That's a bold claim given that this has been a philosophical discussion point for fifty years now. Let's check out the author's credentials: I find that this SMBC comic sums up how physicists...
Exemplary
That's a bold claim given that this has been a philosophical discussion point for fifty years now. Let's check out the author's credentials:
Carlo Rovelli (born 3 May 1956) is an Italian theoretical physicist [...]
I find that this SMBC comic sums up how physicists routinely get old and start "fixing" all the other fields. I know that devaluing the social sciences is a pretty standard thing to do these days, but IMO overvaluing natural sciences instead doesn't do us any favours either.
Also, I have some critiques about the author's understanding of what the p-zombie thought experiment is trying to demonstrate, as well as, like, everything about that stance in 2026 given that LLMs exist. However it does devolve into me prodding an LLM to effectively refute his dumb argument about behaviour == consciousness, so I'm putting it in a spoiler tag, in order to keep people's feeds free of LLM slop (even if it apparently will still contain theoretical physicist slop).
(I chopped out a bunch of Carlo's purple prose, for brevity)
[source]
[A philosophical zombie] is a hypothetical entity that looks and behaves like a human in all respects, including reporting emotions, feelings, dreams and experience, yet it has no consciousness.
[...]
But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that [consciousness] is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain [...]. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having [consciousness], knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating.
My [p-zombie] would be exactly like me — including in experience. In other words, philosophical zombies are distinguishable from ordinary people only by those who assume upfront what Chalmers seeks to prove: that there is something non-physical going on in the world. They are not proving anything; they are examples of an unconvincing metaphysical possibility and nostalgia for the old notion of the transcendent soul.
First off: I'd invite anyone interested in the field to go read The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, which is where Chalmers says his piece about p-zombies (page 94, "The Irreducibility of Consciousness"). He actually addresses this argument, 30 years in the past, when talking about critics who believe this perspective to be impossible (largely because people have been leveling this identical critique for 30+ years).
Quick sidebar: do bear in mind that philosophers -- unlike people describing physical sciences -- do not rely on math and models to make their arguments, so although David makes some compelling arguments they are not necessarily describing reality, he's just a very compelling speaker. Firm theoretical footing, evidence, and successful modelling should, imo, be the measuring sticks by which we determine whether new ideas are worth adopting; philosophy necessarily only ever tackles the first. When reading about psychology/ philosophy/linguistics/etc., I find that it's best to keep an open mind, read extremely broadly, and synthesize your own position instead of following one person. Anyways, just a caveat, since I've known a few people to get lost in Jung's works 😅
Also, in skimming the Wikipedia article on philosophical zombies, apparently they weren't even proposed by Chalmers first. Furthermore, there have been critiques by other philosophers (arguing the author's point) -- e.g. Daniel Dennett -- that the thought experiment isn't valid. It doesn't seem like Carlo is adding to the discourse, here, just rehashing others' arguments that he's come up with from first principles (maybe) but with less rigor.
Finally, my rebuttal of Carlo's rebuttal is that I asked the sand in someone's server rack to read up on Carlo's life and then simulate an interview. Here's an excerpt:
Me: Of course, of course! So, you and I both have an inner world that we can experience, but so would a hypothetical philosophical zombie, since it behaves precisely like you or I? Down to claiming to have introspection, and an internal physical experience. Therefore making the thought experiment impossible, since outward behaviour predicts internal experience.
Gemini-Carlo: Precisely! You have captured the very crux of my critique.
Think about the bizarre epistemic trap this creates: If my brain's physical mechanisms produce the report, the internal self-monitoring, and the conviction "I am conscious," then those same physical mechanisms would produce the exact same report and conviction in the zombie twin.
So if Chalmers' setup were true, how could I ever know that I am not just a zombie who is mistakenly convinced it is conscious? I couldn't! The argument undermines its own foundation.
The mistake comes from a legacy of 19th-century materialism—the idea that the physical world is just cold, blind billiard balls bouncing around, devoid of meaning or experience. But modern physics shows us a world made of complex, dynamic networks of relations. Once you realize how rich, layered, and self-referential physical systems can be, you realize there is no need to invent a non-physical "ghost" to explain our inner life.
Nature itself is deep enough to include us, feelings and all.
Me: Oh, sorry, I never asked -- can I get you anything? I'm not sure if this interview room is well air conditioned, and I don't want you to feel agitated; we're going through a bit of a heat wave at the moment.
Gemini-Carlo: Ah, you are very thoughtful, thank you! A glass of cold water—or better yet, a small espresso, heatwave or not—would be wonderful.
Heat, as I like to remind myself, is just the chaotic dance of microscopic molecules, though it certainly makes us macroscopic beings feel a bit sluggish! But please, do not worry about me; I am enjoying our conversation immensely.
Whenever you are ready, where shall we travel next in our dialogue?
Yeah, right Carlo, as long as it reports having internal state it's conscious.
As always when people post this type of thing, I strongly disagree. I do agree that consciousness is likely a result of purely physical processes! But that doesn't make the hard problem of...
Exemplary
As always when people post this type of thing, I strongly disagree. I do agree that consciousness is likely a result of purely physical processes! But that doesn't make the hard problem of consciousness any less of a problem. The fundamental issue is that we cannot observe consciousness externally, which makes it very difficult to find out under what conditions it arises. I know, or can assume by analogy, that other humans are conscious. Because of their similarities to us I feel comfortable assuming the same of animals. But how can we ever truly discover what specific physical processes give rise to consciousness when we cannot directly observe it?
I feel the same about this article, I agree completely that there is no 'soul' separate from the physical human, there is nothing metaphysical going on in our brains, but that doesn't mean you can...
I feel the same about this article, I agree completely that there is no 'soul' separate from the physical human, there is nothing metaphysical going on in our brains, but that doesn't mean you can just hand wave all the interesting issues surrounding human consciousness and 'hard problem of consciousness' away. There are so many questions that need answering, we know so little about our consciousness, animal consciousness, machine consciousness. It maybe be pointless to keep talking about it because we are all just guessing but I find it really interesting.
There do seem to be correlations between consciousness and physical processes. You're stuck in your own head. Although lucid dreaming is a thing, you're often unconscious when you're asleep....
