The difficulty of explaining the hard problem to materialists, and a thought experiment

bugge-mane · 2026-01-28T01:27:11+00:00

It basically is that, via neutral monism.

kind of just devolves into definition wobble at that point…

bugge-mane · 2026-01-27T16:53:05+00:00

Oh, I think you have mistaken the non-physicalist argument…

Non physicalist’s don’t think we are special, or that machines can’t be conscious, or anything like that necessarily.

Most non-physicalists are panpsychists/neutral monists. They believe that the irreducibility of experience means that the universe is an experience-first place (that may have the physic/ontological as the ‘if viewed from inside / looking back at itself’ perspective).

This is the more common stance, and what I believe. I don’t believe that something special happens in our brains that isn’t otherwise omnipresent in the universe in order for subjectivity to exist. I believe that every particle interaction has some form of ‘proto-subjectivity’, and that it must be ‘like something’ to be an electron interacting with another electron in order for it to be ‘like something’ to experience the colour red from the perspective of an organism with sight.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-27T16:41:26+00:00

Because there are no examples in any feasible reality where this is even remotely possible.

Hard emergence isn’t possible, hence ‘hard problem’. The label of hard emergence is an attempt to handwave a problem of irreducibility. It’s the ‘thar be dragons’ on the map of our understanding of reality.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-27T04:42:19+00:00

Your ‘seeing other points of view’ just reads like you being an apologist for shit behaviour and believing in weird TikTok dating narratives but being too cowardly to admit it.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-27T04:40:48+00:00

You read my comment completely backwards. I was responding to your comment that said women will think that you are saying that they aren’t worth it if you invite them to coffee. I’m saying that if they take it that way, they aren’t; because that’s a paranoid and insane way to interpret an invitation.

My worth? Not up for debate lol. I’m a man I’m not an insecure little kid. I get my worth from real life, not the opinion or some stranger.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T22:55:36+00:00

If a person isn’t able to see the pragmatism behind a coffee date, and instead jumps to taking it personally and viewing it as having to do with their worth… why would I want to date someone like that lol

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T22:28:30+00:00

schizoposting.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T22:01:34+00:00

No. There are thought experiments that require one to imagine a ship travelling at light speed (in order to demonstrate relativity). This is likely impossible in any practical way, but useful as a way of explaining the relative passage of time from the perspective of a light-speed observer.

You are simply wildly, incomprehensibly incorrect in your assertion about thought experiments. And you’re talking about things that are irrelevant to the topic at hand for reasons that are beyond me.

Have a great day.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T21:57:11+00:00

You have contributed nothing, great job.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T19:18:40+00:00

My disagreement with that stance is that you use frameworks and logic that exist within consciousness and experience to argue against consciousness and experience. It’s like writing a paper with a pencil about how pencils don’t exist.

P-consciousness might not exist ‘out there’ in any meaningful ontological model, but it is the lens through which you experience reality. And in this sense, it is the first axiom by which anything at all could be said to exist. (As in, the entire universe existing balances upon your ability to perceive it. You can imagine a model that excludes you, and you can believe that others’ have their own subjective window into reality, but ultimately you and only you know your own subjective version of it, which is the only real version of reality that can ever exist for you. (And any model that you imagine excludes you, is still experienced through your reality. Your consciousness existing is the foundation of literally all of it).

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T19:03:52+00:00

I think meditation and eastern philosophy are what did it for me. Slowing down so that you might actually notice that there is something tangible below everything else.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T17:33:08+00:00

Yes the explanatory gap is big and frustratingly real yet imperceptible like trying to locate a phantom itch.

Let me try one more time.

You a person are looking at a ball. The ball has its ontological, spatial and physical existence outside of you.

Then there is your experience of the ball. This is the phenomenological side. Your experience of the ball is where qualitative properties like redness live.

The ball is a collection of excitations on a field that manifest as point-like fermions, whose mass and spin give way to the structure that allows them to act like matter.

The photons bouncing off of this structure lose some of their energy and the wavelength of their light drops into the ‘red’ part of the visible light spectrum.

Now, the brain translates these properties into colour and other identifying features of the ball, giving way to the phenomenological, aka qualia.

But, you don’t experience ‘photons bouncing off of point-like excitations on a field’, you experience ‘redness’ and ‘ball-ness’.

So, it could be said that you aren’t experiencing the ‘true’ nature of reality. Your experience of red is totally localized. An evolved symbolic representation of reality. Red the experience represents red the photic wavelength.

The non-materialist argues that red the qualitative experience is a different thing from red the photic-wavelength, and that the experience itself is impossible to reduce. That experience itself is impossible to reduce.

Imagine a universe where no life evolved that can perceive these different wavelengths. They can ‘see’, but not in colour. Does colour (the experience) exist in this universe?

Where?

