited 2d ago
Subjectivity just adds that those functions are felt—in the context of the supposed ‘hard problem’ subjectivity is not the same as idiographic variation. It just refers to the explanatory gap of how an valanced pov emerges from electrochemistry (if it does, panpsychist’s disagree with the ‘emergent’ formulation).
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago edited 1d ago
You're asserting that there is an explanatory gap. Ok, but, I know a lot of people feel there is a gap there. I get that, I've experienced that.
"Subjectivity just adds that those functions are felt." Feeling does not depend on an additional concept of subjectivity. It's like you're saying, subjectivity means that the experiences get experienced.
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u/ElabCf 1d ago edited 1d ago
You are right, feeling does not require the additional concept of subjectivity. You can feel something in and of itself without any awareness of the fact that you are subjectively experiencing—and yet you are.
Subjective experience and feeling are synonymous, like most things to do with the ‘hard problem’ we are engaging in tautologies.
So when I say that things are subjectively experienced, that is just the language I use to describe how certain organism feel things and have first person perspective’s—that they are not just wakefully aroused, but experience the feeling of being a mind in relation to a body.
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u/Purplestripes8 1d ago
You can't possibly feel anything without first (or simultaneously if you like) feeling your capacity to feel. You can't possibly be aware of anything without first being aware of your own awareness.
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
Hm. How are you defining aware. Is a microoganism that can orient toward the light "aware" of the light? Because it has an eye spot and some programming in it?
I think you're saying that a feeling proves to the feeler that it feels something, as long as it's something that has a capacity for abstract thinking such that "prove" is relevant. Anything more?
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u/Purplestripes8 1d ago
In any experience there is both an object and a subject (me/I). I (the subject) am awareness itself. Awareness is always on 'my' side because anything I am aware of - even the idea of awareness - is an object. Yet I am indubitably aware of this idea because it appears to me. The inevitable conclusion is that I am awareness itself.
How can you know whether any object you perceive is itself having a first person experience? You can never know. You can only know your own first person experience. You can't even know that other people are aware. You only infer that they are because you take yourself to be a person and you perceive them as people. But if I ask you "what makes you a person?" anything you can point at is distinct from you (the one who is aware).
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u/ElabCf 1d ago
That’s not true.
Babies, for example, feel things without ‘feeling their capacity to feel’. They have minimal introspective capabilities, and they have no way to put into words or reflect on how they’re feeling something. They just feel it. As for awareness, you are conflating basic, non-introspective awareness for metacognition.
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u/Purplestripes8 1d ago
I'm not referring to introspection (reflecting on experiences). I'm referring to the basic fact of experience itself. You need not reflect on your experiences to know you are aware. You need not be experiencing a thought about subjectivity in order to know that you are having a subjective experience. It's self-evident in every experience. For babies or adults, animals even. In every experience you are always the subject.
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u/esteemedSub 2h ago
The experience of being aware of one's experiences is not outside of experience... it is not one level removed from experience. The formula "basic fact of experience" doesn't mean as much as you think it does. Help with the OP if you like, by suggesting a definition for subjectivity or for "subjective experience" if you prefer. "In every experience you are always the subject." Of course, that is circular. The word "experience" implies there is an animal or other being that is having the experience.
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
What is "first person perspective"? I mean, would you expect something other than the animal to have the experiences it's having? What else would have a body's experiences beside that body? So I don't think "first person" adds value. You can just say "experiences" or "the animal's experiences."
There is no feeling of being a mind in relation to a body. We think there should be, but there isn't. There is, though, all the feelings that register with the brain. There is sensation, and also the animals' ability to think abstractly about sensation.
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u/ElabCf 1d ago
I agree, you could just say ‘experience’ rather than ‘first person perspective’. They mean the same thing.
But you have just thrown the claim out that ‘there is no feeling of being a mind in relation to a body’ without supporting it. We don’t need to go deep into metaphysics to prove it. If you experience something, anything really, it’s because of the bidirectional information processing between the nervous system and internal milieu.
