The hard problem of consciousness and altered states of consciousness

The hard problem of consciousness (as originally framed by Chalmers) is "explaining how and why physical brain processes give rise to subjective, qualitative experiences (like the redness of red, the feeling of pain, or the taste of chocolate)." It does not necessarily imply that conscious experience is not reducible to some structure or mechanism of the brain (as the question suggests, though it could be interpreted that way); it merely says that establishing a connection between the subjective mind and the physical brain is extremely challenging.

Psychoactive substances have (historically) been interpreted in both physicalist and non-physicalist terms: the former suggesting some type of 'chemical storm' producing something akin to psychosis, while the latter intimating that the substances free the mind from its physical constraints. We might look at something like LSD, which (if I understand correctly) is filtered out of the biological system in something like 20-30 minutes, but which produces an effect that can last hours. The sensations produced are (thereby) not a function of the drug itself, but something innate to the brain or mind that is 'kicked off' by the drug and carries on long after. That just makes the 'hard' problem harder.

The hard problem arises because we are trying to assess the nature of the subjective mind under the auspices of the subjective mind. It's a convoluted self-reference that is difficult to analyze. Psychoactive drugs merely add a convolution to an already messy situation.

Neither the question, nor the two prior answers, seem to include an understanding of the nature of the hard problem of consciousness.

The hard problem is not intrinsic to consciousness. It is instead a byproduct of the causal closure assumption of physicalism, and the observed properties of phenomenal consciousness.

Under the causal closure assumption of physicalism, the only things which can be causal are physical things or events. And phenomenal experience does not seem to have the location, energy, mass, or other properties that seem to be core to being "physical". Yet our phenomenal experience sure seems to be causal.

Under phenomenal conservatism, the principle that evolution has tuned our perceptions such that the way things seem to us makes it intrinsically more likely that the way things seem is the way things are, than otherwise, in absence of any other data, then one should start with the presumption that we have experiences, and our experiences are causal. This runs head on into the causal closure assumption of physicalism. Without the presumptions of physicalism, one would just naturally accept that consciousness isn't physical due to its lack of mass, etc., and that it is two way interactively causal. Our starting point perspective, therefore, is that of interactive dualism. Physicalists (and near physicalists) must come up with some alternative explanation for consciousness, that somehow makes it either a physical thing, or causally inert. This is the challenge of the Hard Problem. These explanations are not "impossible in principle", the issue for physicalists is that these explanations all run into falsifications. The Hard problem is only "hard" because the proposed solutions have to date all failed.

The primary strategy pursued by physicalists is to make identity claims, such that consciousness is asserted to be identical to some physical or functional aspect of our bodies. It is NOT "impossible in principle" for such an identity to hold. Critics of neural identity theory, which was the first proposed identity, have noted that we humans have the same thought over time, despite continual changes in our neural structure, and we can pass a thought (2+2=4, for example) between us despite our differing neurology. Therefore, the thought, and the neurology, do not track each other 1:1, and do not have the properties of identicality. Neural identity theory is refuted by observation.

The second identity claimed was a functional identity. When we do the function of 2+2=4, functionalism asserts that just IS the experience of thinking 2+2=4. However, as with neural identity, there is a divergence between functions and thinking that makes this claim untrue. 99.9% of our functions are performed unconsciously, so it is clear that functional processing is not automatically identical to experience. And there are some functions that we SOMETIMES do unconsciously, and SOMETIMES do consciously, so we can't even sort for subsets of functions that are identical to experience.

Aside on functionalism -- functions ALSO do not have mass, or energy. Functionalism is only "physicalist" if one expands the definition of physicalism from matter, to matter and abstractions. This is a credible expansion, as physics has a lot of abstractions built into it (relationships, probabilities, math and logic, etc.) -- but many physicalists are reluctant to admit to it, as it makes physicalism a dualist ontology (dualism between matter and abstractions), surrendering a rhetorical argument physicalists like to make. I will credit functionalism as "physicalist", while pointing out it too is falsified by test.

