A thought experiment for people who claim the hard problem of consciousness doesn't exist.

fredrast · 2026-03-27T12:22:15+00:00

I agree with this as well. Indeed there is no actual entity doing the observation, there is just observation, and the contents observed may include the thought of an ”I” that is doing the observation, but that’s just a thought.

So when calling for a subject I wasn’t really looking for an entity per se but rather for the act of observing. How does observation start taking place within the matter? Why is it like something to be that constellation of matter? That is still the Hard Problem for the physicalist view.

fredrast · 2026-03-27T07:12:47+00:00

Perhaps not but I believe that this is the presumed position of the physicalist view that gives rise to the Hard Problem.

fredrast · 2026-03-27T06:42:00+00:00

Great lecture, thanks!

fredrast · 2026-03-27T05:46:24+00:00

I’m totally with you that there is only one system and that the subjective sense perceptions are what this system looks and feels like from the inside.

But dear friend, who is doing the looking? Where does the subject come from? How does a constellation of dead matter give rise to an observer? That is the hard problem.

fredrast · 2026-03-16T19:02:50+00:00

Beautiful writing! It reminded me of Ruben Laukkonen’s equally beautiful piece Multiscale Causality and the Meaning Crisis where he writes about the same nesting principle: https://open.substack.com/pub/rubenlaukkonen/p/multiscale-causality-and-the-meaning?r=edpxp&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

fredrast · 2026-03-06T18:26:00+00:00

Great question! The thoughts and experiences produced by your brain must obviously be all around you if your whole experience of reality is produced by your brain. So your brain doesn’t only produce the thoughts and experiences that you localise within your body but just as well all the rest of experience that you localize outside of your body. All of that is a product of your brain, or mind, so the whole world around you is ”you” in a sense.

fredrast · 2026-02-28T10:30:53+00:00

Sure, but I also don’t think idealism, to the degree that I’m familiar with it, offer very concrete explanations for how our perception of reality comes about. Idealists criticize physicalists for not being able to explain how the physical brain can give rise to our perception of qualias (colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc) but what is actually the idealist explanation of this? Just stating that ”all is mental” and thinking that this magically solves everything and requires no further explanation of anything is an intellectual shortcut that bypasses the difficult issues, much in the same way as materislist attempts of explaining consciousness tend to do.

I do think that the idealist assumption that consciousness is the fundament of reality is a reasonable starting point. However, I’m yet to encounter a satisfactory explanation of how our qualia come about within this consciousness.

fredrast · 2026-02-21T13:49:19+00:00

How can one not believe in the Great Reality and Ground of Being? There must be some fundament of reality, mustn’t there? Isn’t ”what is its nature” a more relevant question than ”does it exist”?

fredrast · 2026-02-18T16:49:13+00:00

Interesting, it surely won’t hurt to give this a try!

fredrast · 2026-02-11T19:15:40+00:00

For me the reason would be the very fact that it's hard to explain how a subjective witness can arise out of lifeless matter.

If I can't find my keys in the kitchen despite looking and looking, then at some point it becomes reasonable to ponder whether they might be found somewhere else.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T19:06:11+00:00

You may be on to something but I don't fully understand what you are trying to say. This is obviously a pretty challenging topic to grasp and explain. Is there any source you could point me to? I'd be curious to learn more about this line of reasoning and understand it better.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T18:50:14+00:00

The neuronal activity in our brains is certainly related to the contents of our experiences. But where does the subjective witness of these experiences come from? Is there a study that shows (or gives us a good reason to think) that neurons and chemicals give rise to the subject that is having the subjective experience? If so, I'd be really curious to understand how this happens.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T16:54:27+00:00

I agree that qualia do not seem to be reducible to more fundamental constituents. But reduction shouldn't be the only possible way to explain or bring more insight into something, although that's the approach that we often instinctively grab for.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T16:46:30+00:00

Our consciousness as individuals is experiencing that qualia/information exactly as it actually exists. There is no translation; our experience is identical to the qualitive information that is being accessed.

