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but that neuronal activity is not itself subjective experience

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laserpig said:

ice you are def my favorite member

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Sweet!

Grapefruit said:

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but that neuronal activity is not itself subjective experience

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Big leap here, how do you know this when we know almost nothing about subjective experience and the brain?

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i can cut into your head or scan it with nanometer-perfect technology

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Grapefruit said:

As far as I can see the consciousness is completely beyond human understanding to the point where perhaps you could even say there's no way anyone can even hope to understand consciousness.

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note that none of these experiences are a cluster of firing neurons
they may be, and probably are, entirely generated by and dependent upon clusters of neurons, but subjective experience is not itself a material process

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when you take it as a given that the problem is insoluble, any attempt at explanation will obviously conflict with that axiom, and we'll get nowhere

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you will see colors, hear sounds, and notice thoughts
note that none of these experiences are a cluster of firing neurons

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There is no consensus about the status of the explanatory gap. Reductionists deny that the gap exists. They argue that the hard problem reduces to a combination of easy problems or derives from misconceptions about the nature of consciousness. For example, Daniel Dennett (2005) argues that, on reflection, consciousness is functionally definable. On his view, once the easy problems are solved, there will be nothing about consciousness and the physical left to explain.

Reductionists often appeal to analogies from the history of science. These philosophers compare nonreductionists, who accept the existence of the explanatory gap, to 17th Century vitalists concerned about the hard problem of life. Comparisons are also made to the scientifically ignorant concerned about hard problems of heat or light (Churchland 1996). Science has shown that the latter concerns are overblown: life, heat, and light can be physically explained. Likewise, say reductionists, for consciousness.

Nonreductionists usually reject such analogies. Part of the analogy is usually accepted: the vitalists doubted that how organisms reproduce, move, self-organize, etc., could be explained in purely physical terms, in much the same way that nonreductionists doubt that consciousness can be explained in purely physical terms. However, what the vitalists sought to explain was how certain functions are performed. By contrast, consciousness does not seem to consist in the performance of functions. Nonreductionists take that difference to undermine the analogy between the hard problem of consciousness and the alleged hard problem of life. They reject the reductionists’ other analogies on similar grounds.

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