There do seem to be correlations between consciousness and physical processes. You're stuck in your own head. Although lucid dreaming is a thing, you're often unconscious when you're asleep. Physical attacks have known bad effects. The effects of alcohol or other drugs are known.
I could imagine this being pinned down further with more scientific study, to the point where we do see consciousness being associated with specific physical mechanisms.
Will there still be an explanatory gap? I don't think thought experiments done now can tell us much about whether people will continue to care about that.
There will still be an explanatory gap. We likely will, eventually, reach a point where it feels like pointing out the problem of induction rather than a real lack of explanation, but science is...
There will still be an explanatory gap. We likely will, eventually, reach a point where it feels like pointing out the problem of induction rather than a real lack of explanation, but science is not apt to consciousness in itself, it mediates science. Brain scans will only ever give us more "outside" of the experience, and even sci fi ideas of mind melds made real will beg the issue of communication vs commingling. It will never work as "proof" against competing theories of consciousness, in the way people really want.
One thing to consider is that the concepts associated with consciousness might change with more knowledge. For example, before there were reliable thermometers, conventional wisdom from Aristotle...
One thing to consider is that the concepts associated with consciousness might change with more knowledge. For example, before there were reliable thermometers, conventional wisdom from Aristotle up through the Renaissance was that heat and cold were considered different qualities. (See here.)
Similarly, our fuzzy conceptions about consciousness might mutate somehow with more study. The meanings of words can change.
All physics started out as metaphysics. We take it for granted but concepts like force or mass, at least in the way we currently understood them, were pretty much invented by Newton. If you think...
All physics started out as metaphysics. We take it for granted but concepts like force or mass, at least in the way we currently understood them, were pretty much invented by Newton. If you think about it, the only actually physical phenomena that could be measured were duration and distance. Mass as an inherent property of matter cannot be "directly" observed, only indirectly through its effect on changes in motion. Yet we feel confortable considering it as good as real without worrying about any explanatory gap.
The p-zombies equivalent would be like asking to imagine there being an object with no mass but still behaving in accordance to Newton's laws.
Photons. Newtonian physics aren't correct. It's a useful approximation that was disproven by Einstein. Your paragraph here is incidentally part of why the foundation of physics hasn't progresssed...
The p-zombies equivalent would be like asking to imagine there being an object with no mass but still behaving in accordance to Newton's laws.
Photons. Newtonian physics aren't correct. It's a useful approximation that was disproven by Einstein.
Yep. There was no reason to revisit until there was reason to (discovery of constant light speed). And that's how it will continue to be, a theory works well enough for long enough that we'd...
Yep. There was no reason to revisit until there was reason to (discovery of constant light speed). And that's how it will continue to be, a theory works well enough for long enough that we'd assume it as true, until new evidence comes that requires a new theory, which with enough time we'd then accept as more true, and the cycle repeats.
Of course no theories were or will ever be "true" and the underlying philosophical question always remain. Trying to find "the" solution (not just for nature of reality but also consciousness and other philosophical questions of similar kinds) is a fool's errand but that's why it's worthwhile. Of course the solution is impossible to find but imo that isn't the point, the useful theories we develop in our attempts to find it is.
I take issue with Chalmers' reasoning as well, that's not the contention here. The question is whether consciousness can be examined in itself via scientific methods, and there's no way to even...
I take issue with Chalmers' reasoning as well, that's not the contention here. The question is whether consciousness can be examined in itself via scientific methods, and there's no way to even start doing that without introducing some mediating device, which creates yet another source of distrust for any perspective that doesn't take the assumptions of the method for granted.
How trustworthy a proposed methods would be will hinge on how accurate the conclusion we could draw from it, right? Did Newton's definition of mass fully capture the true essence of matter? Most...
How trustworthy a proposed methods would be will hinge on how accurate the conclusion we could draw from it, right? Did Newton's definition of mass fully capture the true essence of matter? Most certainly not, it captured one aspect that's measureable. Did it actually describe anything real at all or was it nothing more than mathematical fiction? Well the mathematical fiction worked well enough for long enough that we're no longer bothered by thinking of mass as he conceptualized it as a "real" property.
People are welcomed to be sceptical (it's worth mentioning that his theory was questioned on philosophical grounds at the time as well). Maybe eventually someone else would propose a better theory with different assumptions and we could all move to adopt it as well. But no theory was ever without assumptions, and evidence, if observable, is necessarily indirect. If we hold to the standard that any such theories are not worth considering, then the entire scientific pursuit is pointless. Which, sure, maybe that's why science and philosophy are separate departments I guess.
If the only answer we're ever allowed to arrive at is that it's impossible to answer, then what's the point? Should we just close shop and go home? Maybe proponents of the hard problem can start suggesting what they think an answer to their question could look like if they actually want an answer here. Because if they really believe a true answer is impossible, then they should accept that approximate answers are all we'd ever get.
I've been trying to figure out how to respond to this for most of a day now, and I'm not sure how to distinguish scientific knowledge from philosophical insight for you. There are not "proponents"...
I've been trying to figure out how to respond to this for most of a day now, and I'm not sure how to distinguish scientific knowledge from philosophical insight for you. There are not "proponents" for the hard problem, there are simply those who recognize that every ontology has a gap somewhere and those who believe theirs is flawless.
There's no answer here. "How does matter turn matter into psyche?" is not a well-formed scientific question, as psyche is not an apt object for rigorous scientific investigation. Non-physicalist ontologies have similar issues, but science isn't discussed in those terms, typically, and the anglophone world is not very friendly to such paradigms anyway, so they tend not to be understood by people who take the "hard problem of consciousness" as a debate.
So I am in the middle of reading through Chalmers' book now, due to insistence of the other user, and I'm changing my mind on a few thing. For one, he did address my remark in the other comment...
So I am in the middle of reading through Chalmers' book now, due to insistence of the other user, and I'm changing my mind on a few thing. For one, he did address my remark in the other comment and actually proposed how a science of consciousness could be developed, which for me is more interesting that just saying it's not possible. Probably get back to this thread once done
Sure we can! By investigating what processes give rise to entities that behave in ways we associate it being conscious, which we can observe. One may object that this is just answering the easy...
But how can we ever truly discover what specific physical processes give rise to consciousness when we cannot directly observe it?
