alt Hacker NewsThis is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.
Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
Replies
amenhotep • today at 8:53 AM
I read it as "I'm very clever and sensible. I definitely don't believe in souls."
Like so much other material produced by people who (I suspect deliberately) confuse religion with the subjective phenomenon of existence
Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.
> That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.
That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.
Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.
I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.