Comment by staticassertion
6 days ago
I was rejecting your definition of the hard problem as it contains an assertion that a physicalist wouldn't accept.
Yes, reduction would be one very viable strategy. It doesn't require precisely defining the phenomenon in order for me to just say that it reduces based on the fact that reduction has been a successful approach for everything else in cognition.
> There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness.
Yeah this is what I reject. Why do you say that this is in principle a barrier? You're discussing it as an explanatory gap, not in principle.
The claim that you can't describe consciousness in principle is widely accepted by participants on all sides of the debate. Can you tell me what experiencing red is like to you such that someone who is red/green color blind will know what its like? Most people think not. Rather, phenomenal consciousness is something you must experience yourself. It just isn't something that one can learn descriptively. This is a premise of the hard problem and also the Mary's room thought experiment. People who reject the premise usually just reject phenomenal consciousness completely.
Interpreting the hard problem as an epistemological problem looks trivial. There's nothing extraordinary in ignorance. The way you describe it implies we have the hard problem of ultrasound too.
I think it's ontological problem: structural description ontologically misses unobservable ideal substance, so the challenge is to provide a principle that would make ideal substance unnecessary. If you don't think too much, ideal substance ontologically solves consciousness, and it's not obvious how mere structural description can live without it.