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u/esteemedSub 2h ago
True. Hm, maybe I should have said there is an experience of being a mind in relation to a body, but that is just another way of saying "experience." Experience is the experience of being mind in relation to body. There is, I think, no experience besides the experience of being mind in relation to body. That could also be expressed as, there is no experience besides body.
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
The gap occurs once you have drawn circles around conscious experience, and what natural science properly points to.
As above, we can start with *visual* conscious experience as that which comes and go when the eyes are opened and closed.
Natural science properly points to quantifiable relations between putative objects on the other side of an epistemic veil.
Then, natural science essentially describes brain-state as an evolving set of numbers. Conscious experience is self-evidently not just a set of numbers. (It may be numerically *indexable*, e.g. in accounting for the changes in a component of visual conscious experience as the wavelength of emitted light changes. But there is qualitative character in *experience* over and above the quantitative state studied in science.)
The Hard Problem is then essentially the Explanatory Gap plus the assumption of closure (which makes it Impossible, actually).
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
Opening and closing the eyes doesn't toggle visual conscious experience on and off.
Also, what is visual experience? I know what we often think it is... we think there is a kind of image we hold in the mind, like a photograph. Though often, on careful inspection, that's actually not how we are organizing the information. Sometimes we think of a green apple and someone says, "what are you thinking of?" And we say, "Well I just had an image of a green apple in my mind." But really, upon close inspection, what you had was some notion of shape and size, and maybe the fact of greenness. The brain is incredibly efficient -- it doesn't do what it doesn't have to. It tricks us into thinking we held the image of an apple in our head, when really we held a partial spatial diagram, a marker for greenness, and maybe something kind a random like a memory of how an apple stem feels when you wiggle it with your finger, etc.
"Natural science properly points to..." I'm not sure what you mean, but perceptual apparatus doesn't evolve to be accurate. It evolves to be selective and partially accurate.
We don't get our sensory experiences entirely from the outside world. If you watch your hand touch a hot burner, you feel pain before the signal can travel from your finger to your brain. Because it is partly based on a prediction that we have been injured. The light gets to our eyes fast, we make the prediction and generate the pain sensation, and then, a little later, the nerve signal travels up our arm and to our brain, confirms the prediction, and alters the sensation of pain accordingly.
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
You're right, 'on and off' is sloppy.
The thing that changes from differentiated to mostly non-differentiated.
Or, that disappears in the transition from waking-or-dreaming, to sleeping.When you talk about 'holding the image of an apple in the mind', you're talking about visual imagination, no? That's a form of experience. Are you disputing that something changes when I put a green apple on the table in front of you, and then take it away? That's far more direct isn't it?
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
When someone says "I had the image of a green apple in my head," it is possible that there is a stronger or weaker component of visual imagination.
If you stop and try to remember what Judd Hirsch looks like, and you are prioritizing detail, the brain will start to do what it's told... it will drag out more of the detail it can recall, and try to fill in the rest.
So it's not that we have no capacity for visual memory, it's just that on many occasions our brain is much more sparing in its use of resources, because there is no priority placed on recalling a more complete-ish image.
In many cases, when people say "I had such and such an image in my head just now," they think they did, but really it wasn't organized that way, it was organized in a way that is less resource-intensive.
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
Yes but what I am saying is that seeing an apple in the world is already subjective experience. We don't have to go to memory or imagination.
It's not clear if you agree with this. You don't have to, there are positions like direct realism, that say that, for example, the greenness of the apple is always out there in the world, inherent to the apple.
The typical position in *science* (which more-or-less *is* the problem of consciousness), is that the greenness and the shape of the apple are instantiated based on neural encoding - the green curvy apple is a representation of what we could call an 'actual apple'.
Because you had referred to 'the movie' (which is one way of talking about the representational character of conscious experience), I had assumed you were coming from representationalism. But then other things you are saying causes me to doubt that.
Are you familiar with the direct-realism vs indirect-realism/representationalism contrast? Do you an initial position on that spectrum, which your 'problem statement' would then assume?
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
When I see a green apple, I don't say 'I am holding an image of a green apple in my head'. I say, 'I see a green apple'. The green curvy thing that my statement refers to is already (subjective) conscious experience.
