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There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’
Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.
TL;DR
- The "hard problem of consciousness," as defined by David Chalmers, is a mischaracterization; consciousness is a complex natural phenomenon, not a separate or inexplicable entity.
- Historical resistance to scientific advances, from Darwin's theory to understanding sunsets, shows a pattern of fearing ideas that challenge our self-image and cherished worldviews.
- The idea of an "explanatory gap" between brain processes and subjective experience is flawed, as it attempts to define what would be understood in a future state of knowledge.
- Scientific understanding is not external to experience but is about organizing and interpreting our embodied experience of the world.
- Subjectivity and qualia are not mysterious but are natural, perspectival aspects of embodied experience, not evidence of a non-physical reality.
- The "philosophical zombie" thought experiment is a weak rhetorical trick that assumes what it seeks to prove: the existence of a non-physical consciousness.
- The mind is the behavior of the brain, described in high-level language; both first-person and third-person perspectives are distinct views of the same physical events.
- Apparent metaphysical gaps between different domains of reality (heaven/earth, living/inanimate, mind/body) have historically been resolved by scientific progress, suggesting the same will be true for consciousness.