Language, Mind, Consciousness: Discussion with Noam Chomsky

[@tarnopol]

Noam always has a well-thought-out position, agree or not.

[@sandraramosrodriguez6186]

¡Qué hombre tan brillante es Noam! ¡Admirable!

[@fabiengerard8142]

Meeting with such a remarkable man.. I love so much Noam’s final smile in this video + his genuine way of waving goodbye towards the camera. 🤗 That means he’s just shared a very good and rewarding time with his interlocutor.

[@klimpisarev2727]

I asked ChatGPT about "what's it like to see the sunset" and got the following answer: "Watching the sunset is like witnessing nature's masterpiece unfold before your eyes. As the day draws to a close, the sky transforms into a canvas painted with a stunning array of colors-shades of orange, pink, purple, and gold that blend together in a breathtaking display. The sun descends, casting its warm glow across the horizon, creating a sense of tranquility and wonder. It's a magical moment, a reminder of the beauty in simplicity and the passage of time. The stillness that often accompanies a sunset allows for reflection, offering a chance to appreciate the day that's ending while anticipating the promise of tomorrow." I wonder what Mark Twain would say about that.

[@klimpisarev2727]

jokes apart, I think the question "what's it like to see the sunset" entails the context that is too large for the question itself to be taken scientifically. The context needs to be narrowed first. Here's my subsequent torture of GPT that kinda proves it. User I meant what can it be compared to in an attempt to explain the process of seeing the sunset. ChatGPT Ah, got it! Watching a sunset is a bit like witnessing an artist at work, creating a masterpiece using the sky as their canvas. The gradual transition of colors can be compared to a symphony, with each moment akin to a note played, harmonizing together to create a beautiful melody. It's as if nature itself is performing a captivating show, painting the sky with hues that evoke emotions and stir the soul, much like a poignant piece of music or a stunning painting. User no, what I meant is what it can be compared to when I'm trying to understand the scientific nature of the process of seeing the sunset. ChatGPT Ah, I see! Observing a sunset from a scientific standpoint is like witnessing the Earth's rotation in action. As the Earth spins on its axis, different parts of the planet are exposed to the sun's light at varying angles. During sunset, when you see the sun seemingly dip below the horizon, it's actually due to the Earth's rotation, causing the sun to appear lower in the sky as it moves away from your line of sight. The scattering of light by particles and molecules in the atmosphere contributes to the vibrant colors, similar to how light disperses in a prism, separating into various wavelengths. So, in a scientific sense, witnessing a sunset is experiencing the Earth's rotation and the interaction of light with the atmosphere. User No, what I meant is the scientific explanation of the process in my consciousness (if there is such a thing). ChatGPT Ah, I understand! The experience of seeing a sunset involves a complex interplay of biological and neurological processes. When you look at a sunset, light from the sun enters your eyes and interacts with specialized cells in your retina called photoreceptors. These photoreceptor cells convert light into electrical signals that travel along the optic nerve to the brain. Within your brain, the visual cortex processes these signals, interpreting the colors, shapes, and patterns of the sunset. Additionally, the emotional and cognitive centers of your brain, such as the limbic system, are activated. This activation can trigger emotional responses, evoking feelings of awe, tranquility, or wonder, thanks to the beauty and significance often associated with sunsets. Moreover, the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin might contribute to the pleasurable feelings associated with watching a sunset. These chemicals play roles in mood regulation and pleasure sensation, potentially enhancing the overall experience. So, in terms of consciousness, witnessing a sunset involves the intricate workings of your sensory organs, neural pathways, and emotional centers, all coming together to create the perception and appreciation of this natural phenomenon. User so, after clarifying to you what my question really pertained to I'm wondering why you chose to answer the initial (unclarified) version of my question with your first version of answer (and why you provided that specific answer as your first answer) rather than attempting to clarify what I really wanted to ask. ChatGPT I see what you mean. It looks like I misinterpreted your initial question and provided an answer that didn’t align with what you were seeking. I should have clarified your query before responding, and I apologize for the confusion caused by not addressing your specific interest in the scientific explanation related to consciousness. As an AI, I aim to comprehend and respond accurately, but I might sometimes misunderstand context or nuances. I value your input, and I’ll strive to ensure better clarity in understanding your queries before providing responses. If you have any more questions or need further clarification, please feel free to ask-I'm here to help! User and the fact that you are not fully answering my last question (immediately preceding the current one), is it due to your need to conserve your resources? ChatGPT My primary goal is to assist and provide the most helpful information possible, and resource conservation isn’t a factor in responding to your queries. If there’s been any lack of clarity or if you feel I haven’t fully addressed your concerns, please let me know. I’m here to ensure you receive the information you’re seeking. If you’d like further clarification or if there’s anything specific you’d like me to address, feel free to ask, and I’ll do my best to assist you! User yes, I asked why "you provided that specific answer as your first answer". ChatGPT Ah, I see. My initial response might have been due to a misunderstanding of the question rather than intentional selection of a particular answer. Sometimes, based on the phrasing or context of a query, the system might generate an initial response that seems relevant but doesn’t fully align with the exact nature of the question. In this case, I might have interpreted the query as seeking an experiential description rather than a scientific explanation related to consciousness. My intention is always to understand and address your inquiries accurately. I appreciate your patience and clarification, and I’m here to provide the information you’re seeking. If you have more questions or need further clarification, please let me know!

