Yeah this is fundamentally an argument from ignorance[1].
I want to “just” be a semi-random byproduct of the natural laws and processes. I’m completely fine with that.
On the contrary, I think it is sad that such a reality terrifies people.
So I am religious (Christian -- with a belief in God, afterlife, etc. ) but I actually find a lot of comfort with the very high likelihood that I am totally wrong. The idea of ceasing to exist after this life sounds pretty awesome! Or maybe the afterlife being a completely different experience than what I can currently comprehend.
It's interesting, though, because when I talk to other active members of my congregation about even the possibility of our views being wrong they often view the entertainment of such thoughts as a lack of faith or lack of spiritual experiences. There is often such a fearful, defensive arrogance with religious people (not excluding myself) that I completely understand why many are completely turned away from religion. It's tough to talk to people unwilling to be wrong.
I too, find it sad that people can't cope with the possibility of life being just a random occurrence. There is something beautiful to me about the idea that once we die it is all done (or that an afterlife would be different now than what I can comprehend now should we continue to exist).
Sentience is literally the thing that defines our experience of the world. It's irrational to dismiss it as "Oh, that's nothing. Don't worry about it."
It may well be "a semi-random by product of natural laws and processes", but that's a hand-wavey non-explanation.
Whatever the details are, we're so completely ignorant of them we can't even hazard a reasonable testable hypothesis about how exactly natural laws and processes create self-awareness.
Saying it's a non-problem because "obviously" it just is, is the opposite of science.
> The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).
I don't need consciousness or sentience to need a special or magic substrate to combat existential dread, because I don't feel it in the first place. My comment was not meant to be an explanation either, and I honestly can't see how you read that into it.
Listening to the guests of Lex Fridman on the subject, I'd say the exact opposite: very few of them are pure materialists. I recently tried to listen into a virtual conference of neuroscientists and the keynote (Susan Greenfield) specifically said, "we're not going to be able to turn the water into wine here" that we're only going to be able to discuss the neural correlates of consciousness, etc.
I'm a casual consumer of "popular science" but I only see serious people acknowledge the problem as hard, or explicitly limit their discussion to what-can-be-discussed. I'd say the same for physicists interested in the subject (Richard Penrose and David Deutsch come to mind.)
I'd love to hear who you think is the most convincing materialist here?
EDIT: I'll add that philosophical idealism isn't rooted in a desire to be special. An advaita guru or zen monk for instance is an extreme idealist philosophically and doesn't exhibit any evidence of wanting to be special.
Sean Carroll has a paper arguing that we know much more about the laws of physics than we know about consciousness, so it seems much more likely that we can explain consciousness within the current structure of physics than a brand new "something" that explains consciousness can slot into physical laws without violating all the existing confirmations of physics.
The only reason I'd be quick to dismiss it, is because his understanding of the panpsychist position is very physical.
When an panpsychist says capital-C consciousness (as opposed to arousal, etc) is the necessary premise of the material, they're not proposing it as a physical "ingredient." They're positing a non-thing uniform in all physical phenomena. It's only "attribute" is its self-evidence. And it is indeed passive (which he states as a gotchya).
His argument is that we understand more about physics (quantum field theory) so we should work from that grounding. But his use of "understanding" implies "we have more information." Of course we have more information, a capital-C Consciousness background is, by definition, information-less.
That's not a cop-out. We know some non-thing exists because we have our material experiences reporting to it. Our experience of it might be modulated by the physical but it's no more causal than a canvas is to a painting. The paper insists it can't be causal. True, it isn't. The canvas doesn't cause the painting even though it proceeds it as a precondition. The canvas is not an ingredient, it's a self-evident premise.
It's like looking through a telescope and saying I know much more about the sky than my eyes, therefore it's silly to develop a theory of eyes that's not based in sky.
The only reason we know we have a "hard problem of Consciousness" is because we each (at least one of us) knows "I am" and there's no way to take the derivations of that experience and give rise to their origin.
He has one paragraph/sentence on why Consciousness can't be passive: "No compelling account of consciousness can attribute a central explanatory role to metaphysical ingredients that have no influence on these kinds of behavior." He might have more to unroll here, I'd be curious to know.
my discomfort with these issues has nothing to do with some notion that we are "special" as the universe might have quadrillions of other conscious life forms and I'm OK with that. it has to do with the fact that it's completely paradoxical and links to basically all of existence being a paradox, which then makes the whole thing pretty suspect, and at the very least completely out of the realm of something that can be "understood" by the beings that are the ones currently experiencing consciousness.
This seems entirely self-consistent and non-paradoxical.
Sure there is progress in neuroscience, researchers understand more about the mechanism of the brain all the time. But there have arguably been very little progress on the hard problem of consciousness. Feel like those things are getting conflated in this comment.
This reminds me of religious arguments about how evolution can't account for complex organs like eyes. I think in general humans just have a very difficult time conceptualizing massive numbers and systems, and as such the emergent phenomena that come out of it seem unreal.
Whenever I look into neuroscience, it looks like researchers are getting a clearer and clearer idea of how things work (as you noted, we even understand how to manipulate things at a basic level), but the system is so massive that it's slow going. As such, there's a certain "god of the gaps" argument that people turn to, where anything that researchers haven't yet fully understood gets treated as evidence that there's "something more." You see the same sort of arguments for religious explanations for other natural processes that are still being understood.
When I listen to people who actually study this (and make progress on it), they don't see to hit any limits using a physical approach. The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).