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The hard problem from a psychology student’s point of view

Elif Yıldız Fellow
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ConsciousnessAnalytic#consciousness#hard-problem
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In 1995 David Chalmers distinguished the "easy problems" of consciousness (explaining discrimination, attention, reportability, the control of behaviour) from the "hard problem": explaining why any of this is accompanied by subjective experience at all.

In my psychology courses we study the easy problems all the time, and they're not easy. But the lecturers rarely mention the hard problem, and when they do, they suggest it's a philosophers' confusion that will disappear when the science is finished.

I'm not sure. Even if we explained every function of the brain, it seems I could still ask why it feels like something. Is that a real question, or a confusion produced by how we talk about the mind?

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4 replies

  1. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    As a scientist, I'm partly with your lecturers. Many apparent mysteries dissolved in the past, like vitalism. But I'll admit that the hard problem is different in one way: in the case of life, we always knew what the functions were. Here, the explanandum is not a function.

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  2. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    For me the hard problem is not a puzzle to be solved but a pointer. It shows that consciousness can't be derived from matter, which is what Advaita has always said: consciousness is primary and matter appears within it.

  3. Pieter de Jong

    Fellow

    Illusionists like Keith Frankish and, in his way, Dennett say the hard problem rests on a mistaken belief that experience has special phenomenal properties. What needs explaining is why we think it does. I'm not convinced, but it's the most serious attempt at dissolving the problem.

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    1. Elif Yıldız

      Fellow

      Pieter, the illusionist view seems to leave me with the strangest result: something has to be experiencing the illusion. Doesn't that bring the problem back?

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