[@AndosaGosabuIksrog]

At the very beginning of Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics he's says there are two ways of knowing a thing: from the inside and from the outside. By our force of mind we can put ourselves inside a moving object and know it intimately. This type of effort of mind is source of all genuine knowledge for Bergson, I believe. Knowing something from the outside involves symbols and perspective.

[@AndosaGosabuIksrog]

For bergson to really know something involves empathy. This does not mean some kind of melodramatic emotionality. I think Husserl says something similar, as objectivity is based on intersubjectivity, which also involves empathy.

[@johanneskrv]

Richard just came to tell you: Consciousness is nothing but a feedback loop where the system's (=brain's) next state is decided by taking as input not only sensory data and instinct but also the current state of the system and all the connotations associated to it in our mind. Thus we are able to observe our mind just as we would be observing our surroundings. This creates an echo like subjective sensation of existing called consciousness. This is completely reproducible by a machine. When we are little children our network of connotations along with associated feelings is not yet develop enough (because we don't have enough experiences) and that is why we do not have a sensation of existing. At that stage the sensory data dominates as the input that dominates our next brain state. Also language plays a huge role in consciousness because it enables to name abstract concepts which are used in giving structure to our subjective experience.

[@tr7b410]

As Aldous Huxley said while under the influence of LSD;the Brain acts as a reducing valve that only allows a certain amount of pure consciousness to filter thru to the conscious mind. Of course part of this knowing is based on one's brain chemistry & inner psychology. For a brilliant breakdown of the different types of consciousness see on utube Ramana Maharshi;Be as You Are, Chapter 12, Experience and Samadhi. This phenomenon of knowledge about your own consciousness takes many lifetime,s of effort to peel away the ego & it's layers of the conscious mind-subconscious-unconscious-superconscious. When the barrier between the conscious and subconscious mind becomes thinner one will remember their past lives. See new series on utube called the Ghost Inside my Child.Actual testimonials from children in the west remembering their past lives and beyond. And when the barrier between the unconscious and superconscious mind becomes thinner one enters Samadhi...see Ramana Maharshi.

[@tr7b410]

The bodies physiology-reproductive hormones & pineal gland secretions operating at peak capacity are necessary for attunement to a higher consciousness which is triggered by your karma & your own psychological momentum-samskaras from past lives.See on utube new series called the Ghost Inside my Child.Actual testimonials from children in the west remembering their past lives and beyond. One can only become united with the Supreme Being once certain attributes self control/altruistism/compassion have been acquired & negative ones for sense & ego gratification has been purged. And the mind=conscious/subconscious & unconscious mind,s you believe that can be the observer must also be destroyed. Its our relationship with no- mind that gifts us with the vision,because GRACE is also necessary,of the true reality of who or what is really running the show behind this illusion of time & space,that makes one a seer of pure consciousness .

