What is meant by the “hard problem”?
What is meant by the “hard problem”?
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how we have qualia or phenomenal experiences.
This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that enable us to discriminate, integrate information, and so forward. These problems are viewed as relatively easy because all that is needed for their answer is to indicate the mechanisms that perform such functions. Philosopher David Chalmers claims that even whenever we have tackled all such problems about the brain and experience, the hard problem will in any case persevere.
The hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995) is the problem of explaining the relationship between physical phenomena, for example, brain cycles, and experience (i.e., phenomenal consciousness, or mental states/occasions with phenomenal qualities or qualia). For what reason are physical cycles ever accompanied by experience? And for what reason does a given physical interaction generate the particular experience it does-why an encounter of red rather than green, for example?
Hard problems and easy problems
The hard problem contrasts with purported easy problems, for example, explaining how the brain integrates information, categorizes and discriminates environmental boosts, or centers attention. Such phenomena are functionally definable. That is, generally put, they are definable as far as what they allow a subject to do. Thus, for example, in the event that mechanisms that explain how the brain integrates information are found, the first of the easy problems recorded would be addressed. The same point applies to all other easy problems: they concern specifying mechanisms that explain how capacities are performed. For the easy problems, when the relevant mechanisms are surely known, there is practically no explanatory work left to do.
Experience doesn't appear to fit this explanatory model (however some reductionists argue that, truth be told, it does; see the part on reductionism underneath). Although experience is associated with a variety of capacities, explaining how those capacities are performed would in any case appear to leave important inquiries unanswered. We would in any case want to know why their performance is accompanied by experience, and why either kind of involvement rather than another kind. Along these lines, for example, in any event, when we find something that plays the causal job of pain, for example something that is caused by nerve stimulation and that causes backlash and avoidance, we can in any case ask why the particular experience of hurting, instead of, say, itching, is associated with that job. Such problems are hard problems.
Cognitive models of consciousness (Barrs 1988) are some of the time described as potential answers for the hard problem. However, it is unclear that any such model could achieve that goal. For example, think about global workspace theory, according to which the substance of consciousness are globally available for various cognitive cycles like attention, memory, and verbal report. Regardless of whether this theory is right, the association between such cycles and experience-e.g., why they are accompanied by experience at all-may well remain opaque. For similar reasons, discovering neural correlates of consciousness may leave the hard problem strange: the inquiry as to why those correlations exist would remain unanswered. Nevertheless, logical advances on cognitive models and neural correlates of consciousness may well play important jobs in a comprehensive arrangement.
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