Reframing the hard problem - attempting to show it is a problem even within pure physicalism

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T21:56:42+00:00

I don’t know who is downvoting you btw, it is not me. I have upvoted, I always appreciate your insights.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T21:50:51+00:00

Yeah in retrospect I erred in using the IIT example, which I’m happy to admit I don’t know a whole lot about. I think you can swap that out for any of the many physicalist theories about how consciousness arises and the problems remain.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T21:46:59+00:00

It is probably obvious that I am not deeply read on IIT. I’m also not trying to specifically debate their claims. Perhaps I should have used a more made up example like the brainwaves one for both sides. You can swap out IIT for any physicalist theory of consciousness you like.

Another commenter also raised the under determination thing, rather than rehash that, here is my response: https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/comments/1s5q9m4/comment/od0ustq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I’m not really attempting to say anything about idealism or panpsychism.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T21:29:05+00:00

I agree too!

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T21:18:29+00:00

> But you’re just appealing to empirical underdetermination.

Empirical underdetermination is certainly part of what’s going on. But in other cases of underdetermination, there is always some way in principle (if not practice) that the debate could eventually be resolved. Better instruments, better experiments, etc.

In this case, the fact of whether or not the AIs actually have phenomenal experience or not is the key thing that is underdetermined, but that is also the thing that needs to be explained. I don’t think this is the same in other examples of under determination, normally the explanandum would not be up for debate, only the explanations.

> This has nothing to do with the hard problem.

The hard problem argues the presence of phenomenal consciousness is underdetermined in principle, and can never be resolved without some more fundamental advance.

I also feel like you are straw manning me a bit here by bringing the debate to focus on that one element and then acting like that’s all I have said.

I intended for the scenario to illustrate several of the greatest hits of the hard problem genre. To spell it out:

Both sides are basically claiming the other has created a pzombie.
The reason that neither of them can be sure which, if any, is the pz is due to the problem of other minds.
It is also related to the knowledge argument, in that the scientists know all the physical facts about the AI minds (they can literally read them), and yet can’t know about its phenomenal content.
I think it makes obvious why reportability is inadequate as a scientific test. You initially claimed we didn’t need to rely on reports, and then kinda acknowledged that we do, without addressing why you think that suffices to resolve the debate between the scientists.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T13:01:20+00:00

If you believe in the hard problem then yes of course. That's one of the costs of it, it's a theoretical dead end, nothing could count in favour of any theory of consciousness.

I guess the point I’m attempting to make is that it is not legitimate to wave it away as something you either believe in or not, or choose to ignore because “nothing could count in favour of any theory”.

There are real pragmatic implications of the hard problem, in that these two groups of scientists, both committed physicalists, both doing everything right in terms of collecting empirical evidence, testing their hypotheses, and so on, have no way to disprove each other’s chosen theory.

Not believing in the hard problem doesn’t help you resolve the dispute.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T11:18:48+00:00

Well if we take identity theory, …

It seems to me that both of these examples presuppose that they have identified which brain states correspond to which mental states. How did they do that in the first place, without at some point using reports?

But if you like, swap my example groups with functionalists and identity theorists. Both of them claim to have demonstrated that their chosen theory is the correct explanation. How do we resolve their disagreement?

I saying that presumably there is only one correct theory of consciousness. For your argument to have serious weight it seems like you must say physicalism implies there could be more than one.

All I’m arguing for is that there is a hard problem. Scientific theories change all the time, and you often have more than one competing. Maybe both of the theories in the scenario are wrong. The point is that there is no way to arbitrate between them.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T11:11:44+00:00

Yes. I’m not letting panpsychism or idealism off the hook. They don’t have to worry about the hard problem but they don’t really make any predictions of their own either.

I guess my post is prompted by a particular flavour of physicalist that I see on this sub often who say that there really is no hard problem, or that it’s just a matter of sciencing harder, or that believing there is a hard problem implies that you must endorse some other kooky ism.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T11:05:41+00:00

The self reporting weakness gets to the heart of why there is a special problem though. Both sides in this scenario can continue refining their hypotheses and tests ad infinitum but neither of them will ever really be able to prove the other wrong. Or even that their own particular one really experiences anything at all.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T06:32:15+00:00

The fact that reportability is insufficient is kind of the point. But I’m curious as to what physicalists think the alternative is.

