Hard Problem of Consciousness

A Philosophical Discussion / TED Circle Event, Presented By:
> Nikki Johnson, Founder of Fibonacci Events. www.FibonacciEvents.com.
> Enlightenment Wisdom. linkedin.com/company/enlightenment-wisdom.
“THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS”
[Image Source: Freepik]

TONIGHT’S MIND-BLOWING DISCUSSION TOPIC
• “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”
o The massive difficulty encountered in
attempting to explain the relationship between:
• Subjectively felt experiences
such as perception, sentience, and self-awareness
• The hard-wiring of the brain,
which somehow enables these experiences to be felt
o Featured TED Video:
• David Chalmers
o How Do You Explain Consciousness?
o https://youtu.be/uhRhtFFhNzQ
> Fibonacci Events. www.FibonacciEvents.com. > Enlightenment Wisdom. linkedin.com/company/enlightenment-wisdom.
[Image Source: The Partially Examined Life]

BRIEF BACKGROUND ON THE PRESENTER
• Nikki Johnson
o Lifelong writer, formerly based in marketing
• Twelve years ago, I began to realize:
o “Gosh, there’s got to be more to life
than simply making a buck and spending it….”
o Traveled across 40 countries on six continents
• Toured numerous museums and cultural sites
• Plunged deep into diverse nonfiction domains
o Philosophy
o Comparative religious studies / spirituality
o Psychology
o Science
o Etc.

INTENSIVE PERIOD OF SELF-DRIVEN INQUIRY
• Earnestly have been exploring
life’s deepest questions
for more than a decade,
on a restless self-driven basis
o Who are we?
o Why are we here?
o What is the true nature of reality?
o How can we use this initially
counterintuitive information
to enhance our experience
of life on this plane?

PRESENT PROJECT
• Currently writing a book with a holistic focus
o The Internal Process of Enlightenment:
Bridging Spirituality and Science
• Traces the process that occurs within the human body
to trigger the subjective experience of enlightenment
o Physical side
• Specific parts of the brain and spinal cord involved
o Metaphysical side
• Role of chakras, nadis, etc.
• Does not attempt to “prove the case for the existence of enlightenment”
o Simply highlights strong correlations between:
• Objective anatomical information
• Subjective descriptions from spiritual / philosophic / psychological traditions
[Image Source:
KJPargeter - Freepik]

BACK TO TONIGHT’S TOPIC
• “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”
o Today, philosophers and scientists
actually face a very similar situation in trying
to dissect consciousness from end to end
• Correlations can certainly be drawn between:
o Physical / objectively observed brain features
and patterns
• The hard-wiring of the brain parts involved
o Non-physical / subjectively perceived experiences
• The felt experiences that can be described
• However, a gap inevitably seems to remain
• Preventing us from fully understanding why
these felt experiences are generated as they are
[Image Source: Good Studio –
CreativeMarket.com]
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ILLUSTRATIVE ANALOGY
• Personally, this situation reminds me of The Creation of Adam
o The famous fresco painting by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling
• These objective / subjective aspects closely mirror each another …
and yet never quite touch….
Think of
God here as a
representation of
CONSCIOUSNESS
(i.e., Subjectively
Perceived
Experiences)
Think of
Adam here as a
representation of
THE BRAIN
(i.e., Objectively
Observed
Features of the
Human Body)

EXPLANATORY GAP
• American philosopher Joseph Levine generated a fitting name
to describe this issue
o In his now-classic paper, written in 1983, he termed it “the explanatory gap”
THE BRAIN
(i.e., Objectively
Observed
Features
of the
Human Body)
CONSCIOUSNESS
(i.e., Subjectively
Perceived
Experiences)
THE EXPLANATORY GAP

“THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS”
• David Chalmers was the first to use
this phrase to describe the problem in 1995
o He also perhaps explains
the crux of the issue best,
as we heard in the TED Talk
recommended for tonight:
• SCIENCE, by its nature, is OBJECTIVE.
• CONSCIOUSNESS, by its nature, is SUBJECTIVE.
o Thus, some people say that a
SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
is simply IMPOSSIBLE.
[Image Source: ScottBarryKaufman.com]
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“THE EASY PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS”
• There are no truly easy problems with consciousness,
but – on a relative scale – some are simpler than others
o “THE EASY PROBLEMS”
• Finding “neural correlates of consciousness”
• Identifying specific systems in the brain with activity that
correlates directly with states of conscious experience
• Explaining the ability to apply information to thinking
and behavior, integrate perceptions, etc.
o “THE HARD PROBLEM”
o Figuring out why consciousness feels the way it does
o Why bother with the elaborate production of an inner movie?
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MUCH OLDER ROOTS
• While David Chalmers didn’t coin
“the hard problem of consciousness”
as an official phrase until the mid-1990s,
the issue itself is much older.
o Philosophers and scientists have actually
been wrestling with this basic conundrum
for centuries – under a different name:
• THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
o Specifically, the Mind-Body Problem focused upon:
• The extent to which mind and body can be
considered separate or directly connected
[Image Source: Robert Fludd, 1619, Wikimedia]

RECOMMENDED READING
• One book that I highly recommend
as a source for historical background
on the Mind-Body Problem is:
o Introducing Consciousness: A Graphic Guide
• Authored by David Papineau,
and illustrated by Howard Selina
o amazon.com/dp/B00URQVM4U/
o One caveat:
• It does not cover the now-prevailing view –
Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
o This approach was not proposed
until after its publication date

DUALISM
• The mental and material are
two distinct yet interacting realms
o Pre-20th century philosophers
and scientists presumed that reality
included independent conscious minds,
separate from any material existence
• Rene Descartes – the progenitor of
modern philosophy – most famously
popularized this view
o Believed that conscious minds exist
on a separate, non-physical level
o Also identified the pineal gland as the “principal seat of the soul,”
the place where mind and matter interact, and the source of all of our thoughts
[Image Source: iterphilosophicum.wordpress.com]

MORE DUALISM
• Two main types of dualism
o Substance dualism
• Rene Descartes subscribed to this view,
considering mind and matter as
two separate substances that never mix,
though they do interact –
like oil and water
o Property dualism
• Modern dualists like Chalmers tend not
to see conscious minds as separate stuff –
split off entirely from the material body –
but view it as all part of a unified substance
with two distinct types of properties
[Image Source: schaabling.wordpress.com]
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SUBSTANCE
DUALISM
ANALOGY
PROPERTY
DUALISM
ANALOGY

IDEALISM
• Reality essentially consists only of minds,
and the physical world is an illusion –
nothing more than mental creations
o As a prominent voice for skeptics of
Descartes’ dualism:
• George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne,
proposed in 1710 that all experiences are
just sensations and ideas – with no physical
objects “out there” prompting perceptions
o According to Berkeley, Georg Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill,
Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, and others,
there is no material world – only the realm of mental events
[Image Source: mynzahosiris.wordpress.com]

MATERIALISM
• Physical matter is the only form of reality,
and all things, processes, and phenomena
– including consciousness and mental states –
result from material interactions alone
o Two main forms:
• Eliminative materialism
• Subjective experiences do not exist,
and consciousness can be entirely explained
through sufficient understanding of neuroscience
• Reductive materialism
• While subjective experiences do exist, they are
indistinguishable from physical brain processes
[Image Source: myvmc.com]
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• Various types have emerged from the two main branches
o The three most notable varieties:
• Methodological behaviorism
o Favored by psychologists, such as John B. Watson
and B.F. Skinner – insisting that psychological theories
should be based on observable stimuli and behavior
• Logical behaviorism
o Primarily a movement among philosophers, such as
Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein – which made
stronger arguments than methodological behaviorism
• Functionalism
o Defining mental states by their functional role – rather
than their makeup – and allowing them to be internal
MORE MATERIALISM
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MYSTERIANISM
• Consciousness is just a complete mystery
from a human perspective
o Understanding of phenomenal consciousness
is quite simply beyond the grasp of
human comprehension
• Gottfried Leibniz, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Huxley,
Carl Jung, Roger Penrose, Thomas Nagel,
Owen Flanagan, Colin McGinn, and others
notably asserted this view
o May be a case similar to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems
• Gödel found there are some mathematical statements that are true, but
nevertheless cannot be proved – could the same story apply to consciousness?
[Image Source: philosophytalk.org]

INDEFINABILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
• Bottom line here: No objective, scientific definition
seems able to capture the full essence of consciousness
o Various definitions have been proposed, but none clinch its entirety
• “The state of being aware and
responsive to one’s surroundings.”
– Oxford Living Dictionary
• “Your subjective experience of
the mind and the world, which is one of
the fundamental facts of human existence.”
– David Chalmers
• “What goes away in the evening
when you go to sleep, and comes back
the next morning when you wake up.” – Giulio Tononi
[Image Source: neurotracker.net/]