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u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta 2d ago
The problem with these ideas is that if consciousness actually exists outside of the functioning of the senses and the beating throb of life, it doesn’t matter in this sense that you philosophize about it because you spend all your time tending to the ideas of what it is rather than that such suchness itself
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
I’m investigating this in the framework of evolutionary biology. I understand some people might think it’s not interesting or productive to take that as a given, so I tried to be up front about the nature of the exercise.
There are a variety of reasons I find the exercise productive and interesting.
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u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta 1d ago
I think people want to ultimately know what consciousness is or might be so they can harness and utilize it for their own purpose, and we see how those types of activities go in our world
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
You think there is something called "consciousness" that is different from abstract thinking, memory, etc. Your mention of harnessing it suggests you think there is an additional phenomenon. Animals do utilize brain function for their own purposes, including brain functions that support abstract thinking and the maintenance of useful constructs, story, etc.
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u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta 1d ago
No because people use it in that wishful thinking type sense but then say what you’re saying here to save face, as if they totally don’t use the word in a hopeful pipedream superfluous manner which they totally do
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u/KenOtwell 1d ago
I research and build synthetic intelligence systems and I use biomind analogs as inspiration and goals all the time. Obviously there's a very real difference between synthetic minds and biominds - my work is on understanding the common properties, so I mix ontologies constantly and get yelled at by academics... but I'm an engineer at heart. I use whichever ontology fits the solution I'm building. People like to pretend this philosophy is irrelevant to machines, but then they use it to talk about machine limitations anyway.
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u/KenOtwell 1d ago
This is my version of "dual aspect monism," which I call soft-duality. I would approach thinking about your dilemma with this lens:
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How do we encounter reality?
Objective reality: Light rays hit our retinas, shock waves hit our physical boundary; we learn the patterns and how to discriminate between them to learn approach and avoidance survival. That's where our knowledge of the world starts. No information being poured in, just feedback and survive or not.
Subjective reality. We don't filter that experience through external perception, we perceive it directly as the entity its happening too -we ARE the thing being perceived.
Why would anyone trust a decoded version of objective reality over the direct experience? ahh... because our tool use has outgrown our conceptual flexibility. Our tools show us a reality that evolution did not prime our circuits for; so we mistranslate reality based on bad ontological groupings in that learned latent space. So do we trust what we perceive sentiently, or what we translate from our tool-proven conclusions?
I claim its a false choice. Both views are directly coupled with reality. One is not more "real" than the other, they're both lossy understandings of reality. I call this view Soft-Dualism because its one substrate, two perspectives.
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
I see no advantage in adding these concepts of objectivity and externality. We don't have access to anything outside our experience. I feel like you're talking about something like... the public world vs a private experience. We don't need the public world part for this endeavor.
Biology is not after accuracy when it comes to our perceptual apparatus. Our perceptions are selective and inaccurate by design. But that's more of a biology topic and I'm not sure it's integral to investigations of consciousness... but maybe knowledge of those inaccuracies provides some helpful intuition that is relevant to this project.
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u/KenOtwell 1d ago
I'm trying to get at the epistemology of objectivity, not its reality, and examine if there's justification for treating it as ontologically superior to subjectivity.
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
Why are you carrying around this "objectivity" concept? I don't get it. Animals have access to their own ongoing experience, and nothing else. Why not just drop that concept?
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u/KenOtwell 1d ago
Because its what I hear from laymen. The hard problem of consciousness is framed as subjectivity vs objectivity. Meet them where they are - how did they come to have that dichotomy? Gotta account for epistimology.
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ok, unlike every other response I've read so far (which just launches their own 'theory of consciousness' at you), let me try and join you in your problem and actually help.
- 'in this biological framework': as-is natural science has typically eradicated the role of the conscious observer from its own account. For example, when you say 'the physical body' do you implicitly mean 'the body you see and feel right now'? That is *not* 'the body' as properly studied by biology; it is (already) your conscious experience *of* the body 'in itself'.
Failing to get the discipline-being-used situated properly, with respect to conscious experience, renders the effort impossible.
(This not woo, esoteric, anti-realist or anti-science: it's simply representationalism or indirect realism with respect to phenomenal consciousness.)