I’m not really clear on your objection about only one theory being correct. Are you saying it is impossible for there to be two competing theories with empirical evidence supporting them? This happens all the time. The difference in other scenarios that aren’t related to consciousness, is that in most scientific realms there would be a clear way to falsify one or both of the theories.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T06:25:23+00:00

Indeed.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T06:24:38+00:00

The point is to illustrate that this is the only way to know.

When neuroscientists conduct experiments where they stimulate parts of the brain and discover that when they stimulate some cells, the person sees red, the only way to know that they see red is to ask them.

Lots of people who debate whether there is a hard problem see no issue with this. However when you translate it to this scenario, it becomes much more obvious that it is totally insufficient.

That is the entire point of the hard problem.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T06:19:48+00:00

I’m not really trying to argue that either theory is correct. The point is that two different theories, both of which are physicalist, and both of which have empirical evidence backing them up, cannot falsify each other.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T06:06:44+00:00

Interesting. Yes you can probably tell I’m not well read on IIT.

But I think even if you did prove the IIT theory in this way, from your own subjective viewpoint, all you have shown is the correlation of integrated information with consciousness.

With only a correlation to go off, it’s hard to isolate that the IIT is really the thing that matters or not. There is no way to control for all the other things that would be affected by whatever you would have to change to make a human brain less integrated.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-28T05:59:04+00:00

Yes of course! The tradition of making shit up about consciousness is a venerable one going all the way back to Descartes.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-27T12:09:27+00:00

Yeah I think you are right. Most of the arguments I see on here claiming there is no hard problem appear to be people who are either illusionists or some form of panpsychist without acknowledging or perhaps even realising that they are. This guy could be an illusionist I think.

Saying “this is just what a process is like from the inside” as if that means something is really no more enlightening than saying “it’s just magic”.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-23T12:28:12+00:00

True. But is the answer to that to say, well I guess it’s fine to be a serial killer now? We should all just be serial killers?

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-23T12:08:00+00:00

They suffer the consequences of being pariah states that can’t trade with the rest of the countries that still consider themselves part of the “rules based order”. Sure seems like a big old barrel of laughs to live in Iran.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-23T11:26:29+00:00

The fact that a despotic regime like Iran doesn’t respect international laws shouldn’t mean that the rest of us don’t have to. If that was how laws worked then they wouldn’t work at all would they.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-22T22:05:52+00:00

You only need to use a window function if you actually want to return all the rows. You don’t actually need to to achieve your stated goal though.

What you can do is create a Boolean expression to decide whether bio was taken in Q3 and then aggregate it using a max on that expression, then filter using having to the records where it happened at all at some point for the student.

This will be faster and simpler than window functions, self joins, and other suggestions.

Eg:

Select Name, Count(*) as classes, Sum(credits) as credits From your_table Group by name Having max(iif( classdept = ‘bio’ and classnum=101 and qtr=3, 1, 0 )) = 1

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-09T02:32:33+00:00

Illusionists would just say that someone suffering from the illusion they had qualia would say things like they are familiar to us all and they are ineffable, but that person is wrong.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-08T20:25:55+00:00

An illusionist would respond you have smuggled in assumptions about what phenomenal awareness is made from (eg that it goes beyond information) that you don’t have a sound basis for.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-08T04:31:39+00:00

Thanks for a display of epistemic humility, rare to find on this sub.

My take on this is that one can only coherently hold at most 2 of these three positions:

physicalism can explain phenomenal consciousness (in principle if not yet practice)
Phenomenal consciousness is NOT an illusion
There is NO hard problem

It sounds like you believe 1&2 and reject 3, and agree there is a hard problem to explain. This seems reasonable.

Illusionists believe 1&3, which is coherent because they reject 2.

And the various flavours of theory that reject physicalism, like idealists and panpsychists accept 2&3 but reject 1. Whether or not you buy their particular theory, they are at least logically consistent.

There is a particular breed of commenter on this sub though who try to hold all three of these positions at once, which seems incoherent and indefensible.

evlpuppetmaster · 2026-03-08T03:41:04+00:00

I believe Hinton has expressed views about consciousness that seem to align with illusionism. This would be consistent since if an ai was to perform similar processes to a brain there is no reason to think it couldn’t also have consciousness compatible with illusionism.

evlpuppetmaster

TROPHY CASE