Hard problems made harder

What is like to be you?

The hard problem of consciousness has reared its amorphous head in various ways and to various degrees for some time. Arguably brought into a glaring spotlight by Nagel's paper What is it like to be a bat?, it has been further sermonized by Chalmers (most famously) and many others, including neuroscientists and physicists. But what are we asking when we ask "what is it like to…."? An analysis of the necessitated foundations this question rests on might be in order, thereby allowing a more discrete consideration of what follows from being conscious.

The feel of feeling

Every experience, according to proponents of the hard problem, has a distinct qualitative characteristic to it. Experiences are individuated by it, in fact. What does it feel like to see the color red? To taste an apple? To smell a rose? To smell this rose? There is the experience itself and nested relationships to the objects of it (the rose, the act of smelling) and there is this separate but related other layer to conscious experience: qualia. Even upon mapping out the brain and all of its functions and capabilities, qualia shan't be reducible to these components. We can isolate the photoreceptors, optical nerve cells and processing centers in the occipital lobe that allow for the perception of red but the how and why and the feel of seeing red won't be lay before us as easily as the descriptions of physical functionality. The refutation of reducibility necessitates a bottom up view. As such, this line of inquiry must seemingly emerge from the physical and search for answers in some other arena. But what arena would this be? Something outside of the physical reality that seems to be our plane of existence? Is it in the "other" materiality in some dualistic views of matter? Maybe it resides in some bastardized form of a soul, untethered to cognitive neurological structures?

Shouldn't the difference between identifying a broken bone and feeling what is like to have a broken bone be obvious? We are talking of explanation versus experience, are we not? A doctor might identify the physical characteristics of a broken bone, but quite clearly has no electrodes hooked up from a patient's currently-firing nerves to the doctor's pain processing centers to allow for perception of the patient's agony (wouldn't it be nice to eliminate the ubiquitous emergency room question of "On a scale of 1–10 how is your pain?"). A neuroscientist can explain how your mesocorticolimbic circuit's ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, anterior cingulate cortex, etc. play a part in motivation and learning a musical instrument, but they most assuredly don't have access to yours while you learn to play the piano. We have identified the existence of infrared light waves, but how might we going about illumining what it is like to see in infrared, were we to have the natural ability? Wings allow flight, but will I ever know the stomach-dropping sensation of it?

All evidence points to my consciousness experience having a boundary, something akin to a "field of vision" (a curious discussion of solipsism follows from that, but that is a topic for another post). This field of vision is bound by perception and the underlying structures that allow for it. No one, unless they have my material makeup, will know what it is like to have my material make up and do things with my material makeup. A tautology if I have ever heard one.

Is the attempted endeavor of the hard problem one gone awry? Does it simply suffer from malformed concepts?

The eye of the beholder

What is it like to be in pain?

Is there a boundary between that particular notion of a question and any other question that attempts to qualify the experience of pain? Proponents of the hard problem use the particular phrasing of "What is it like…" to designate something other than immediate sensation of unpleasantness. A recursive sensation of a sensation? A meta-sensation? But what would you say to "What is it like to be in pain?", other than something along the lines of "It is unpleasant" or "It hurts and I don't like it"? What else, that could constitute qualia, might you have access to in such an experience?

Look at your hand. Now look at your arm. What is it like to see your hand? To perceive your arm? What specific "qualia" can you pick out in either experience, or even between the experiences that might individuate them besides the object of perception? Some perceptions seem to be fairly uneventful in this regard. It seems clear that not all experiences have qualia, or if they do, they do not register at a conscious level. If they do not register at a conscious level, how can we with any reliability at all say that an intrinsic property of experience is qualia?

Maybe we should shift to more complex experiences. What is it like to dance? Surely we come away from that with something other than what it took to make your body physically move? We are not talking of our simple disposition towards dancing that might color the experience hedonistically, the "What is it like…" prompt searches for something else. But what? We must admit, the descriptions and quantifiers of such an entity have fuzzy, incoherent boundaries; the question "What is like to (interpolated experience here)?" itself and any of like ilk is devoid of clarity on a deep and profound level.

Referencing the "it"

In Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Wittgenstein brilliantly illustrated a further, and major, problem:

"The content of experience. One would like to say 'I see red thus', 'I hear the note that you strike thus', 'I feel sorrow thus', or even 'This is what one feels like when one is sad, this when one is glad', etc. One would like to picture a world, analogous to the physical one, with these thuses and thises. But this makes sense only where there is a picture of what is experienced, to which one can point as one makes these statements."

This quote was in turn used in another paper refuting the hard problem by a fellow Wittgenstein enthusiast Peter Hacker (the entire work is well worth the read and actually inspired this blurb). Chalmers et al. repeatedly question why certain experiences are like this and like that. These are a nonsensical questions. It is asked as if we could step outside of the arena of our perception, providing some external reference to it and its makeup. We may be able to offer up a rough demonstration of "seeing red as thus" and pointing to a sample of it, allowing for external reference to ourselves and others in a way (utilizing Wittgenstein's "picture"), but it would be meaningless to attempt the same with an inward point to our current experience unless we could explain exactly how we experience seeing red. We can no more elucidate qualia externally than we can identify it to ourselves (see Wittgenstein's beetle in a box from Philosphical Investigations: here is the thought experiment as laid out by him and a further analysis here); the attempt to do so falls apart at the logical seams. Qualia are unobservable in others and unquantifiable in us.

Find a sample of the color red and look at it. Now close your eyes. What qualitative characteristic, outside of the simple perception of it and your possible attitudinal disposition to red, do you not feel anymore when your eyes are shut? I'd wager you'll be searching for a while for the answer, just as we might for the answers to the hard problem of consciousness.