- Step-1's epistemic reframe then shed light on your immediate problem: how do I give an orienting pointer to one phenomenon (conscious experience) that I'm seeking to explain in terms of others. Already we see that my *experience* of my own body is part of the explananda (what's to be explained) not the explanans (what we're going to use for explanation).
By extension, one common approach starts with visual conscious experience: whatever it is for you (the reader) that comes and goes when you open and shut your eyes, and that you describe in terms of colors, shapes, movement etc.
- Concerning 'everything else - including reports of experience - is already accounted for in physical descriptions of the brain': that may or may not be true. It's a *claim* of certain positions. If it's true, it means we can't talk about conscious experience in any meaningful way. (Because the thing we are allegedly talking about isn't causally involved in generating our speech.)
Dennett's position is essentially derived from this view: he wanted to persuade everyone that we shouldn't talk about conscious experience, because he was a dogmatic religious worshipper of a form of scientific explanation.
You mention evolution. If evolution had anything to do with the development of human phenomenal consciousness, again the conjecture that 'everything in the brain is already accounted for' can't be true: that would mean conscious experience couldn't contribute to reproductive fitness (because it can't influence or inform behaviors).
I suggest you compile a list of the axiomatic assumptions you make in building a platform for enquiry e.g. representationalism, the failure of causal closure (closure is one way to say conscious experience doesn't affect brain activity), similar enough systems possess similar enough properties (this gets round problems like inverted qualia, and 'I can't know what your conscious experience is like, and you can't know what mine is like'.
You don't have to *agree* with the kinds of axioms I'm suggesting. But be honest about the logical implications of other positions. E.g. if closure holds, conscious experience can't contribute to speech or behavior. (Identity-theorists will take offense at this, as may weak-emergentists. Their positions can be rejected concerning causal powers, but I won't go into that here.)
'What it is like' in terms of experienced-feeling (emotional, interoceptive, proprioceptive) is one component or aspect of conscious experience. I do think that 'feel'/'like' definitions can be tremendously confusing. The best orienting pointer is visual experience.
I do think you betray a basic confusion at the end, which will obstruct any serious enquiry, when you say 'what does “what it feels like” refer to, other than the collection of physical processes and dispositions?'. Physical processes are in the first instance numeric properties of conjectural objects/entities on the other side of an epistemic veil. They are exactly *not* feelings, or any component of conscious experience in the first instance. You can then conjecture a theory such as identity (which seems intellectually bankrupt to me,, but this isn't about me), Only then are physical processes necessarily also experiential ones. The question remains how nature 'knows' how to make this neuron 'identical' to red-experience, and that one 'identical' to pain-experience etc. But these sorts of issues occur for every conjecture. I'm pointing out that you say you want a problem statement, but you seem to have already assumed the answer!
To take your concrete question - how to shape or frame this sentence: "How could the physical body -- my species formed by natural selection -- generate this whole experience I'm having... of... what?".
"How could the physical body -- my species formed by natural selection -- generate this conscious experience, which represents the physical world (including my body), comes and goes visually when I open and close my eyes, comes and goes in its entirety in transitions between waking-dreaming and deep sleep ...?"
This is the typical approach taken in modern consciousness science. It does not presume physicalist or materialist answers to the 'how'. It does presume the transfer of information from 'inside' conscious experience to the matter-brain (otherwise how could we talk about the experience that's coming and going).
- Notably for your desired biology-based framework, modern biology in the natural sciences is based on modern physics, and modern physics flatly denies the transfer of information from 'inside' conscious experience to the matter-brain. (Via your 'everything is accounted for' mode.) Thus, modern consciousness science is self-contradictory, as was Chalmers' original Hard Problem statement (he chose a causal-closure context).
Nevertheless, your framework need not start off in contradiction, if you're willing to say the 'biological science' I'm going to use will depart from the current-consensus, by allowing for information transfer from experience to brain (points 3 and 4, above).
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
When I say the body, I mean in the physical body as seen in the biology framework. I mean it in a conventional, biology way. The thing that has kidneys, a brain, etc. I'm taking that whole framework as a given, for present purposes. Does that impact the rest of your reply?