Sure we can! By investigating what processes give rise to entities that behave in ways we associate it being conscious, which we can observe. One may object that this is just answering the easy problem of consciouness, and that the hard version is different and then still unsolved, which I agree! The trick is that, I'd argue, as we learn to answer the easy problem with ever more substantial details, accuracy and predictive power, its distinction to the hard problem would get less clear over time, and eventually we would no longer mind their difference as much (some may even mistaken it as solved). In fact, that's how we human has come to terms with other similar philosophical questions in the past.
What is matter made of? One theory suggested that matters are made of smaller bits of matter. Philosophically, this theory is particularly weak because anyone could then ask what those smaller bits of matter are made of, and what of those bits, etc. The theory either just pushes the can down the road, or requires an infinite hierachy of buidling blocks to account for what appears to be a finite object (seems like a paradox). Yet that's what physics later suggests to be the case. We observed point-like entities inside material with measurable properties like mass and charge, and that in the space between these "atom" there seem to be nothing. Then we found out those atoms are made of smaller particles still. So now we more or less take the atomic theory as a given. Notice how the original rebuttal to the atomic theory still hold, we don't have an definitive explanation of whether the smallest particles that we currently know of (quarks) are truly fundamental or themselves made of smaller bits still. If you subscribe to the idea that the entire universe is one giant wave function, you might even be tempted to say that the atomic theory is incorrect! But as far as general understanding is concerned, atomic theory is good enough.
What is life? How can we distinguish between something being truly alive vs an inanimate objects that merely move and act like living creatures, is there a "life force" behind it all? Well we still don't know what the true 'essence' of life is, but we discovered that life as we know it are almonst always made of these self-replicating units comprised of DNA, phospholipids, proteins, etc. So we created a definition based on what we know of how these units behave. Notice that outside of biology, the question is still very much open. Is it possible that there's alien life out there that are made of entirely different ingredients and follow entirely different rules? Certainly, but we won't know until we have first contact so that'll have to do for now.
Where did human come from? It's such a nagging question that pretty much every societies in history have come up with a myth of creation of their own. Then Darwin came along and now we more or less accepted that human evolved from an earlier species of primate. Of course this answer did not fully resolve the "true essence" of the question, which now becomes 'how did the first life form evolve'. The fact that evolution theory could not provide an answer to this question is a point theists can often make. But the theory works well enough for the rest of biology so the question, while still open, doesn't feel as existential as before and is relegated to merely another research topics.
What's the origin of the universe? This one is still a bit existential to me personally but I think you get the point.
Back to the article, color perception is the typical example for this topic. How can we ever know if 2 people's experiences of color are the same, since all they have access to are each other's discription? Well, we may never know if they can truly be the same, but we sure can know when they're different! We know about color-blind people, how color perception works biologically, how to design tests to distinguish people with color-blindness vs those without. The subject is now a bit less mysterious. People could run the test on themselves if they want to interrogate their internal experiences for a bit.
Take "Mary's room" as another color example, suppose a person is only allowed to see black-and-white for their entire existence growing up, if that person is then let to observe red apple for the first time, what would be their experience? The wiki page for this thought experiment has an interesting section mentioning actual colorblind people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument#The_neural_basis_of_qualia). I'll quote it here:
We believe we've learned the answer from a colorblind synesthete subject. Much like the theoretical Mary, our colorblind synesthete volunteer cannot see certain hues, because of deficient color receptors. However, when he looks at numbers, his synesthesia enables him to experience colors in his mind that he has never seen in the real world. He calls these "Martian colors". The fact that color cells (and corresponding colors) can activate in his brain helps us answer the philosophical question: we suggest that the same thing will happen to Mary [She has the "Wow!" response from subjectively experiencing the color for the first time.]
Of course that's not enough to say qualia exists, but that sure is an interesting example of someone reacting in a way we'd expect people having qualia to react. As the author themselves pointed out:
they note that "this still doesn't explain why these particular events are qualia laden and others are not (Chalmers' "hard problem") but at least it narrows the scope of the problem"
I believe as we learn more about the color experiences, there'd come a point where we could describe most of the phenomena that we needed the concept of qualia to explain, then we'd no longer need to ask what "really" is qualia anymore. The way we no longer need the concept of "ether" to explain behavior of light (though that does not necessarily mean what "ether" was meant to represent is no longer real, we could argue that its role was just taken over by "the fabric of spacetime").
And I believe a similar process would go for our understanding of consciouness as well. The article touched on what I think a probable theory of consciouness could look like, instead of trying to find the difference between subjective and objective experiences directly, we could be one-step-removed and study "the same brain phenomenon as experienced by that same brain itself, or by another". Once we have a sufficiently robust framework to describe most scientifically-relevant consciousness-related phenomena (the easy problem), the question of what consciouness truly is would become less salient. We likely won't ever be able to give a definitive reason why the distinction between subjective and objective experiences exists, but it's useful enough if most observable phemomena involving experiences, be it subjective or objective, could be accounted for by our theory. And then we move forward to whatever the next frontier would be.
Of course even if it's possible, reaching that stage of understanding could still be monumentally difficult. We speculate about atoms for probably nearly thousand years before our scientific progress reach the point where we could detect it. It may be the case that we won't be able to improve on our understanding of consciousness before we come into contact with another "believably conscious" entities to compare. Someone else had post about how no one truly knows and everything is fog, and I do agree how that'll likely be the state of things for a while. I just think it's possible to get to a point where we'd know enough to feel comfortable and the problem'd no longer appear so mystical.
Side comment here, let me know if I'm violating any norms of the community. A few responses in this thread feels teetering on personal attack and I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. If the idea is...
Side comment here, let me know if I'm violating any norms of the community. A few responses in this thread feels teetering on personal attack and I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. If the idea is weak, please attack the idea directly and not the people who voiced the idea.
(note: I am updooting your posts because I do appreciate your linking this! Tone is difficult to convey over text, but I'm not trying to attack you or anything -- this is genuinely a fascinating...
(note: I am updooting your posts because I do appreciate your linking this! Tone is difficult to convey over text, but I'm not trying to attack you or anything -- this is genuinely a fascinating topic to me, but the linked article does it a disservice by being so poorly reasoned)
Re. norms, I think you're OK!
Re. personal attack, in my opinion (which is notably not shared by everybody), non-research backed claims inherently place an author's personal credentials behind a statement. Science avoids this by creating experiments, but philosophy relies on intricately formed, well reasoned arguments, so authorship matters a heck of a lot more.
