> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".
Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.
Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.
This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.
Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.
> Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me:
A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.
These are very good analogies (and possibly experiences for those who are natural synesthetes), but even then, that won't make the who doesn't have the corresponding perceptual modality person experience that exact sensation.
> A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
why does a major chord sounds pleasant? and why does a minor chord sounds "sad"? Why does the locrian mode sound so unsettling? is it due to our anatomy or purely cultural?
Well, right, it's contextual. We each have a series of inputs that add up to these contexts. This doesn't mean it can't be explained, it just means there needs to be context.
If you give the blind man a sensor that converts color data to something he can input, and then provide inputs giving the feeling you want to portray associated with that color, you have explained it.
If you feel red is angry, all you need to do is play 400 to 484 THz into his instrument and yell at him angrily enough times for him to associate it. It doesn't seem too subjective to me.
Color perception has nothing to do with light wavelength. Color is a subjective perceptual space.
If you zap your occipital cortex with electromagnetic pulses, you'll experience color flashes (phosphenes).
If a blind person who can read baille does the same, they'll experience tingling sensations in their fingers [1].
People can have visual experiences through somesthesic stimuli (you can give muddy waters divers sonar-based sight by stimulating their skin with an electrode array).
AFAIK, it is not however know whether someone who was blind at birth and whose brain didn't learn to see could have such experiences.
Show me what is subjective about it then. What makes one illusion created out of flesh more real than another?
How are any of these experiences subjective if you can already relate their nature so easily and universally? You are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Are you saying that you are a literal philosophical zombie?
Do you understand the difference between feeling the pain in your toes when you shoot in a door frame and what you experience when you see someone else do the same.
See also colorblindness as a common example, or tetrachromacy, which is posited in some individuals with at least two X chromosomes, and the norm in several species of birds.
Their color space has four dimensions.
People who lose parts of their brains can lose the ability to conceptualize the ability encoded by the region they lost.
No, I am saying the concept of a p-zombie relies on a flawed premise. I am asking you to explain what is fundamentally "subjective" about these experiences.
How are colorblindness and extended color perception any different from full blindness which we already addressed? These are issues of scale of perception, there is nothing subjective about them. You either process the data or not.
Can you experience sympathetic pain without having already experienced pain? I don't see any subjectivity there.
If there are multiple people that experience no pain, how are they subjectively different in their experience of no pain? Really, the more I look at it, arguing subjectivity from the null experience seems a particularly bad hill to die on. If a broken hardware bus generates a subjective experience of its own absence, then an unplugged microphone has a "subjective experience of silence."
Ultimately, I still think you are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".
Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.
Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.
This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.
Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.