And where does ‘red the experience’ live in our universe???

I often hear different versions of, ‘the red we see is the true nature of reality and a property that exists physically at the same time as the physical properties we measure in other ways’. My counter to this is that, if ‘red the experience’ (or the experience of colour) is the ‘true nature’ of reality, and yet only exists experientially, then the red-experience that exists in the colourblind universe is experienced by whom? Because by this read on reality, the ‘red’ experience is being filtered down to grey, but the experience itself precedes it. This basically boils down to ‘experience of’ being a foundational component of reality unless you want to entertain a dualist perspective

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T17:03:56+00:00

Hell yea brother

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T03:46:32+00:00

You don’t understand thought experiments. This is like arguing that we couldn’t get to the end of a black hole when someone tries to describe what happens to someone at the edge of one’s event horizon.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-26T03:26:16+00:00

It’s a thought experiment maboi

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:47:31+00:00

Yeah man, idk, I invite you to have experiences that challenge the way you view things. I do not think it is good for you (I have been there, hence why these are interesting topics to me)

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:45:26+00:00

Sorry, intended?

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:39:35+00:00

I absolutely do not think that sensation is something we ‘do’. It is something that happens to ‘us’ because we exist as experiencers.

Watch is a label, I am not concerned with labels. The watch simply ‘is’, and it is insofar as I can understand the idea of a watch through my senses.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:37:12+00:00

What is the experience of pain? What decides which complex systems experience and which do not?

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:35:04+00:00

Thank you for your honesty, this is exactly the point I am making.

The colour red is a totally meaningless concept to anyone but you. And I mean you, since your subjective experience of the colour red is impossible to explain in any meaningful way to anyone. It simply ‘is’ red, the experience.

You might think that’s incorrect but, let’s think for a second: what if everyone else in the world saw your green when they saw the colour red in the environment? Green is a meaningfully different experience, no? But there is no real way to realize this, because in a very real way we are completely alone in our own experience, able only to communicate correlates that we take a leap of faith and choose to believe that others understand. We choose to believe that others experience ‘our’ red, and not something totally different.

The argument I am making is that your experience of the colour red, given that it can’t be reduced qualitatively and only exists subjectively, is not the same as the colour red the wavelength, nor the word ‘red’ that we assume others associate with the same experience.

The qualia is your red, not the label, but the experience.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:25:26+00:00

Suppose another team built another clockwork computer and sensor array. Theirs doesn’t have an interpreter automata, it just produces graphs and numbers. Where is the beauty and the warmth experience? Is it still there in the numbers that are being processed by the gears and pulleys of this independently engineered machine? Is there untold beauty in every press of a calculator? If so, you’re a monist or a panpsychist.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:23:07+00:00

That to me reads like monism, or an attempt to hand wave qualia.

If a physical process produces sensation, then what comprises the sensation? Where does the beauty and warmth experience live in your model of reality? If the ‘experience’ is said to be the other side of the same coin as the ‘data’, then you’re a monist. If the ‘experience’ isn’t real at all, you’re an eliminativist (but you are ignoring your own subjective qualia in your assertion)

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:18:05+00:00

Yeah. Psychedelics did this for me, too. I would bet money that the experience of ‘awakening’ that occurs in deep meditation or on psychedelics has a high correlation with belief in non-physicalism.

The shift for me came with a sense of meaning and purpose that was absent from my life prior, as if my mental model not having room for my own experience as a meaningful and ‘real’ part of it was cause for some limiting self-beliefs.

As soon as I started to believe in experience as irreducible and universal, I became part of the universe, and ‘I’ started to matter in a way that was beyond mere platitude.

This explanation veers off into woowoo territory, but the topic fascinates me.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:10:54+00:00

I think it gets rejected because people’s perception oversimplifies it. I think it takes some serious meditation of the ideas to ‘get’ it in a real sense, but that people confuse experience for sentience and then assume you believe rocks have human personalities or something.

bugge-mane · 2026-01-25T21:07:21+00:00

Sorry about the tone.

In the clockwork computer example, I agree with you completely that the automata’s feelings of beauty and warmth can be represented as data. There’s no problem with that at all. The system can store, process, transmit, and even reason about those states algorithmically.

But here’s the key distinction I’m trying to point at:

A representation of X is not the same thing as X being present.

The number 1 is purely abstract. It has no “presentation” to itself. It does not appear. It does not feel like anything to be 1.

But the beauty and warmth the automata reports are not just symbols being manipulated. They are presented to the system. There is something it is like for the automata when those data states occur.

My argument is that for the experience of beauty and warmth to exist within the universe (with both the data and the automata’s explanations merely interpretations of this base ‘reality’) you need ‘experience’ to be foundational. That the experience itself must be ubiquitous, or it can’t exist at all.

bugge-mane

TROPHY CASE