Typically, as a person with no qualifications, one would litter one's work (if one wanted it taken seriously) with citations of other folks' whose perspectives have held fast over time in order to avoid logical missteps. Generally -- in philosophical or scientific literature -- one will heavily reference previous work, since it's inherently very difficult to make massive leaps without accidentally missing a step or two and coming to a false conclusion.
This article doesn't do that. The author takes a well debated concept, ignores all context, and examines it like we're back in the 1980s, seeing it for the first time. If someone is interested in the field, there are dramatically better reasoned takes available from that era, many of which are referenced from the Wikipedia article on the subject (and I'd seriously recommend reading "The Conscious Mind" if this is of interest to you! There are some PDFs floating around readily on Google). Or, if the general topic is of interest, asking a question to start a discussion going then linking to this as a reference would be appropriate, that way we can discuss in general, without tearing a specific reference apart.
If I were to deeply engage in the topic of discussing the meat of this article, I'd first open it up in a word doc and start highlighting all the unsourced and poorly reasoned arguments. But -- at a glance -- there are so many, it barely seems worth discussing the actual text: it's built on such shaky foundations that its conclusions would fall at the slightest breeze. They could also claim that the moon is made out of cheese, and I wouldn't blink. Honestly, the author says it best:
I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist.
And if I want to know about the philosophy of mind, I ask a person with a degree in cognitive science or philosophy, not theoretical physics.
In conclusion: this is an interesting topic, but the author is clearly out of their depth discussing it. If I'm linked an article, I'm going to discuss the article. Outlining the many many ways that it's glossing over its own argument would take dramatically more energy than just pointing out that (1) they don't know what they're talking about, (2) read Chalmers' or Dennett first, since they're actually great authors whose work is foundational.
Re. life, if you're interested and would like to watch something in the background, I like videos from Phy the Neutrophil's channel! (such as this one on giant viruses) It turns out that a...
Re. life, if you're interested and would like to watch something in the background, I like videos from Phy the Neutrophil's channel! (such as this one on giant viruses) It turns out that a rigorous definition is difficult, and that there are organisms which seem to evenly straddle the line with whichever definition we go with.
Non-philosophers including Rovelli do not understand the hard problem. At all. In a sense, everyone including physicalists about the mind grant there is a "hard problem". The hard problem can be...
Exemplary
Non-philosophers including Rovelli do not understand the hard problem. At all.
In a sense, everyone including physicalists about the mind grant there is a "hard problem". The hard problem can be summed up in a single sentence:
If we have ineffable phenomenal experiences, then these experiences are, in principle, indescribable in mathematical terms
This is because, trivially, if something is ineffable it is indescribable in any terms including mathematical terms. That's what ineffable means. "Physical things" are things that are in principle describable in mathematical terms. To understand the idea, we will need to understand what "phenomenal" and "physical" mean.
Phenomenal concepts are the language we use when we talk about "redness" or "pleasure". It is the "what-it's-likeness" or "qualitative nature" of an experience. The taste of mint, the smell of coffee. There are two important elements of these concepts: ineffability and privacy. These concepts are ineffable, which is to say that there is at least something about the experience that cannot be described to someone who hasn't had the experience before. If you are colorblind, I can't tell you what "redness" is, because when I talk about redness, I verbally "point" at an experience that only color-sighted people have had. They are "private" for roughly the same reason; we can never learn what it feels like to use echolocation by examining bat brains.
Physical concepts are all of the other kinds of language we use. Neuronal firings, avoidance behavior, disposition to become violent, etc. These are the "quantitative properties" of an experience. Quantities that fit neatly in formulas and models and describable mathematically.
Here are the broad categories of solutions here, none of which insist that "there is no hard problem":
Type-a physicalism: the phenomenal, as stipulated, isn't describable in mathematics, and the phenomenal does not exist. "Consciousness" exists, but shouldn't be understood in terms of "felt experience" or "what-it's-likeness", rather in functional terms, behavioral terms, or otherwise in terms that in principle can be described in mathematics
Tybe-b physicalism: the phenomenal, as stipulated, isn't describable in mathematics, but because there is an "a posteriori" identity (see below) between them and physical states, and physical states are describable, therefore the phenomenal is describable, even if it isn't conceptually reducible
Anti-physicalism: the phenomenal, as stipulated, isn't describable in mathematics, and it exists independently of the physical
a posteriori identity: the ancients believed the morning star and the evening star were different stars. If you do more science, you discover they are both the same entity: Venus. We just had two ways of accessing, and two concepts for describing, the same entity. This is distinct from a priori identities which occur when two terms have the same definition (e.g., bachelors and unmarried men.)
I think what the writer advocated for would fall into type-a physicalism, the "there is no..." is just framing it provocatively. Maybe this is my fault for choosing an article with such an...
I think what the writer advocated for would fall into type-a physicalism, the "there is no..." is just framing it provocatively.
Maybe this is my fault for choosing an article with such an aggressive tone because that's what many seem to get hung up on.
Type-a physicalists don't say the kinds of things Rovelli says here, because what he is saying are straightforward mistakes. He at no point was able to provide a basic articulation of the debate,...
I think what the writer advocated for would fall into type-a physicalism, the "there is no..." is just framing it provocatively.
Type-a physicalists don't say the kinds of things Rovelli says here, because what he is saying are straightforward mistakes. He at no point was able to provide a basic articulation of the debate, provide reasons for taking the type-a view, or even reference phenomenal concepts, on which most of the debate hangs. For instance, take the quote:
I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?
This is confused. The "explanatory gap" is the fact that the phenomenal conceptually underdetermines the physical (and vice versa.) I can't, a priori, do neuroscience by reflecting on my experiences, and (if we even have "felt experiences"), I couldn't know about the character of these "felt experiences" of someone merely by looking at their neurology. There are two broad physicalist responses to this worry, and it seems like Rovelli is unfamiliar with both of them.
Maybe this is my fault for choosing an article with such an aggressive tone because that's what many seem to get hung up on.
I don't mind an aggressive tone. It's just disappointing how often relatively basic mistakes in the philosophy of mind gain traction. I don't blame you at all; it's kinda lame the editors didn't have someone familiar with the subject review prior to publication.
