I don’t think there is any hard problem of consciousness
I think Chalmer’s argument is faulty, and I think it presupposes the existence of an ethereal consciousness, or a soul. I think most people are doing that too, even if that’s not explicitly what they say, by trying to investigate something that’s empirically emergent from physical structures.
I think a big problem with discussions around consciousness is that we don’t actually have a shared definition of consciousness, and I think it’s because broadly, we’re trying to give shape to something that’s not there.
In my opinion, consciousness is analogous to experience, and I don’t need to know what someone else‘a qualia are like, I just accept that they have them because they are able to experience.
My opinion is that life just happens because it randomly can, irrespective of any definitions - there is no soul, there is no intangible property that continues after detachment from the physical form. We are protein, , and admittedly, very evolved, protein, blobs, but ultimately blobs experiencing the world around them. I don’t think there’s anything terribly fancy happening there either, when the binary is life or death, the bias of those who can explain their experience, i.e., the living, is weighted a little too heavily. The dead went through exactly the same evolutionary processes, but didn’t happen to have a genetic advantage that allowed them to continue to procreate. And I don’t think there is any intention or meaning there-you either procreate or you don’t.
What I basically think is going on, without delving into neuroscience or philosophy, is that we experience things because it helps us to survive danger in our environment. We experience things because it allows us to learn, to assimilate information, and in a way to become a store of embodied knowledge that allows us to avoid danger in our environment.
There is no ’me’ - What I think of as me is simply a narrativization of that embodied knowledge. The brain reflects, and observes, so it is decidedly unspecial that it has reflected on and observed its own internal processes as well, and does not imply the existence of a central ‘eye’. It’s all the same system, but the system is just self-reflecting and repeating the story back to itself endlessly.
This is a useful story as a successful social construct, and necessarily emerges from the understanding that others are individuals, and therefore we are too, which allows us to define ‘ourselves’ in opposition and form community.
I think everybody is passionate about it, because the idea that we’re just meat blobs, repeating stories to ourselves, originating out of random chance, feels extremely devaluing.
Curious to hear your thoughts and learn from you all. I am learning that my philosophy of consciousness is probably or materialism.