The Problem with the "Hard Problem"

Having not gone deep into this problem, I’m a bit confused. It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter.

Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”?

Is it not possible that our experiences, our recognition of color, our smell of moth balls, our hearing of clarinets are, in fact, just aggregate functions of those parts that make us up?

Am I missing some greater argument here? Is this just humanity’s need to feel special on navel-gazing display, or is there a stronger crux here lost in the haze of the article?

This sort of sloppy, shoddy, “I don’t like how I feel about it therefore it must be false” type of thinking has fallen to analysis and the scientific method every single time they meet. The sloppy retreats to another bastion but it merely delays the inevitable.

That materialistic, mechanical, “mathematically reductionist” brains might produce the particular qualia isn’t a hard problem. We alter the brain and the qualia of experience are altered: it is unavoidable that the brain is involved in generating the experience.

The actually hard problem is how (or whether) chemistry can generate awareness, into/onto which the qualia of experience arise.

To provide some context: It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher. His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area, which most users here (including me) don't. If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.

I read this article once and it felt like it.. went nowhere? Is it just this author's way of writing or is all philosophy like this?

This is the exact point where I always get off the hard problem p-zombie train:

> It is possible at least in principle, he says, for there to be a world physically identical to our own down to the last particle, but where there are none of the qualia of conscious experience.

No. I don't consider this possible even in principle. Imaginable, yes, possible? No.

One example is enough to dispose of any contradiction, so here's one: in this contrafactual world, a person says "I feel the sun warming my skin". Since qualia do not exist in the contrafactual, in that world, the person is a liar. In this world, he is not. That is a difference: QED.

Ah, but you may say: this is not a physical difference. No, perhaps not. But it most rapidly results in one. Liars and honest men are not the same. Especially when they lie about having any and every experience of existence. This is a difference which must perforce produce change: it beggars the imagination to picture such a world careening forwards identical to our own.

This is not physics. It is fantasy.

Total claptrap

There are various intelligible rejections of the hard problem; Anil Seth's "Beast Machines", Colin McGinn's "Mysternianism", and Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory", all come to mind. None are completely satisfying or widely held, all are try to strike a balance between the problems of effective materialism and the more woo-woo frames of idealism and panpsychism (or, commonly, go hard to one end of the scale).

None, not a single one, not from the people who think a billet of 304 stainless steel has feelings or the ones who think the human mind isn't meaningfully differentiated from that billet in its cold unfeeling nature, tries to so fully reject our materialist knowledge of the physical world and regress into this literally medieval understanding.

The author may be experiencing an unbalancing of the humours.

Sorry but ed feser is regarded as a lunatic by most professional philosophers. He is a man of strange opinions. Not necessarily about this problem but his average opinion on an average topic is on the lunatic fringe.