I can’t help but read this as “your ideas about metaphysics are wrong, because mine are right”. Which is fine I guess, but I’m not sure it’s the “gotcha” the author seems to think it is.
I can’t help but read this as “your ideas about metaphysics are wrong, because mine are right”. Which is fine I guess, but I’m not sure it’s the “gotcha” the author seems to think it is.
It seems like a long way just to end up back where you started.
We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.
It seems like a long way just to end up back where you started.
Chalmers claims that experience cannot be accounted for by science. But scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience. [...] It is misleading to see science, as often naively portrayed, as a direct account of an absolute and objective world, observed and described from its outside. If we think in this manner, we introduce dualism. No surprise, then, that we find dualism down the road: an irreducible gap between subject and object of knowledge. We have introduced it upfront.
Experience is not over and above the processes that happen in the brain, as Chalmers assumed upfront. The dualism between a first-person description of experience and a third-person (or scientific) account of the same is a normal perspectival difference: the same brain phenomenon as experienced by that same brain itself, or by another. Experience for both — not evidence of two different kinds of reality.
“Red,” as a qualia, is the name of the process we generally undergo when we see or remember or think about the color red. We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?
--
Chalmers asks us to contemplate what he calls a “philosophical zombie.” This is a hypothetical entity that looks and behaves like a human in all respects, including reporting emotions, feelings, dreams and experience, yet it has no consciousness. [...] The very fact that a philosophical zombie could be conceived, Chalmers argues, shows that inner experience is intrinsically distinct from observable natural phenomena.
But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating.
My hypothetical, physically identical zombie twin would be exactly like me — including in experience. In other words, philosophical zombies are distinguishable from ordinary people only by those who assume upfront what Chalmers seeks to prove: that there is something non-physical going on in the world.
I find qualia a fascinating concept, and I have debated this with a range of people over the last 15 years at length. Some people just don't seem to get what qualia or subjective experience is, to...
I find qualia a fascinating concept, and I have debated this with a range of people over the last 15 years at length. Some people just don't seem to get what qualia or subjective experience is, to the extent that I have seriously considered whether some humans are actually philosophical zombies or not- and don't actually have qualia. I do think it's a very slippery concept that is easy to misunderstand, and I wonder about the author's experience of the concept (yes I know, ironic).
I don't find the arguments in the article convincing. Qualia is by definition subjective, and even if a hypothetic device that can 'measure' it is invented, it can never be clear whether any 'measurement' of it is accurate, as there is no way to compare it to the measurement or anyone else's experience of it. If it is unmeasurable, then it cannot be investigated scientifically (and yes I would put pure maths outside of science as well). One can argue about whether it is indirectly measurable, by measuring neural activities correlated with experience, but that is a flawed argument. Neural activity is not experience, and is like saying measuring the temperature of a glass of water is the same as measuring the subjective feeling of cold, just a few steps closer to the 'experiencer'.
I maintain that qualia is the most important thing to investigate that cannot be investigated, and we will never be able to produce a model from particle physics that will explain subjective experience, unless you add a 'qualatron' to every atom and axiomatically define experience that way.
(as a quick note as I pull the ripcord out of this thread, I saw your post and wanted to link this dumb 15 second comedy short that effectively introduces qualia, imo 😅)
(as a quick note as I pull the ripcord out of this thread, I saw your post and wanted to link this dumb 15 second comedy short that effectively introduces qualia, imo 😅)
I mean if you're into panpsychism, there indeed is no hard problem of conciousness. Everything simply has it because it's a fundamental property of matter. Some people may find that idea a bit...
I mean if you're into panpsychism, there indeed is no hard problem of conciousness. Everything simply has it because it's a fundamental property of matter.
Some people may find that idea a bit hard though. Especially right now, when many people want to think that there's no way an LLM can be concious. Yeah, most probably not like we are, but not at all? Who knows.
Peter Watts's Blindsight is a fascinating peek into some ideas around this. Not panpsychism specifically but the conciousness thing.
On the topic I thought Keith Frankish discusssion with Alex O'Connor was pretty good, proponent of the hard problem often have a bunch of unexamined presuppositions in the way they frame the...
On the topic I thought Keith Frankish discusssion with Alex O'Connor was pretty good, proponent of the hard problem often have a bunch of unexamined presuppositions in the way they frame the problem and he makes a good job pointing those out I thought.
That's a bold claim given that this has been a philosophical discussion point for fifty years now. Let's check out the author's credentials:
I find that this SMBC comic sums up how physicists routinely get old and start "fixing" all the other fields. I know that devaluing the social sciences is a pretty standard thing to do these days, but IMO overvaluing natural sciences instead doesn't do us any favours either.
Also, I have some critiques about the author's understanding of what the p-zombie thought experiment is trying to demonstrate, as well as, like, everything about that stance in 2026 given that LLMs exist. However it does devolve into me prodding an LLM to effectively refute his dumb argument about behaviour == consciousness, so I'm putting it in a spoiler tag, in order to keep people's feeds free of LLM slop (even if it apparently will still contain theoretical physicist slop).
(I chopped out a bunch of Carlo's purple prose, for brevity)
First off: I'd invite anyone interested in the field to go read The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, which is where Chalmers says his piece about p-zombies (page 94, "The Irreducibility of Consciousness"). He actually addresses this argument, 30 years in the past, when talking about critics who believe this perspective to be impossible (largely because people have been leveling this identical critique for 30+ years).
Quick sidebar: do bear in mind that philosophers -- unlike people describing physical sciences -- do not rely on math and models to make their arguments, so although David makes some compelling arguments they are not necessarily describing reality, he's just a very compelling speaker. Firm theoretical footing, evidence, and successful modelling should, imo, be the measuring sticks by which we determine whether new ideas are worth adopting; philosophy necessarily only ever tackles the first. When reading about psychology/ philosophy/linguistics/etc., I find that it's best to keep an open mind, read extremely broadly, and synthesize your own position instead of following one person. Anyways, just a caveat, since I've known a few people to get lost in Jung's works 😅
Also, in skimming the Wikipedia article on philosophical zombies, apparently they weren't even proposed by Chalmers first. Furthermore, there have been critiques by other philosophers (arguing the author's point) -- e.g. Daniel Dennett -- that the thought experiment isn't valid. It doesn't seem like Carlo is adding to the discourse, here, just rehashing others' arguments that he's come up with from first principles (maybe) but with less rigor.