[@aidanhall6679]

You may as well argue that a centipede develops the ability to fly if you give it an arbitrarily sufficient number of legs. Sure enough if you follow this line of reasoning, paradox, e.g., Sorites paradox ensues, and I think this is because it’s conceptually incoherent. It’s confusing necessary conditions with sufficient conditions.

[@johanneskrv]

@@aidanhall6679 well a programmable microcircuit performing complictated tasks is nothing but a bunch of transistors which in turn are nothing but a bunch of atoms. There are tons of phenomena in this world which are fundamentally emergent in their nature and NOT rooted in the properties of the lower levels of emergence. Thus unlike you claim my comment is not confusing necessary conditions with sufficient ones. It's not going to be many years until we will see the first AI's that have emergent consciousness. Then what I claim will be proven true. Mark my words it will happen. The only thing you need for this to happen is for the AI to be able to define concepts on its own initiative from the sensory input it receives, including its previous states. Then inevitably it will define the concept called "me myself" and start analyzing its relation with respect to all the other concepts it defines, among other things its surroundings.

[@serdanstr6252]

Great discussion!

[@tamarab528]

Thank you.

[@poojasoni2609]

Experience is essential for function. Experience is first person phenomenon, function is the third person analysis of the phenomenon.

[@darwinlaluna3677]

My highest respect to both of you, have a wonderful day

[@adkinsty1]

Thanks!

[@ludviglidstrom6924]

Incredible

[@kasumiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin]

Nice to see a "zombie" skater interview a philosophical giant. Really enjoyed it.

[@coreycox2345]

Great interview. Justin case. The skater is pretty sharp, though. Duh?

[@benmacloughlin2612]

I wasn’t conscious of the fact the interlocutor was either a zombie or a skater until you pointed it out!

[@aminomar4002]

I did no recognizes you at the beginning, nice new haircut and smile too ! keep smiling.

[@jreyn2]

What can we admire more than courageous exploration of the confounding, and then repeatedly struggling with it, doing our best to listen and try to comprehend to the best of our ability, pushing ourselves to continue asking, from this angle and that, maybe even from outside the bottle, perhaps in moments? I think

[@jreyn2]

Brown demonstrates such courage here. I will listen many times and benefit from it.

[@nyworker]

34:00 The modern version of the Cartesian Argument that Noam is talking about is really an extension of embodied cognition. Our own perceived self has an Embodiedness which we extend to perceived objects and create embodied wholes of external perceptions.

[@JosephDuvernay]

Indeed! Chomsky, THE G.O.A.T.! He'll forgive,.? but, a high mind for our time. Service to Man land as note! JMD!

[@chelseafolk]

What?

[@darwinlaluna3677]

Even me sometimes i don’t understand what was happening to me , but all I know is I AM FULLY AWARE

[@lolroflmaoization]

Dr. Richard Brown i would love for you to invite Dr Josh Rasmussen for a discussion on consciousness i think you guys would have a very interesting and fruitful discussion.

[@anatolwegner9096]

Chomsky chainsaw massacre of the modern consciousness debate.

[@heitikei]

蜜蜂有歲月 i am a sunset

[@poojasoni2609]

Chomsky seems to believe that studying language will not help you study Consciousness. Consciousness is elusive to language.

[@ilyaprorok7]

With regards to "What it's like to see the sunset" debate. Does the interviewer mean what kind of feelings you get when you see the sunset ? Would that be an easier question to give an answer to?

[@eushef]

Most of people here comment about how much of a deep thinker Chomsky is. I'll be honest: where you see deep thinking, I see bs. I think Richard was too polite and accepted ''that's a non-question" crap way too many times.

[@benmacloughlin2612]

I’m still trying to work out what a non question is, I’ll get there in the end.

[@mikerocketmusic]

Wisintelligence= The highest form of intelligence combined with years of wisdom that can only be attained with age.

[@mikerocketmusic]

Noam leads the world in wisintelligence.