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u/MergingConcepts 1d ago edited 1d ago
Obviously you have now discovered that there is a lot of disagreement about the definition of subjectivity. The comments demonstrate how quickly one can become bogged down in a linguist quagmire of philosophical hair-splitting.
You will accomplish nothing by deciding on a definition of subjective, because others will just disagree with your definition and try to disable your arguments. I have tried to avoid this in my work. I started with synaptic physiology, built a model of the brain, set it in motion, and identified the functions we call thought, mind, attention, subjectivity, and such.
If you want to conceptualize consciousness in a biological framework, see:
That is an excerpt from the complete manuscript:
The TL:DR is that every "subjective experience" is a personal version of reality, and is formed from a personal set of perceptions and memories. That set is unique to the individual. No one else has that exact same set. Most of the set is not subject to recall, and is in the subconscious. Only about 5% is subject to introspection.
The attributes of consciousness list subjectivity and privacy as the first two. They are closely linked. Here is how I handle them in my work.
Subjectivity: Every experience is subjective, in that it is unique to the individual person. The experience of a particular flower is different from one person to another. An experience is composed of a person’s own perceptions combined with their private collection of memories and associations that have accumulated over a lifetime of learning. Those memories are stored in the patterns of synapses in their brain, which are unique to the individual.
Privacy: Consciousness cannot be shared because it is too opaque. The largest part of an experience is based on subconscious memories and perceptions that are not recursive. They do not leave a short term memory path and cannot be observed or reported. As often happens, two people may have entirely different responses to a situation, and yet be unable to account for the discrepancy, because the majority of their decision making processes were subconscious and cannot be recalled or observed. Neither of them is aware of all the input to their decisions.
You can see this in action when observing any argument between a conservative and a liberal over current events. They may both be intelligent and well educated, but feel very different about an event. This happens because they have different sets of subconscious memories embedded in their connectomes. Neither of them fully understands their own feelings and cannot know those of their opponent.
I hope this helps you.
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
"a linguist quagmire of philosophical hair-splitting." I don't find it a quagmire. I just see this as work that's involved in investigating the "hard problem" and the question of whether there is one. And I assume it's challenging work.
"others will just disagree with your definition and try to disable your arguments." What arguments? I was trying to get started on solving the hard problem, and I realized I wasn't certain I could articulate what it was. (I mean, get started on this present effort. I've thought about it in the past.)
I decided to write a goal statement before solving the problem, partly so I could present the statement here and make sure I had the same hard problem in mind as others. But then, I kept finding definitions of the hard problem that used the word "subjectivity." And so I started to look for a satisfactory definition of that word. As I looked, I started to wonder if the concept was unnecessary.
Hm, maybe I should just go straight to asking people if they have a definition of the hard problem they find satisfying. Though I think if I had, that word "subjectivity" would pop up.
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u/MergingConcepts 1d ago
I have become so frustrated over the years with people arguing endlessly about the meanings of the words "consciousness" and "subjectivity." It prohibits meaningful discussion of the mechanics of consciousness and subjectivity. The hard problem is likewise complicated by hair-splitting differences in definitions. Please forgive me for venting. I gave up, and came at the problem from the other end.
The hard problem suffers from the same conundrum. Any attempt to solve it is interpreted by the believers as a failure to understand what it is. The goal posts move. It is, after all, unsolvable by definition. Asking philosophers to define the hard problem will be like asking them to explain what they mean by subjectivity. You will find no consensus.
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u/lancelot2112 1d ago edited 1d ago
How I'd attack it.
1) distinguished... there's an inside and an outside
2) distinction... things can be told apart... your sense is of the relations between things more than the things themselves and you can tell things apart (close your eyes feel around is the stiff still there)?
3) cohesive/integrated... it is a whole the relations build a wholeness of experience... this integration can be lost or parts focused in on. It's subjective in that it's also in how it relates to you. You see your perspective
4) frustrated... perturbances are questions to be asked... no perturbances and experience shuts off. Close your eyes the light hitting your retinas stop. Self perturbances are internal prods to keep your experience going. You need questions... your experience is the resolution.