There was an earlier near-physicalism that assumed that consciousness was an acausal byproduct of SOME neural processes or SOME functions. This would be an emergent epiphenomenal dualism. William James spelled out the evolutionary test case that refutes this near-physicalism, by pointing out that the occasional aspects of consciousness (sometimes we process unconsciously), plus the erroneous instances of "wrong" consciousness (delusions, synesthesia, invalid inferences that we then "see") shows that without evolutionary selection for correlative consciousness between our processing and our experience, then epiphenomenalism would lead to zombiehood or totally irrelevant experience. THAt our consciosuenss correlates with what our brains and bodies do, is really only explainable if evolution selected for those experiences, and selection only works on causal phenomenon. Which gets us back to INTERACTIVE dualism, rather than epiphenomenal dualism.

It is these failures of the proposals of physicalism and near-physicalism that have made the Hard Problem "hard". And there is a straightforward solution to it -- interactive dualism.

So no -- the Hard Problem is not that a physicalist or near-physicalist explanation for consciousness cannot be constructed, but that those proposed solutions have failed.

1. Your post looks to me as if you consider conscious experience to be a mystic process which - due to its complexity - can be decoded only in a mental state induced by a hallucinogenic drug.

   This seems to me an attempt to explain obscurum per obscurius (= the obscure by means of the more obscure).

2. According to wikipedia and its references there is no agreement whether there is a hard problem of consiousness (HP) at all. And if there is, how the problem should be stated in a precise way.

3. Hence each discussion of the HP should begin with a clear and precise definition what the author considers to be HP.

   Secondly the author should show that they are familiar with the state of the art in this field. New hypotheses about HP should be linked to existing findings from neuroscience.

   Otherwise, the contribution to HP is just a personal opinion from an exterior viewpoint.

According to current psychology and neurology, and without yet taking any kind of strong philosophical stance about the nature of "experience" or "consciousness", I believe we can all agree on the following:

• Conscious experience is somehow the result of non-conscious processes of information processing inside our bodies. [Some might find 'result of' sound too much like taking a identity-theory-like stance. If so, add the words "... the correlate of ... ".]
• Those non-conscious processes are strongly correlated with measurable and manipulable neurological processes. They are often correlated with specific parts of the brain and the central nervous system, and with specific informational pathways (chemical and electical signaling).
• Those processes exhibit hierarchical organization: different processing modules (again either correlated with specific parts of the brain or with specific pathways) are involved; they work, both in parallel and sequentially, to construct conscious experience (or its neurological correlate, if any distinction can be made). We know about this from the study of various extremely "weird" neurological case studies. (For popular accounts, see various books by Oliver Sachs, such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook has Wife for His Head.)
• We are not introspectively aware of those processes, normally. (Thoughts may "pop" up in our heads and we do not know how, we do not see from where they come or what triggered them. We see our environment, but we've no introspective aware of how the internal process that enables this goes about its business.)

Now there are two questions: First, is it in principle possible to get some access, introspectively, in conscious experience, to some of those enabling processes? Can certain psychedelics provide this kind of access?

Second, if they do to some extent provide this access, does this dissolve the so-called hard problem of consciousness?

The first question is a neurological question. It's partially theoretical, and partially empirical. The general answer, as far as I know about current theories, is that it may very well be possible to get more access or to get some access to particular steps in the process of construction of an experience, that is, to steps that normally always proceed conscious awareness. If so, this would surely also lead to experiences that are experienced as very strange, bewildering, and indescribable - first of all, since we normally do not have access to this, so we lack any kind of frame of reference or frame of appreciation. (But, in fact, even normal everyday perceptions appear to us as not fully describable in words. The flood of information in any perception is too much, too rich to be fully captured in words.)

On the other hand, there are also certain inherent limitations. Any process that models itself (monitors itself, using a self-model) cannot do so at every level of detail. [The question of inherent limitations of self-modeling is not so trivial, though. For instance, consider this: We can make a turing machine that generates an exact copy of itself. So, doesn't that also enable complete self-knowledge, in principle? It does, perhaps, but not as dynamic and predictive model. In computer science, the fundamental limitation is that Halting Problem is undecidable. Biological self-models are predictive models, systems approximately simulating themselves, so they cannot do better.]