Finally, my rebuttal of Carlo's rebuttal is that I asked the sand in someone's server rack to read up on Carlo's life and then simulate an interview. Here's an excerpt:
Yeah, right Carlo, as long as it reports having internal state it's conscious.
I do find it fitting having a (borderline) p-zombie refute the arguement that p-zombies do not exist.
As always when people post this type of thing, I strongly disagree. I do agree that consciousness is likely a result of purely physical processes! But that doesn't make the hard problem of consciousness any less of a problem. The fundamental issue is that we cannot observe consciousness externally, which makes it very difficult to find out under what conditions it arises. I know, or can assume by analogy, that other humans are conscious. Because of their similarities to us I feel comfortable assuming the same of animals. But how can we ever truly discover what specific physical processes give rise to consciousness when we cannot directly observe it?
I feel the same about this article, I agree completely that there is no 'soul' separate from the physical human, there is nothing metaphysical going on in our brains, but that doesn't mean you can just hand wave all the interesting issues surrounding human consciousness and 'hard problem of consciousness' away. There are so many questions that need answering, we know so little about our consciousness, animal consciousness, machine consciousness. It maybe be pointless to keep talking about it because we are all just guessing but I find it really interesting.
There do seem to be correlations between consciousness and physical processes. You're stuck in your own head. Although lucid dreaming is a thing, you're often unconscious when you're asleep. Physical attacks have known bad effects. The effects of alcohol or other drugs are known.
I could imagine this being pinned down further with more scientific study, to the point where we do see consciousness being associated with specific physical mechanisms.
Will there still be an explanatory gap? I don't think thought experiments done now can tell us much about whether people will continue to care about that.
There will still be an explanatory gap. We likely will, eventually, reach a point where it feels like pointing out the problem of induction rather than a real lack of explanation, but science is not apt to consciousness in itself, it mediates science. Brain scans will only ever give us more "outside" of the experience, and even sci fi ideas of mind melds made real will beg the issue of communication vs commingling. It will never work as "proof" against competing theories of consciousness, in the way people really want.
One thing to consider is that the concepts associated with consciousness might change with more knowledge. For example, before there were reliable thermometers, conventional wisdom from Aristotle up through the Renaissance was that heat and cold were considered different qualities. (See here.)
Similarly, our fuzzy conceptions about consciousness might mutate somehow with more study. The meanings of words can change.
It's amazing that you managed to convey pretty much all the points I wanted to make with way fewer words! I need better self-control haha
Very true! but that's basically metaphysics changing around it. Without our current physicalist paradigm, the hard problem is dissolved.
All physics started out as metaphysics. We take it for granted but concepts like force or mass, at least in the way we currently understood them, were pretty much invented by Newton. If you think about it, the only actually physical phenomena that could be measured were duration and distance. Mass as an inherent property of matter cannot be "directly" observed, only indirectly through its effect on changes in motion. Yet we feel confortable considering it as good as real without worrying about any explanatory gap.
The p-zombies equivalent would be like asking to imagine there being an object with no mass but still behaving in accordance to Newton's laws.
Photons. Newtonian physics aren't correct. It's a useful approximation that was disproven by Einstein.
Your paragraph here is incidentally part of why the foundation of physics hasn't progresssed in 40 years. The philosophical aspects of physics have somewhat been tossed to the side.
Yep. There was no reason to revisit until there was reason to (discovery of constant light speed). And that's how it will continue to be, a theory works well enough for long enough that we'd assume it as true, until new evidence comes that requires a new theory, which with enough time we'd then accept as more true, and the cycle repeats.
Of course no theories were or will ever be "true" and the underlying philosophical question always remain. Trying to find "the" solution (not just for nature of reality but also consciousness and other philosophical questions of similar kinds) is a fool's errand but that's why it's worthwhile. Of course the solution is impossible to find but imo that isn't the point, the useful theories we develop in our attempts to find it is.
I take issue with Chalmers' reasoning as well, that's not the contention here. The question is whether consciousness can be examined in itself via scientific methods, and there's no way to even start doing that without introducing some mediating device, which creates yet another source of distrust for any perspective that doesn't take the assumptions of the method for granted.
How trustworthy a proposed methods would be will hinge on how accurate the conclusion we could draw from it, right? Did Newton's definition of mass fully capture the true essence of matter? Most certainly not, it captured one aspect that's measureable. Did it actually describe anything real at all or was it nothing more than mathematical fiction? Well the mathematical fiction worked well enough for long enough that we're no longer bothered by thinking of mass as he conceptualized it as a "real" property.
People are welcomed to be sceptical (it's worth mentioning that his theory was questioned on philosophical grounds at the time as well). Maybe eventually someone else would propose a better theory with different assumptions and we could all move to adopt it as well. But no theory was ever without assumptions, and evidence, if observable, is necessarily indirect. If we hold to the standard that any such theories are not worth considering, then the entire scientific pursuit is pointless. Which, sure, maybe that's why science and philosophy are separate departments I guess.
If the only answer we're ever allowed to arrive at is that it's impossible to answer, then what's the point? Should we just close shop and go home? Maybe proponents of the hard problem can start suggesting what they think an answer to their question could look like if they actually want an answer here. Because if they really believe a true answer is impossible, then they should accept that approximate answers are all we'd ever get.
I've been trying to figure out how to respond to this for most of a day now, and I'm not sure how to distinguish scientific knowledge from philosophical insight for you. There are not "proponents" for the hard problem, there are simply those who recognize that every ontology has a gap somewhere and those who believe theirs is flawless.
There's no answer here. "How does matter turn matter into psyche?" is not a well-formed scientific question, as psyche is not an apt object for rigorous scientific investigation. Non-physicalist ontologies have similar issues, but science isn't discussed in those terms, typically, and the anglophone world is not very friendly to such paradigms anyway, so they tend not to be understood by people who take the "hard problem of consciousness" as a debate.
