No Hard Problem?

Central to the debate between those who believe that everything is explicable in terms of matter and energy (materialists) and those who believe that in addition to our material selves there's also an immaterial substance that's essential to our cognitive experience (substance dualists) is human consciousness. The phenomena of conscious experience are very difficult to explain if we limit ourselves to just the matter and chemistry of the human brain.

So difficult to explain are these phenomena - sensations like pain, color, sound, flavor, fragrance, etc. - that the task has been dubbed by philosopher of mind David Chalmers the hard problem of consciousness.

An article at Mind Matters examines the solution to the problem offered by philosopher David Papineau, a materialist and professor of philosophy at King’s College, London.

Papineau argues that all that's involved here are brain processes that "feel like something." For Papineau,

Conscious states are just ordinary physical states that happen to have been co-opted by reasoning systems. Consciousness doesn’t depend on some extra shining light, but only on the emergence of subjects, complex organisms that distinguish themselves from the rest of the world and use internal neural processes to guide their behaviour.

Papineau's solution, then, is simply to restate the materialist position. There really is no hard problem, he insists, there are just electrochemical goings-on in the brain. The solution to the hard problem is to affirm that there is no hard problem.

That's not a very convincing argument.

What the materialist needs to do is provide a plausible theory as to how mental phenomena like the sensation of sweet or pain are generated solely by neurochemical processes in the brain, and this no one has been able to do.

Imagine a miniature scientist inserted into a person's brain in order to discover the location of sweet when the person tastes sugar or the location of pain when the person strikes his thumb with a hammer.

The scientist will never find sweet or pain, only electrons whizzing about and molecules bonding and breaking apart, but these phenomena aren't sensations anymore than touching a sugar cube to one's tongue is the sensation of sweet. So where in all of that welter of neurochemical activity is the sweet or the pain? And what exactly are these phenomena anyway?

They're not the chemical reactions that produce them, they're something more than those. The gap between the material processes associated with these sensations and the sensations themselves is called an "explanatory gap."

The Mind Matters article quotes a commenter at Reddit Philosophy named Etherdeon who explains that,

...dualism is a proposed response to materialism’s inability thus far to account for the explanatory gap. What a lot of these materialist thinkers fail to understand is that the hard problem is hard because we cannot even begin to conceptualize a possible solution.

That’s what makes it different from most of the other unresolved issues in science. For example, we don't currently have a universally accepted unified theory of quantum gravity, but we can imagine what it would look like (tiny particles that can interact with gravity that we just haven't discovered yet). Meanwhile, we cannot even think of a materialist proposal that would explain a causal chain that starts with interacting particles and ends in qualitative experience.

Literally all it takes to solve the hard problem is a sound hypothesis, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been able to come up with one. You can’t just say “consciousness refers to brain processes that feel like something” and call it a day. We know that already, it’s a strawman argument. The real question is how are those brain processes able to feel like something?

There's more on this at the link. As the evidence in favor of dualism continues to mount and the corresponding confidence in materialism begins to wane it seems that the only reason anyone has to cling to it is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism from which materialism is often, though not necessarily, inferred.