Second question. For hard-core defenders of the hard problem (that is, those who believe there is a hard problem to be solved, an explanatory gap even after a complete functional account of consciousness has been given) this would probably still not be convincing. It would merely show a way to be more aware of internal processes, but would not by itself explain how that consciousness "arises" out of a neural substrate.

In order to dissolve the so-called hard-problem (and the related problem of "qualia"), I believe the only method is to attack the philosophical problem head-on and explain why some people believe there is a problem (i.e. we have to make them feel understood) and why this belief is internally incoherent and untenable (i.e. we have to make them see the error of their ways - in their own terms). I don't have an answer to this that will convince everyone, but I would suggest, that the error is based on misguided intuitions, i.e. misguided extrapolations based on experiences (where the experience is unproblematic). For instance, the richness of perceptual content in any normal perception - what makes it not possible to capture any experience fully in a verbal description, and what makes any experience in some sense ineffable, may appear (intellectually, not as direct perception itself) as a separate quality of the experience, a "quale". It's then only a small step to conclude (also intellectually) that no purely functional or (god-forbid) mechanical explanation could ever account for that.

You say:

My point is that it seems to me that if a reasonable person could even consider it a possibility that psychedelics do really show the internal structure and mechanism of conscious experience, then the entire hard problem falls apart entirely, given that, as I understand it, it's based upon the supposed impossibility of even conceiving that consciousness could be a structure with a mechanism the way ordinary physical processes are, an assertion which seems to be based on an equally subjective conscious perception.

Your argument doesn't hold. The hard problem is simply how can physical processes give rise to subjective experience, not how can consciousness be shown to emerge from physical processes. Most people accept at face value that there are physical and non-physical things, and the question is tantamount to how does anything in the physical category, such as neural activity which is biochemical in nature go beyond correlation (as in NCCs) to cause mental events.

Psychedelics in no way solve the problem, because they do not give an explanation sought by Chalmers to demonstrate causality. In the technical domain of philosophy of mind, causes are closed to the physical world, so when a layperson says 'shrooms alter my consciousness', they presume correlation is causation that the technical philosopher of mind rejects as post hoc fallacy. Psychedelics may be used reliably for trips, but philosophers of mind routinely reject that they cause changes in the mental world. In fact, to solve this problem, some thinkers subscribe to a position called epiphenominalism where mental events "shadow" physical events not having full causal interaction.

No materialist philosopher denies that there are correlations between events in the brain and events in the mind; the evidence is overwhelming, but if you buy the logic of the hard problem, then you have to explain how the physical causes the mental, not just correlates with it. Descartes cooked up the pineal gland and God's intervention as a solution, and others pretend it's just the mental world is some sort of byproduct. Even though it seems that drugs cause changes in experiences, exactly how does that happen? This is an philosophical problem that not everyone accepts and that various answers remain controversial. Another popular answer is eliminative materialism where the mental states are simply held not exist. No mental states, problem solved!

The hard problem of consciousness basically says that we can't prove identity or causation. We can demonstrate an overwhelmingly strong correlation between consciousness and the brain, such that they seem to be one and the same in every conceivable way, but we can never get conclusive proof that they definitely ARE one and the same, and we can never get conclusive proof that something definitely causes something else.

But if one applies this standard consistently, one would have to reject or perverse most of our understanding of reality.

• How do you know that physical objects bend spacetime - it could be some magical force that exists alongside every object, which is actually the thing bending spacetime.
• How do you know that any given electrical component actually does what it seems to do - it could be some magical force that exists alongside every such component, which is actually the thing transmitting electricity or whatever.

This is what dualism does: it says that we can't definitively know that the brain actually does what it seems to do, and that the effects observed are actually the result of some magical force that exists alongside every brain.

The hard problem of consciousness may as well just be called the hard problem of identity or causation. The most reasonable response to that is: Interesting note. Anyway. Let's continue with the most reasonable interpretation that this is identity and causation. It would not be a particularly reasonable response to say that therefore magical forces exist.