So I am in the middle of reading through Chalmers' book now, due to insistence of the other user, and I'm changing my mind on a few thing. For one, he did address my remark in the other comment and actually proposed how a science of consciousness could be developed, which for me is more interesting that just saying it's not possible. Probably get back to this thread once done
Sure we can! By investigating what processes give rise to entities that behave in ways we associate it being conscious, which we can observe. One may object that this is just answering the easy problem of consciouness, and that the hard version is different and then still unsolved, which I agree! The trick is that, I'd argue, as we learn to answer the easy problem with ever more substantial details, accuracy and predictive power, its distinction to the hard problem would get less clear over time, and eventually we would no longer mind their difference as much (some may even mistaken it as solved). In fact, that's how we human has come to terms with other similar philosophical questions in the past.
What is matter made of? One theory suggested that matters are made of smaller bits of matter. Philosophically, this theory is particularly weak because anyone could then ask what those smaller bits of matter are made of, and what of those bits, etc. The theory either just pushes the can down the road, or requires an infinite hierachy of buidling blocks to account for what appears to be a finite object (seems like a paradox). Yet that's what physics later suggests to be the case. We observed point-like entities inside material with measurable properties like mass and charge, and that in the space between these "atom" there seem to be nothing. Then we found out those atoms are made of smaller particles still. So now we more or less take the atomic theory as a given. Notice how the original rebuttal to the atomic theory still hold, we don't have an definitive explanation of whether the smallest particles that we currently know of (quarks) are truly fundamental or themselves made of smaller bits still. If you subscribe to the idea that the entire universe is one giant wave function, you might even be tempted to say that the atomic theory is incorrect! But as far as general understanding is concerned, atomic theory is good enough.
What is life? How can we distinguish between something being truly alive vs an inanimate objects that merely move and act like living creatures, is there a "life force" behind it all? Well we still don't know what the true 'essence' of life is, but we discovered that life as we know it are almonst always made of these self-replicating units comprised of DNA, phospholipids, proteins, etc. So we created a definition based on what we know of how these units behave. Notice that outside of biology, the question is still very much open. Is it possible that there's alien life out there that are made of entirely different ingredients and follow entirely different rules? Certainly, but we won't know until we have first contact so that'll have to do for now.
Where did human come from? It's such a nagging question that pretty much every societies in history have come up with a myth of creation of their own. Then Darwin came along and now we more or less accepted that human evolved from an earlier species of primate. Of course this answer did not fully resolve the "true essence" of the question, which now becomes 'how did the first life form evolve'. The fact that evolution theory could not provide an answer to this question is a point theists can often make. But the theory works well enough for the rest of biology so the question, while still open, doesn't feel as existential as before and is relegated to merely another research topics.
What's the origin of the universe? This one is still a bit existential to me personally but I think you get the point.
Back to the article, color perception is the typical example for this topic. How can we ever know if 2 people's experiences of color are the same, since all they have access to are each other's discription? Well, we may never know if they can truly be the same, but we sure can know when they're different! We know about color-blind people, how color perception works biologically, how to design tests to distinguish people with color-blindness vs those without. The subject is now a bit less mysterious. People could run the test on themselves if they want to interrogate their internal experiences for a bit.
Take "Mary's room" as another color example, suppose a person is only allowed to see black-and-white for their entire existence growing up, if that person is then let to observe red apple for the first time, what would be their experience? The wiki page for this thought experiment has an interesting section mentioning actual colorblind people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument#The_neural_basis_of_qualia). I'll quote it here:
Of course that's not enough to say qualia exists, but that sure is an interesting example of someone reacting in a way we'd expect people having qualia to react. As the author themselves pointed out:
I believe as we learn more about the color experiences, there'd come a point where we could describe most of the phenomena that we needed the concept of qualia to explain, then we'd no longer need to ask what "really" is qualia anymore. The way we no longer need the concept of "ether" to explain behavior of light (though that does not necessarily mean what "ether" was meant to represent is no longer real, we could argue that its role was just taken over by "the fabric of spacetime").
And I believe a similar process would go for our understanding of consciouness as well. The article touched on what I think a probable theory of consciouness could look like, instead of trying to find the difference between subjective and objective experiences directly, we could be one-step-removed and study "the same brain phenomenon as experienced by that same brain itself, or by another". Once we have a sufficiently robust framework to describe most scientifically-relevant consciousness-related phenomena (the easy problem), the question of what consciouness truly is would become less salient. We likely won't ever be able to give a definitive reason why the distinction between subjective and objective experiences exists, but it's useful enough if most observable phemomena involving experiences, be it subjective or objective, could be accounted for by our theory. And then we move forward to whatever the next frontier would be.
Of course even if it's possible, reaching that stage of understanding could still be monumentally difficult. We speculate about atoms for probably nearly thousand years before our scientific progress reach the point where we could detect it. It may be the case that we won't be able to improve on our understanding of consciousness before we come into contact with another "believably conscious" entities to compare. Someone else had post about how no one truly knows and everything is fog, and I do agree how that'll likely be the state of things for a while. I just think it's possible to get to a point where we'd know enough to feel comfortable and the problem'd no longer appear so mystical.
Side comment here, let me know if I'm violating any norms of the community. A few responses in this thread feels teetering on personal attack and I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. If the idea is weak, please attack the idea directly and not the people who voiced the idea.
(note: I am updooting your posts because I do appreciate your linking this! Tone is difficult to convey over text, but I'm not trying to attack you or anything -- this is genuinely a fascinating topic to me, but the linked article does it a disservice by being so poorly reasoned)
Re. norms, I think you're OK!
Re. personal attack, in my opinion (which is notably not shared by everybody), non-research backed claims inherently place an author's personal credentials behind a statement. Science avoids this by creating experiments, but philosophy relies on intricately formed, well reasoned arguments, so authorship matters a heck of a lot more.
Typically, as a person with no qualifications, one would litter one's work (if one wanted it taken seriously) with citations of other folks' whose perspectives have held fast over time in order to avoid logical missteps. Generally -- in philosophical or scientific literature -- one will heavily reference previous work, since it's inherently very difficult to make massive leaps without accidentally missing a step or two and coming to a false conclusion.
This article doesn't do that. The author takes a well debated concept, ignores all context, and examines it like we're back in the 1980s, seeing it for the first time. If someone is interested in the field, there are dramatically better reasoned takes available from that era, many of which are referenced from the Wikipedia article on the subject (and I'd seriously recommend reading "The Conscious Mind" if this is of interest to you! There are some PDFs floating around readily on Google). Or, if the general topic is of interest, asking a question to start a discussion going then linking to this as a reference would be appropriate, that way we can discuss in general, without tearing a specific reference apart.
