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0 pointswint3rmute19d ago0 comments

I've heard an interesting argument about this while going down the rabbit hole of the hard problem of conciousness. Unfortunately can't rember the source - if you can recognize it, do let me know!

Back in the XVII/XIX century, a similar problem existed regarding life - the problem of "what makes living things tick". The assumption at that time was that while we can understand the biological processes around life, we will never understand the so-called "vital force", which causes things to live - life itself. I know it sounds weird now, but back in the day the mental models were different. Phenomenas like "water boils" and "organisms self-replicate" were treated as completely different domains of reality, without an overarching uniform scientific model.

It turned out that after around 100 years, we can figure out the chemical/physical processes and the need for the term "vital force" became redundant.

While this is certainly not an argument proving that the Hard Problem is not in fact hard, it is an interesting idea to think about. Perhaps its all a matter of developing better, higher-resolution neurological models which will at some point give us the tools to decompose qualia.

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vidarh19d ago

The problem of subjective is different, because while we might be able to get to a point of being able to say it can't affect anything, pretty much by definition we can't experience another entity's subjective experience or lack thereof.

Even if we were to e.g. identify some field that seemed to coincide with entities reporting a subjective experience, we wouldn't have a way of determining if they truly do, or just act as if they do, nor is it clear such entities would be able to report the difference.

As it is, we struggle to quantify even much more basic differences in experience that we can introspect. E.g. I have aphantasia - I don't see things in my minds eye - and I regularly come across people who insists both that can't be true, and that it can't be true that others see things. And some of the people I've spoken to who insist aphantasia isn't real clearly has it based on digging into their thinking about it.

Even at that level we rely on trusting people's claims about their introspection - we don't know, we assume based on testimony.

andrewflnr19d ago

Worth keeping in mind, yes, but biological processes are readily observable whereas subjective mental phenomena are... not. Everything about them is inaccessible and frankly unfalsifiable except for the fact that they're the bedrock of all the rest of our observations. Not directly comparable.

Anyway, further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism I was in fact looking this up recently for fiction-writing purposes.

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