Summary of the positions on the hard problem. Philos. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. Cognitive models of consciousness (Barrs 1988) are sometimes described as potential solutions to the hard problem. Biol. doi: 10.2307/2183914, OBrien, G., and Opie, J. Therefore I will consider next a situation that could be, in my opinion, interpreted as having a direct glimpse at the internal structure of an apparently monadic quale. One of the main reasons for such systematic co-occurrences is, according to the hypothesis, the fact that all the essential nodes responsible for explicit representations are directly connected to the planning modules of the brain (the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, in particular), where their projections can easily affect the behavior of the subject (Koch, 2004, p. 245). An example of that kind of radical structuralist metaphysics is a theory of Ladyman and Ross (2007). And supposing there are some fundamental elements with no finer-grain internal structure, it would be still arguably true that these elements are empirically accessible only via their (causal) relations with other elements and objects (including, perhaps, some measuring apparatus). Instead of trying to solve the hard problem with reductionism or dualism, idealism throws out all that and states that consciousness is the very core of existence. The solution is that all of those itty-bitty pieces of us, the atoms and molecules, contain within them a sort of proto-consciousness. Many scientific object structuralists defend a less radical position, known as epistemic structural realism, according to which structure and relations are simply all we can empirically access. According to Crick and Koch, the structure of such reddish color experience (or the meaning of that experience) is a vast network of unconscious associations of all the countless encounters with red objects in that persons personal history and of personal histories of her ancestors, embodied in her genes (Crick and Koch, 1998; Koch, 2004, pp. Proc. By analogy, we can consider some macro-physical properties of an ordinary physical object made of wood and stone: if we examine such object at a low enough level of detail, we can call the macro-physical properties of woody and stony qualitative properties (here I use the word qualitative in a strictly physical sense, as, for example, wood and stone have different qualities from the perspective of a construction engineer or an architect). J. Phys. (A Laconic Exposition of) a method by which the internal compositional features of qualitative experience can be made evident to subjective awareness. It is often claimed, by referring to the famous article of Nagel (1974), that any amount of objective knowledge about, say, a bats brain can never contain the knowledge of what is it like to be a bat (in other words, what is the exact qualitative character of a bats consciousness). For example, consider global workspace theory , according to which the contents of consciousness are globally available for various cognitive processes such as attention, memory , and verbal report. Moreover, those internal structures can be identified which certain neural patterns. |, Introduction: the Hard Problem as a Tension between three Theses, Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. Once we become aware of the overtone structure, we get access to some (a tiny part) of that information. Philos. Brains are too complicated, and are conditioned on too many random events and accidents of evolutionary history, for such armchair methods to successfully illuminate the truth. Such empirical spirit should be seen as a particular strength of their approach: it seems to be much more preferable to come by with an actual (even though hypothetical) scientific account of consciousness and qualia than to simply demonstrate philosophically that such scientific account could be developed. And last but not least, the above structural account of consciousness is psychologically convincing and intuitively illuminating: it is much easier to accept (for me, for Crick and Koch and, hopefully, for many others) that the constitutive components of qualia are unconscious associations, than, say, some fundamental protophenomenal elements of whose nature we are completely ignorant.
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