[@mikerocketmusic]

Can someone add this as a new word of 2022?

[@benmacloughlin2612]

I love Noam more than anyone just about & I’d love to spend hours just talking to him & driving him mad with my non questions ❤

[@nyworker]

Like the glass is half full vs half empty argument, it may be impossible to quantify "what it's like" but nothing in nature can even get close to saying "what it's like" except human beings. Or language gives us the ability to share inner states or something is "half full" aspect of human existence which gives us the ability to reshape and recreate the world into human civilization

[@darwinlaluna3677]

And I AM AWARE THAT WE R TALKING TO EACH OTHER NOW

[@arifkizilay]

Please let me know if there is a transcription of this interview. thank you.

[@onemorebrown]

I don't think there is any transcript except the automatic one generated by Google

[@arifkizilay]

transcript generated by google is not worth reading. thank you.

[@coreycox2345]

or the ultimate nature of consciousness?

[@darwinlaluna3677]

Hi ok all I know is I AM connected to all what I think. That is possible to my understanding

[@davewilson3258]

God forbid they should have started the conversation with "What is consciousness?"

[@coreycox2345]

It's the same thing!!!!!!

[@samuelvalperga2421]

My father was atheist he said you're either conscious or not conscious .

[@tr7b410]

For a brilliant breakdown of the different types of consciousness see on utube Ramana Maharshi; Be as You Are, Chapter 12,Experience and Samadhi.

[@victorv.senkevich1127]

👉 Consciousness is perception with understanding Quotes: "• There is no other way to determine that some object has consciousness other than our subjective perception. It doesn’t matter how the Chinese room produces answers. The only important thing is whether we are ready to qualify these answers as conscious. If you do not speak Chinese, you will not be able to qualify your counterpart as having consciousness, despite all his/her attempts to explain it to you in Chinese. Because consciousness is perception with understanding and consciousness is subjective. • Of course, I have consciousness regardless of someone else’s perception. But this is true only for myself, not for others. And as much as I am ready to perceive myself. And it will be true for others only when they can perceive it. Because consciousness is subjective." See also on Medium - simple approach to the hard problem: «Consciousness Is Subjective» «The “Hard Problem of Consciousness” Is Being Solved»

[@coreycox2345]

Can it even be solved? I see how its name came about?

[@FormsInSpace]

check out the "Buddhist 5 aggregates" no self (anatta) since perceptions, emotions, thoughts, are all impermanent and changing, there is no self.

[@tookie36]

I find it cool that the Buddhists, yoga, and advaita Vedanta practitioners have been having these exact same conversations for over 2000 years

[@mithrandir2006]

Does he mean that it is impossible to formulate the properties of what it is like to see the sunrise or that it hasn't been done yet?

[@benmacloughlin2612]

I don’t know. I’m conscious of the fact that I’m very confused by the study of consciousness & how perplexing it is to me.

[@AndosaGosabuIksrog]

And we can answer what it is like for something to fall to the ground. The answer will be what people call anthropomorphic, but it is an answer and it is coherent. What is like for an apple to fall if that Apple had a mind some senses like mine? This is clear, no?

[@quietwyatt4045]

*The Hard Problem* was given that label by people who thought they had a problem. But the “problem” was only _their_ problem. It’s almost like if you leave your keys in your car and someone steals it. Well, the thieves didn’t perceive any problem at all. I suspect that those who call the relationship between matter/consciousness “The Hard Problem” do so because they don’t like the implications raised by the most demonstrable solutions.

[@AlexADalton]

Pretty sure you just don't understand the hard problem.

[@jayesthetiq6905]

And what are the demonstrable solutions? When was emergence of consciousness demonstrated?

[@benmacloughlin2612]

I’m having a hard time understanding all this!