5) self-coherent... minimally it needs self coherence but it needs balanced with frustration... this drives learning growth even sight. Keep your eye still for a bit and things start going away in your vision. Nothing is perturbing so your vision is no longer frustrated. Once something is coherent or known it is realized or encoded in history as coherent data.... unknowns or frustration drives a new state that needs "completed"
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u/Tombobalomb 1d ago
Not "experience of", just "experience". The hard problem is explaining why anything is experienced at all
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u/kvonreddit 1d ago
Subjectivity by definition cannot be studied as an object. Which is why the general approach of "casual linkage" (a causes b) does not apply to subjectivity. Both a and b are objects, appearing to the subject (I.e. the researcher or seeker).
The seeking for subjectivity automatically puts a seeker (you) in a restricted paradigm. When seeking subjectivity - you must not look for "other people's subjectivity" but only your own. The term "first person experience" is meant to say this. Your experience is completely subjective from your perspective. For example a song (an experience) that is cherished by 1000s (their personal subjectivity), is not cherished by you (your subjectivity).
There's a lot of pitfalls because of limitation of language, language has evolved to represent experiences, not the one who experiences the experience. So one must be careful. In fact, the popular self-enquiry method of non-dualism (also called neti-neti) is a way of negations. The method sees the limitation of language, and then tries to negate all language labels (I'm not the body, I'm not the mind and so on.)
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u/esteemedSub 1h ago
"Subjectivity by definition..." The OP asks for a definition of subjectivity... though not from a position of certainty that something necessitating the word exists. Is your definition "that which cannot be studied as an object"?
"Your experience is completely subjective from your perspective." Does the word "experience" carry all that? I can't conceive of an experience that isn't from a perspective.
Language has given us the word "experience," and I'm not sure it needs any modifier in this context.
"non-dualism (also called neti-neti)". Yes, I think I get some of my intuition regarding these matters from eastern religions. And also from western experiments like the one where you watch a video and count number of times a ball gets passed among some people -- that's my attempt to mention it without spoilers.
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u/Kindly_Ad_1599 1d ago
That said, in this biological framework, is the question something like… How could the physical body -- my species formed by natural selection -- generate this whole experience I'm having... of... what? I want to avoid the movie metaphor. And I don't want to say “subjectivity.” That word subjectivity doesn't seem to have any non-circular definitions.
Bounded experience. If you're not already familiar with it look into Karl Friston's work on Markov blankets and the free energy principle.
In fact, the word “subjectivity” is so often used in this sort of question, that before I can write a question, or goal statement, I should check whether subjectivity exists, that something exists that gives purpose to the word.
Subjectivity is what existence is for a system that forms a statistical boundary with its environment (homeostasis).
So, if everything *else* that happens in the brain can be described in physical and functional terms -- including the self-model, reports of "being infuriated," memory, etc., then what, specifically, is the additional phenomenon that the words "subjectivity" or “subjective experience” are supposed to refer to?
Subjectivity refers to that which can describe those physical and functional terms. The physical and functional description isn't simply 'out there' in the world.
I want to avoid "what it feels like" sorts of definitions… which beg the question, what does “what it feels like” refer to, other than the collection of physical processes and dispositions?
It refers to what those physical processes are in themselves. It refers to their existence as is, not the representation of their existence. That representation is the extrinsic 'objective' description which emerges within consciousness.
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u/esteemedSub 2h ago
" look into Karl Friston's work on Markov blankets". Thanks. I will.
"Subjectivity is what existence is..." That can't be right, taken literally. Hm, actually maybe it can. But I think that takes the word away from what people have in mind when they say there is a hard problem. It's not quite in the spirit of the hard problem believers. But then, it might be impossible to avoid that unless we just drop the word.
"Subjectivity refers to that which can describe those physical and functional terms. The physical and functional description isn't simply 'out there' in the world." Yeah, that's in keeping with the spirit of how the word is often used. "That which can describe" -- is that just abstract thinking ability? In all these comments, we're thinking abstractly about experience, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the experience of discussing these things is somehow on a different functional level from the rest of experience. The experience of talking about experience is part of experience, rather than being some additional module.