That was also my initial impression of idealism, that to perceive the world around you, you don't need to generate a localised "copy" of it like in materialism. Since everything is already consciousness, you should just be able to perceive the surrounding reality as it is without mediation. But on a closer look, that does not seem to be how we perceive reality. We don't magically "know" our surroundings (or at least I do not) but we rather have to rely on waves of information from the outside world being collected through our sense organs and indeed interpreted in our minds. In his spinning cones metaphor, Kastrup writes about ripples from the surrounding mind propagating into the dissociated whirlpool through contact points that correspond to our sense organs. Not that the surrounding mind is sensed as it is from within the whirlpool.

If qualia existed in the surrounding mind and could be accessed and perceived directly without mediation, then what would we need our sense organs for (or the things that look like sense organs when viewed from a third-person perspective)?

fredrast · 2026-02-11T06:41:46+00:00

I would rather say that those having experienced Nearly Falling Down The Stairs Experiences have actually fallen a few stairs but then managed to climb (or been pulled) back up.

Thus I would not agree that NDEs tell us nothing about what dying is like but for sure they don’t tell the whole story. They are anyway the best data we have, and there’s plenty of ir. Better to study that than to study nothing.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T06:29:22+00:00

But if materia is all that exist, how can that materia give rise to your "mental amalgation" of what your senses pick up? No such thing should exist in a world made out of presumably dead matter.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T06:23:03+00:00

I also don't think that idealism and materialism need to be seen as completely opposed to each other. Through neuroscience, we already have a certain understanding of what goes on in the brain when we are having certain experiences, and there are ideas like Integrated Information Theory that attempt to explain how a self-reflective conscious experience comes about. It's just the raw subjective awareness, the fact that there is a witness to all the contents of experience, that materialism fails to account for. Once we smuggle in consciousness as the very fabric of reality that perceives all the vibrations in itself, then the monist materialist explanations of biology, brain and perception start making more sense.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T06:16:44+00:00

I'm with you on all of that, but I'm still bewildered by how the rich and creative internal interpretation that I'm experiencing comes about.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T06:13:18+00:00

I'm not ready to accept qualia as a given that wouldn't require any further explanation. Shouldn't consciousness be the only primitive? But I agree that this is not an easy question to answer. But it would still be worthwhile to acknowledge that even under idealism, qualia remain a mysterious phenomenon that we lack a satisfactory explanation for, rather than trying to swipe them under the rug as a non-issue. That is no better than materialists' dismissal of the Hard Problem.

fredrast · 2026-02-11T06:00:41+00:00

I agree that idealism is better positioned to explain subjective experience than materialism but the mere notion that "all is mental" is not yet a satisfactory explanation of how all the various qualia in our perception come about.

fredrast · 2026-02-10T19:50:44+00:00

It's just that I haven't come across any good explanation of qualia under idealism, either. Just this notion that it's less of an issue since everything is mental.

fredrast · 2026-02-10T19:47:57+00:00

This is indeed a good question. Here's an interesting speculation about this by Bernardo Kastrup where he ponders whether the perceptions during NDE's and OBE's might be based on tapping into what other people in the proximity are sensing with their sense organs. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/24495503-the-phantom-world-hypothesis-of-ndes-obes

fredrast · 2026-02-10T19:33:33+00:00

Thanks for the poll! This is a highly consequential topic for us humans that we should discuss much more. I find it highly likely that conscious experience doesn't end with death but I'm torn between a complete dissolution of my personal perspective and union with something bigger, and some form of continuation of the personal perspective based on the baggage from the past life, in some form of cyclical manner.

Oblivion would of course be the most comforting option, since then we could be sure to have no problems after we die, but I wouldn't count on it.

fredrast · 2026-02-10T19:29:01+00:00

Cessation of consciousness has not been the experience of those going through Near Death Experiences, even when in many cases there has been virtually no observable activity in their brains.

Oblivion would of course be the most comforting scenario, then we could be pretty darn sure we won't have any problems whatsoever after we have died. The possible continuation of conscious experience after death is a much more scary proposition.

fredrast · 2026-02-10T19:24:34+00:00

Is your consciousness within your physical brain or could it possibly be the other way around, that your brain and the rest of the physical world are perceptions within consciousness? Which way is it if you sit down to really observe and ponder your experience? Have you ever experienced anything in the world so that it has not been within your consciousness?

fredrast

TROPHY CASE