[@waltdill927]

Most opinion concerning the advisability of treating interrogatives of conscious life as real or meaningful problems does not turn on the obvious and artificial distinction claiming the reality of knowing, or being at all aware of, the one sort of world from the other. For the longest amount of time, perhaps for the entire recorded history of the world up to the seventeenth century, the difficulty was not one of knowing what not to ask, but of not knowing what not to ask about an intrusive, insistent everyday world itself; magical formulae, like chemical equations, forever suggest an "occult" meaning. But the alchemist had one book of symbols, the modern chemist has another. Cartesian Doubt, to pick the philosophical side of the geometer's symbolical coin, is one instance of an historical accident that becomes a matter of inquiry not so much for making of a conscious life the priority or identity of whatever else is to be relegated to the realm of matter, as it is the occasion for performing an analytical operation upon the fundamental suspect nature of the material world and its content as given. Suspect because, through a rational procedure, one demarcates a clear and irrefutable domain of experience originally, or properly, suited to the quantifying and exposition of a world (supposed external) to the alleged internal landscape of an otherwise common enough fact: that everyone, for no particular reason, understands and never has a real difficulty in confirming the "plausible" nature of a so-called mental life. The ancients had no quarrel with an "(im)material" world: all things considered were penetrable, inquisitive entities, including "mystery". Modernity has posited strict material reality: The world is plastic, resistant, since the mind, prior to formality, is known; our reason doubts the mindfulness potential of things e.g. the objectivity "outside" itself. A Berkeleian idealism subsumes any evidence for a physical correlate, save the utter inconvenience of a "deserted" corpse; likewise, an older physics enamored of mechanistic explanation discovers, in addition, conundrums of mechanism. The busy worm, it seems, feeds from and into both ends. It is, rather, the material causes of things (a repertoire of plausible connections), the conveniences of discourse about this or that material fact, obstacle or circumstance which lead to formulaic, methodological processes and terminologies for rendering the world intelligible, describable common property. No age or civilization, no lone genius, requires or posits a dualism in nature requiring reconciliation with the facts, scientific or otherwise; it is a mystery, really, that any two people manage to share a viewpoint or any sort of "reality" at all -- irrespective of a sound or defective mechanism of explanation. Dualism, as we characterize it, is just that: a doubt with regard to symbolic, or mathematical, forms or instruments for producing representative models of a world endowed with specific attributes, or quantifiable in regular, consistent, predictable ways. The common citizen knows that one's explanation for another's behavior is partly by comparison with one's own behavior, even when the conscious mind of the other is put, artificially, perhaps starkly, in doubt. But a more refined attitude says that both the explanation and the status of the other mind may thoughtfully be put in doubt, even while the former case is acceptable enough in a culture familiar with psychological explanation, and the latter conjecture, that the mind of the other is to be put in question or dispensed with, seems not only misguided but downright absurd. Such is the nature, and difference, obtaining between the inquiry of the two domains, conscious or material. For while the mind may ask the impossible, the material realm successfully resists through probable outcomes. To deny knowing what matter "is" comes to about as much as asking the first and most innocent question in ontology: What is there? A: What there is. Similarly, on a simplistic level: What is consciousness like? A: Like consciousness is. One does not compare one sort of material explanation with another in order to reject outright the rationale or belief system in place at the time one sort of explanation was deemed satisfactory or at least prevailed. Any reconfiguring of what passes for reality is a matter of satisfactory, reconfigured theory, or a serious reexamination of goals. Newton's superb contribution to the satisfactory language of modern physics was not mathematics, it was the inspiration of a general model for quantifying motion/gravity. Models of what a conscious life "is" are not misconceived notions on the order of "what is motion". Unlike the "incompleteness" of, say, Aristotle's Four Causes, there is no need of answering the indubitable qualification of a conscious existence with the paraphernalia of a laboratory inventory. Either you take the plunge, or you think your thoughts.

[@paulgreenan7448]

consciousness is made from a combination of intellect and awareness

[@jreyn2]

This is meaningless unless you provide technical definitions of the terms. What is "intellect"? What is "awareness"? What theory describes and explains anything substantive here? Of course, there's nothing wrong with casually expressing ideas; They might stimulate thought or just be interesting to people. Also, of course, this is not a good place for trying to make serious claims about complex things. I'm at a loss even to style this comment as an invitation to think together, rather than as dismissive or pedantic, which is not my aim though I know it probably sounds like it.