In any case, you ask about psychedelics. These absolutely strengthens the correlation, and makes dualism that much less plausible. But it doesn't refute the problem above, because nothing can refute that problem - it's unfalsifiable.

Eternally repeated (frequently refuted) arguments against physicalism

Under the causal closure assumption of physicalism

Physicalism makes no such assumption. Physicalism just means we don't posit explanations that are magical invisible forces or entities which we can't reliably observe, directly or indirectly.

The only "causal closure assumption" one can really get from the above is that non-existent things (which seems to be all proposed "non-physical" things) can't have causal effects. If you want to justify the existence of non-physical things, and justify how we can reliably know about their causal effects... get to it then. Good luck though, given that people have been trying and failing at that, for thousands of years.

See also: my answers on the questionable distinction between "physical" and "non-physical".

phenomenal experience does not seem to have the location, energy, mass, or other properties that seem to be core to being "physical"

This seems to just outright presuppose dualism and deny physicalism. And then it tries to present this presupposition as an argument for the thing it's presupposing.

Under physicalism, the "location, energy, mass, or other properties" of phenomenal experiences is (a) in your brain, (b) the energy required by your brain, (c) the mass of electrical activity and chemicals in your brain and/or your brain itself, and (d) other properties of electrical activity and chemicals in your brain and/or your brain itself.

The primary strategy pursued by physicalists is to make identity claims ... Neural identity theory is refuted by observation

This is demonstrably false. The plurality view, at least among philosophers, is functionalism. Identity theory is close to a third as popular. Meanwhile, scientists (the people actually getting their hands dirty in trying to understand reality) are reductive physicalists in practice, whether they adopt that label or not (more on that below).

Identity theory (at least in the form presented here) is a poor perversion of reductive physicalism. It tries to turn reductive physicalism into a strict categorisation of reality, despite the fact that it's well-demonstrated that reality fails to fit neatly into our attempts categorise it. This is comparable to pointing to someone saying each animal is a particular fixed "type", and then saying science is "refuted" by the fact that groups of animals change from one "type" to another across generations. The former is a naïve understanding of biological species, and the latter is an even more naïve (at best) attempt to say animals exist magically because the afore-mentioned naïve understanding clearly doesn't reflect our scientific understanding of species.

Reductive physicalism is science (I mean ALL of science, but also neuroscience in particular). It's the practice of trying to "reduce" some observation to some combination of forces and models and particles and such. And "physicalism" means we don't posit explanations that are magical invisible forces or entities which we can't reliably observe, directly or indirectly. Dualism is such invisible magic, whereas we have reduced consciousness significantly to neural processes. Related: my answer on whether reductive physicalism has been falsified.

Dualists seem to shy away from addressing reductive physicalism. I wonder if that has something to do with it being the foundation of all reliable knowledge of reality, as well as a whole lot of reliable knowledge about the brain and consciousness.

The second identity claimed was a functional identity ... it makes physicalism a dualist ontology ... it too is falsified by test

Functionalism says "what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part".

Maybe there exists a version of this which says that mental states are themselves made up of these functions, that this is their fundamental nature. This is what the other answer is addressing, but it seems by far the more absurd interpretation of functionalism.

The more reasonable interpretation and view of functionalism, in my opinion, is that it posits nothing about the fundamental nature of consciousness. It would be a lot like the "shut up and calculate" in quantum mechanics: we don't need to know which neurons are firing to classify something as pain or joy or whatever. I don't have much of an issue with that, and it's basically what psychology does. It's pragmatic. It certainly isn't dualism, and it certainly hasn't been falsified - I can't figure out how one could even conceptually falsify the idea of classifying neural states by their function. It's merely a useful way to group things, it's not a truth claim.

I would say that consciousness is structured.The consciousness experience in the “waking state” is binary because the individual experiences both the in and out of the moment consciousness states.The fact that the individual doesn't initially realise this is down to a lack of awareness.

The individual transitions (toggles) back and forth between the in and out of the moment consciousness states all the time so the consciousness experience is vibratory which is consistent with the fact that the cosmos and all matter within it vibrates as well.