QUALIA
• A key concept that is used to
describe consciousness is “qualia”
o Subjective or qualitative properties of experiences
• These are the raw “felt” qualities, such as:
• Sensations
• Emotions
• Thoughts
• Etc.
o Why are they so critical?
o All content of consciousness
is made up of qualia.
[Image Source: desmotivaciones.es][Image Source: vox.com]

THOMAS NAGEL: WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
• In 1974, American philosopher Thomas Nagel posed a
question often cited in conceptualizing consciousness
o What is it like to be a bat?
• Bats rely on heavily on echo-location –
emitted bursts of high-pitch sound –
to determine the location of physical objects
o Nagel’s question:
What is it like for bats to sense by echo location?
• We have no way of knowing how a bat’s brain
presents this sensory information to it internally
o As sounds? As shapes? As some sort of “sonic texture”?
We have no way of knowing what it is like to be a bat.
[Image Source: slideshare.net/abbenay]
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INTEGRATED INFORMATION THEORY (IIT)
• Currently prevailing theory to explain the nature
of consciousness and its association with certain
systems, proposed by Giulio Tononi in 2014
o Starts by accepting the existence of consciousness
as certain, based upon our own direct experience of it
o Identifies the essential properties of consciousness
o Infers the properties of physical systems that account
for these essential properties of consciousness
o Determines – for any given system – whether it has
consciousness and to what degree, based on complexity
o Makes testable predictions
o Permits inferences and extrapolations
[Image Source: semanticscholar.org]

AXIOMS OF INTEGRATED INFORMATION THEORY
• The essential properties of consciousness,
as identified by Integrated Information Theory
o INTRINSIC EXISTENCE
• Consciousness exists; each experience is actual / real
o COMPOSITION
• Consciousness is structured; made of multiple phenomenological distinctions
o INFORMATION
• Consciousness is specific; each experience is differentiated
o INTEGRATION
• Consciousness is unified; each experience is irreducible
o EXCLUSION
• Consciousness is definite; each experience has given distinctions, no less / more
[Image Source: Gerd Altmann - Pixabay]

THOUGHT EXERCISE
• In terms of relative complexity and level of consciousness,
how would you rate insects such as ants or bees?
o Consider that these insects have been classified as “superorganisms”!
• Function with a type of interaction that resembles behavior of single organism
• Tapped into a form of collective consciousness, which directs each ant / bee
to serve the colony’s needs, instead of merely individual’s own self-interest
o For more information, see the following study and book, respectively:
• Energetic basis of colonial living in social insects.
• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies.
• Returning back to the original question:
Does this alter your initial answer?
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GAIA HYPOTHESIS
• The theory that living and
non-living parts of the Earth
form a complex system,
which can be thought of
as a living organism
o Proposed by chemist James Lovelock
and microbiologist Lynn Margulis
during the 1960s
• Based on work for NASA,
concerned with detecting life on Mars
[Image Source: nacla.org]

CELLS IN YOUR OWN BODY
• Consider the fact that you have
a similar structure to your own body –
alive and active right now!
o The body with which you associate
your personal identity is composed of
more than 30 trillion individual cells!
• Each of these cells is a living entity
o All contain the instruction set of
the whole through DNA
• Cluster together to form organs, etc.
• Perform particular collective functions
for the benefit of the entire superorganism
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PANPSYCHISM
• The doctrine or belief that
everything material – regardless of size –
has an element of individual consciousness
o Two possible forms:
• PANEXPERIENTIALISM:
• The view that conscious experience
is fundamental and ubiquitous
• PANCOGNITIVISM:
• The view that thought
is fundamental and ubiquitous
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
• How do we know whether or not an Artificial Intelligence
system is conscious?
o Study co-authored by Hakwan Lau – associate professor of
Cognitive Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at UCLA –
has identified three levels of consciousness for AI systems
• edgy.app/3-levels-of-consciousness-explained-and-what-they-mean-for-ai
o Three levels:
• C0: Autopilot
• C1: Trains of Thought and Pools of Info
• C2: Metacognition
[Image Source: Robert Fludd, 1619, Wikimedia]

“CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT”
• A classic thought experiment, first published in
a 1980 paper by American philosopher John Searle
o Designed to show that a digital computer
executing a program cannot be shown to have
a “mind,” “understanding,” or “consciousness”
• No matter how convincingly it may perform human-like behavior
o Scenario:
• Searle sits alone in a room, responding to Chinese characters
slipped to him under the door
• Following program for manipulating symbols,
just as a computer does
• Has no real understanding of Chinese – only following commands
[Image Sources: deepideas.net]

TIME FOR DISCUSSION!
• Guidelines for our round-table discussion
o All opinions, ideas, and perspectives are valid
• As David Chalmers mentioned in the TED Talk video,
it will take some radical shifts in thinking
to make further progress in this field
• There are no ”crazy ideas” in this open dialogue
o Let’s keep the discussion moving swiftly
• Be courteous to others who also wish to speak
• If we all keep our responses shorter,
we’ll be able to circle back to everyone
more quickly
[Image Source: jing.fm]
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QUESTION #1:
• What does the word “consciousness” mean to you?
o How would you define it?
• How does consciousness
relate to:
• Perception?
• Sentience?
• Self-awareness?
• Are there distinct nuances
to each of these terms?
[Image Source: theconversation.com]

QUESTION #2:
• Are there different levels or degrees of consciousness?
o For example:
• How does animal consciousness
differ from that of humans?
• Are there various levels
or degrees of consciousness
among humans?
o What defines
these levels or degrees
from your perspective?
[Image Source: i.ytimg.com/vi/I5KHCRnSKf0/hqdefault.jpg]

QUESTION #3:
• What are your thoughts on “panpsychism,”
as frequently referenced in this TED Talk?
o Is everything conscious,
including elementary
particles?
o How could this view
potentially affect
our conception
of what it means
to be a “living thing”?
[Image Source: quantumawareness.net]

QUESTION #4:
• What are your thoughts about group consciousness,
as explained toward the end of the video?
o Does our group – i.e., the attendees of tonight’s event
– have a distinct consciousness?
o Does the city of New York have its own consciousness –
and, if so, how are the boundaries defined?
o How does the Hard Problem of Consciousness
relate to the Jungian concept of
the “collective unconscious” –
i.e., structures of the unconscious mind
shared among beings of the same species?
[Image Source: cocreatorsworld.com]

QUESTION #5:
• Why is it so difficult to define
the precise relationship
between mind and matter?
o What makes it so challenging
to explain how consciousness
is produced?
[Image Source: express.co.uk]

QUESTION #6:
• Would you consider yourself
to be a materialist? Dualist?
Idealist? Mysterian?
o How do these branches of
philosophy relate to the
Hard Problem of Consciousness?
o How does your preferred ideology
influence your view of the
relationship between
consciousness and the brain?
[Image Source: crossexamined.org]

QUESTION #7:
• How much of the
ultimate reality
are we able to
perceive through
sensory signals
interpreted by
our brain?
o How does this
process affect
our ability to know
what truly exists?
[Image Source: bbc.com]

QUESTION #8:
• How does the Hard Problem
of Consciousness relate to
the Cartesian Theater and
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?
o How do these models
facilitate our understanding
of the relationship between
the brain and consciousness?
[Image Source: wikipedia.org]

QUESTION #9:
• What are your thoughts about
consciousness as it relates to
Artificial Intelligence?
o What determines whether
an AI system is conscious or not?
o What are the moral and ethical
considerations that come into play,
as our world advances further in
developing these types of tools?
[Image Source: hurriyetdailynews.com]
[Image Source: forbes.com]

QUESTION #10:
• Are there any other concepts
touched upon in the TED Talk
that struck you as significant
or intriguing that have not
been discussed yet?
o Share any other aspects of the
video – or the subject of the
Hard Problem of Consciousness
in general – that you find
particularly interesting.

THANKS FOR ATTENDING TONIGHT’S EVENT!
• Thanks so much for participating!
o Hope you enjoyed tonight’s event!
• See you again soon!
o Stay in touch!
o Nikki Johnson
• LinkedIn:
o linkedin.com/in/nikki-johnson-free-thinker
• Preview of the Book Introduction:
o linkedin.com/pulse/internal-process-enlightenment-
bridging-spirituality-science-johnson/
[Image Source: KJPargeter - Freepik]

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