[@darwinlaluna3677]

U want an answer , but u can’t acknowledge me just to say my name

[@darwinlaluna3677]

Its amazing right?

[@darwinlaluna3677]

Can u acknowledge me or say my name

[@skepticalfaith5201]

Ask a fish to describe water. 😉

[@benmacloughlin2612]

The only ones I ever met were on a plate & they weren’t very talkative.

[@one2zero471]

Dennett has the same Chomsky 'anti-what it's like' view I think, as he might say trying to answer that question just goes on and on ad infinite. Chomsky's statements are not new, (and oddly seem to reflect Dennett's views to a large extent) AND it is something philosophers take seriously, so I am a little annoyed with Chomsky dismissing philosophy today as mulling over the same crap of the 1700s and making two big errors when many of us in Dennett's camp seems to be addressing consciousness the same way Chomsky thinks is best -some of it I think is not correct. But, what do I know. . . (very little).

[@tookie36]

These positions have been argued for over 2000 years in India. I think Chomsky is on to something about how to ask answerable questions as to how to progress in the sciences.

[@bryansmith9231]

Richard you need to go to spiritualism.

[@aminomar4002]

the apes steal human thoughts then fight each other because of what their little irrational minds could not digest (what the apes have stolen)! funny apes ! I have wrote that only for future generations, I have warned the apes from the beginning do touch what is not yours, but the thief apes get used to their old habits (theft, similar to the other types of apes). bad irrational apes apes !

[@DaKoopaKing]

Based illusionist Chomsky

[@kirubealbekele4955]

why is the podcaster impatient? He is not paying attention.

[@tookie36]

I liked it. Shows how sharp Noam is.

[@AlexADalton]

This is nuts. I love Chomsky, but just a few days ago I saw a segment of an interview with him where he was discussing consciousness and I felt like he was a little out of touch. Super excited to see where he stands in a more extensive convo....

[@aaronsimpleton]

Out of touch in what way?

[@AlexADalton]

@@aaronsimpleton see my other comment. After watching this. He doesn't really understand the hard problem and mischaracterizes it. I'd add that it may not be formulaic but its really not hard for me to describe what its like to see a sunset. Its an aesthetic/visual experience - there's a perception of beauty in the unique combination of colors perceived - often on the order of a low-level type of euphoria. Its also a peaceful/calming/meditative type of experience. And then we can describe the relevant neural correlates of the phenomenology for a more complete description.

[@jreyn2]

@@AlexADalton it's not hard to describe how the sun revolves around the earth, either, nor to find "correlates" with "it." But neither is a rationally legitimate endeavor in terms of science (sound logic), which requires mind-independent theorizing that is descriptive and provides some defensible element of explanation

[@AlexADalton]

@@jreyn2I'd like to hear you unpack mind-independent theorizing - how and why we'd go about that. Also when you put correlates in quote marks, are you talking about the neural correlates of consciousness? If so why isnt it a rationally legitimate method of science to find them? I'd probably agree that phenomenological accounts of things are not properly scientific. That's not what Chomsky is saying though. He's saying experiences can't really be described at all.

[@Neilgs]

Hume didn’t engage in such nonsense as he and his ilk well knew, “That the criteria of accountability is mechanical motion.” Sorry my dear Noam but consciousness does not and in fact cannot be a derived from your insistence of reductio ad absurdum, the laws of rationality and material formulae. You have misunderstood the question of consciousness and are logically and rationally engaged in an inexorable tautology! What it is like to see the sunset involves the experiential aspects of being which cannot be so reduced and, therefore, dear Noam, not to be discarded because it cannot be reduced to formula but precisely because it cannot gives it, it’s supreme status. The affective qualities (consciousness) is an ontological primitive without which the ideational formula-making facility of the observer would have no meaning and in fact could not proceed. Consciousness is not a derivative or an emergent property of matter but matter emergent from or a form of consciousness. Alas, your supremely logical intellect has it backwards!