If I were to deeply engage in the topic of discussing the meat of this article, I'd first open it up in a word doc and start highlighting all the unsourced and poorly reasoned arguments. But -- at a glance -- there are so many, it barely seems worth discussing the actual text: it's built on such shaky foundations that its conclusions would fall at the slightest breeze. They could also claim that the moon is made out of cheese, and I wouldn't blink. Honestly, the author says it best:
And if I want to know about the philosophy of mind, I ask a person with a degree in cognitive science or philosophy, not theoretical physics.
In conclusion: this is an interesting topic, but the author is clearly out of their depth discussing it. If I'm linked an article, I'm going to discuss the article. Outlining the many many ways that it's glossing over its own argument would take dramatically more energy than just pointing out that (1) they don't know what they're talking about, (2) read Chalmers' or Dennett first, since they're actually great authors whose work is foundational.
However, these are deeply intertwined. Just the physicists seem to have forgotten that Newton was a philosopher.
Re. life, if you're interested and would like to watch something in the background, I like videos from Phy the Neutrophil's channel! (such as this one on giant viruses) It turns out that a rigorous definition is difficult, and that there are organisms which seem to evenly straddle the line with whichever definition we go with.
Non-philosophers including Rovelli do not understand the hard problem. At all.
In a sense, everyone including physicalists about the mind grant there is a "hard problem". The hard problem can be summed up in a single sentence:
If we have ineffable phenomenal experiences, then these experiences are, in principle, indescribable in mathematical terms
This is because, trivially, if something is ineffable it is indescribable in any terms including mathematical terms. That's what ineffable means. "Physical things" are things that are in principle describable in mathematical terms. To understand the idea, we will need to understand what "phenomenal" and "physical" mean.
Phenomenal concepts are the language we use when we talk about "redness" or "pleasure". It is the "what-it's-likeness" or "qualitative nature" of an experience. The taste of mint, the smell of coffee. There are two important elements of these concepts: ineffability and privacy. These concepts are ineffable, which is to say that there is at least something about the experience that cannot be described to someone who hasn't had the experience before. If you are colorblind, I can't tell you what "redness" is, because when I talk about redness, I verbally "point" at an experience that only color-sighted people have had. They are "private" for roughly the same reason; we can never learn what it feels like to use echolocation by examining bat brains.
Physical concepts are all of the other kinds of language we use. Neuronal firings, avoidance behavior, disposition to become violent, etc. These are the "quantitative properties" of an experience. Quantities that fit neatly in formulas and models and describable mathematically.
Here are the broad categories of solutions here, none of which insist that "there is no hard problem":
a posteriori identity: the ancients believed the morning star and the evening star were different stars. If you do more science, you discover they are both the same entity: Venus. We just had two ways of accessing, and two concepts for describing, the same entity. This is distinct from a priori identities which occur when two terms have the same definition (e.g., bachelors and unmarried men.)
I think what the writer advocated for would fall into type-a physicalism, the "there is no..." is just framing it provocatively.
Maybe this is my fault for choosing an article with such an aggressive tone because that's what many seem to get hung up on.
Type-a physicalists don't say the kinds of things Rovelli says here, because what he is saying are straightforward mistakes. He at no point was able to provide a basic articulation of the debate, provide reasons for taking the type-a view, or even reference phenomenal concepts, on which most of the debate hangs. For instance, take the quote:
This is confused. The "explanatory gap" is the fact that the phenomenal conceptually underdetermines the physical (and vice versa.) I can't, a priori, do neuroscience by reflecting on my experiences, and (if we even have "felt experiences"), I couldn't know about the character of these "felt experiences" of someone merely by looking at their neurology. There are two broad physicalist responses to this worry, and it seems like Rovelli is unfamiliar with both of them.
I don't mind an aggressive tone. It's just disappointing how often relatively basic mistakes in the philosophy of mind gain traction. I don't blame you at all; it's kinda lame the editors didn't have someone familiar with the subject review prior to publication.
I can’t help but read this as “your ideas about metaphysics are wrong, because mine are right”. Which is fine I guess, but I’m not sure it’s the “gotcha” the author seems to think it is.
It seems like a long way just to end up back where you started.
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I find qualia a fascinating concept, and I have debated this with a range of people over the last 15 years at length. Some people just don't seem to get what qualia or subjective experience is, to the extent that I have seriously considered whether some humans are actually philosophical zombies or not- and don't actually have qualia. I do think it's a very slippery concept that is easy to misunderstand, and I wonder about the author's experience of the concept (yes I know, ironic).
I don't find the arguments in the article convincing. Qualia is by definition subjective, and even if a hypothetic device that can 'measure' it is invented, it can never be clear whether any 'measurement' of it is accurate, as there is no way to compare it to the measurement or anyone else's experience of it. If it is unmeasurable, then it cannot be investigated scientifically (and yes I would put pure maths outside of science as well). One can argue about whether it is indirectly measurable, by measuring neural activities correlated with experience, but that is a flawed argument. Neural activity is not experience, and is like saying measuring the temperature of a glass of water is the same as measuring the subjective feeling of cold, just a few steps closer to the 'experiencer'.
I maintain that qualia is the most important thing to investigate that cannot be investigated, and we will never be able to produce a model from particle physics that will explain subjective experience, unless you add a 'qualatron' to every atom and axiomatically define experience that way.
(as a quick note as I pull the ripcord out of this thread, I saw your post and wanted to link this dumb 15 second comedy short that effectively introduces qualia, imo 😅)
I mean if you're into panpsychism, there indeed is no hard problem of conciousness. Everything simply has it because it's a fundamental property of matter.
Some people may find that idea a bit hard though. Especially right now, when many people want to think that there's no way an LLM can be concious. Yeah, most probably not like we are, but not at all? Who knows.
Peter Watts's Blindsight is a fascinating peek into some ideas around this. Not panpsychism specifically but the conciousness thing.
On the topic I thought Keith Frankish discusssion with Alex O'Connor was pretty good, proponent of the hard problem often have a bunch of unexamined presuppositions in the way they frame the problem and he makes a good job pointing those out I thought.