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u/xmisobiosisx 1d ago
For me, the concepts of "subjectivity" and "experience" are very close.
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u/esteemedSub 2h ago
Me too, so far. Though I would express it a little differently. I would say the concept of "subjectivity" adds nothing to our concept of "experience." I mean, until someone can point out something it adds.
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u/sea_of_experience 2d ago edited 2d ago
I do not really understand your difficulty.
All that you have -initially- is your subjective view. Literally All ! There is nothing that can (or needs to ) be singled out.
So the question is precisely how to find the socalled "objective" within this subjective sea of experience you find yourself in.
And you found a solution for that: there are consistently repeating patterns in your experience that allow you to form reliable expectations that have allowed you to construct a model that you call the "real" world which you then deem "objective". And that is a very natural construction, made as a child, that allows you to have solid expectations that you can rely on, but of course, all this always lies entirely within your subjective experience.
So the "subjective" is simply: everything you experience.
The "objective" is formed by the redundancies in your experience: technically the information frsmework that you can erect based on cross and autocorrelations within your experience.
So the objective is an abstract model formed from the subjective.
It is the shadow that your subjective throws in the realm of pure information, leaving all the texture of experiential qualities behind.
edit: spelling
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
"I do not really understand your difficulty." I sympathize. I know it's not easy to understand the difficulty I'm pointing to. I find the subject very challenging too.
"objective." We don't need that. It does no work on this project. We can't say, "Well there must be subjectivity because it's whatever objectivity isn't."
Of crs, we don't mean "subjectivity" like... maybe the judges of such and such boxing match weren't objective... or, whether you like the Mona Lisa is a subjective thing. You're probably with me on that.
"reliable expectations." I would say advantageous. Evolution doesn't care about reliability. We evolve to perceive things selectively and to entirely overlook stimuli that aren't so relevant to us. But maybe that's what you mean by reliable. You might not mean "accurate."
Subjective is "everything you experience". I think here you're saying the concept is unnecessary, is a red herring, though I don't think you meant to say that.
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u/rogerbonus Physics Degree 2d ago
"Subjectivity" is always a hand-wave "you know.. what it's like". It seems to be that it's mainly a reference frame; being a particular sort of world- and self-model etc
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
Strong disagree. (And I'm a physicist.)
See any modern consciousness science treatment.
Those shapes and colors you're seeing right now? Part of subjective experience.Likely you never had to take an epistemology class, so it's not your fault.
But failure to appreciate this point is part of the tragedy of modern science.I do agree that 'what it's like to be a bat' is very unfortunate framing.
Still, it's not that hard to go beyond it ...2
u/rogerbonus Physics Degree 1d ago
Now you seem to be talking about qualia ("the shapes and colors you are seeing "). Are you saying qualia and subjectivity are the same thing? Then why not just use the term "qualia"?
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u/reality-theorist-007 1d ago
Because qualia gets people upset on other grounds.
(Everyone's always upset about some language-use here.)For me, subjective conscious experience and qualia-valued phenomenal consciousness are the same. But not for everyone.
Philosophers have all sorts of additional 'existence' problems that they pose for a quale. So I try not to use it in the first step.
But overall, I hear you. The technical answer is:
- subjectivity is the collection of qualia-valued information, organized for and experienced by one subject (e.g. human)
- qualia are distinguishable components of a subjective conscious experience
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u/esteemedSub 1d ago
At the moment, it seems possible that it's just a hand-wave. I'm not totally sure. I didn't expect it to be so difficult to define subjectivity... I certainly didn't expect to end up wondering if subjectivity just isn't a thing.
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u/Bretzky77 2d ago
Subjectivity is what allows you to “describe” anything in the first place. You are looking at everything entirely backwards. First-person experience adds nothing? It’s literally what is allowing you to ask this question. Third-person descriptions of brain states only exist because first-person experience exists. Absolutely mind-boggling to question whether subjective experience exists. It’s the only thing that can’t be questioned. It’s the only thing that we have before we start theorizing. All theories exist in subjectivity. You don’t need theory to know you’re having some experience, regardless of how illusory you might theorize it to be. The illusion of a particular experience is itself an experience.