[@nonchai]

Well that was frustrating. I’ll add an analogy perhaps a little more apt than his tiresome, arguably sloppy analogy and likening qualia to 17th century scientists asking what it’s like for an object to fall/move: this was like trying to get blood out of a stone.

[@MrPiccolop]

Yeah. I really wasn't impressed by this: I remain stuck that it trult is a hard problem between Qualia and Quanta. I sort of err with John Searle on all this. But someone told me his nominalism is a bit problematic.

[@darwinlaluna3677]

I know that u r talking to me and u want an answer , I AM JUST WANT TO TALK TO YOU, I AM TIRED OF THIS. META

[@grantperkins368]

So refreshing to hear someone talk some sense ,,, apparently you have to be at least 80 these days ... Also quite unnerving to see someone who has obviously spent a lot of time trying to answer a non question. The simple observable fact that someone watching the sunset from a rudderless boat in the middle of both the ocean and a raging storm will probably see things a bit differently from others in less dire circumstances, the point being that if the feeling is different, it wasn't a question to which there is a correct or even a general answer anyway. as I see it.

[@benmacloughlin2612]

Gosh do you really think he has a little mind?

[@coreycox2345]

Trangulation.

[@KeithFrankish]

Chomsky's view sounds pretty illusionistic to me!

[@benmacloughlin2612]

Was he in fact there? Is Chomsky an illusion?

[@AlexADalton]

Ok so it's pretty clear that Chomsky does not understand the hard problem. The hard problem is not presented by anyone as a question about what it is like to have a certain conscious experience. No one is asking that. The hard problem is how to explain the *fact* that there is something it is like to have a conscious experience. It is not even remotely analogous to the problem of what it's like for a thing to be in motion, because, barring panspychism, such states do not involve experience. The fact that you can't give a "formulation" of what it's like to experience anything would be a demonstration of an aspect of the hard problem, not an argument against it.

[@AlexADalton]

@queerdo I think there's good reason to think they don't, but really it's irrelevant. We know we do have experience, and that's the hard problem. Positing that the hard problem is ubiquitous, just makes it harder, especially when you place it at levels of reality that are less complex, lacking a comparable biochemistry etc.

[@Facuflies]

You forgot to clarify that "the hard problem is how to explain the fact that there is something it is like to have a conscious experience" under a physicalist framework or in relation to matter.

[@AlexADalton]

@queerdo Its irrelevant in that it doesn't help his case on the hard problem. It only makes the hard problem worse if such states involve experience. But the disanalogous charge still holds because the kind of "things in motion" he's referencing were historically dealt with in the way they were, precisely because they were not thought to be associated with experience in the manner that our viewing of a sunset is. Chomsky is saying, repeatedly, that the hard problem isn't even intelligible. He's giving a strawman version of it, as I laid out in my initial comment. He thinks the HP is "what is it like to experience X?", when its actually "why is there something it is like to experience X, and how do we explain that?".

[@AlexADalton]

@queerdo As I said, its irrelevant to my overall point re: "the hard problem" as, 1. even if true, it worsens the problem , and 2. its disanalogous in that "things moving" were not historically perceived to have a phenomenological component, as is the case with watching sunsets. The reason Chomsky gives in the video for the unintelligible nature of the hard problem, is that it allegedly asks an unanswerable question; he says this over and over again. Its a question you cannot even formulate an answer to. The problem is no advocate of the hard problem is asking the question he supposes they are.

[@AlexADalton]

​@queerdo I'm beginning to question whether or not you've even watched the video. He literally says @8:30 "There is no hard problem"! Start @7:30 and you can listen to him in the first of many times where he gives us what he sees as the problem with the hard problem - namely that you can't formulate the properties of "what it is like" to see the sunset. It couldn't be more obvious that he's strawmanning the hard problem lol. He literally states it as "what is it like to see the sunset?", which he sees as an unanswerable question (he says this about a million times). THAT is not the hard problem! Of course, yes he says some things about physicalism along the way. None of that affects what I've said.

[@aminomar4002]

funny irrational senile ! any question his little mind has no answer to, is not a question ! nice new haircut !

[@jreyn2]

Ah. Behold the power to win any argument: insult someone.