(This comment only for those who take this subject seriously; save yourself the trouble!) Another attempted conceptual solution to a non-conceptual problem. ‘Hard problem of consciousness’ boils down to this: how to bridge 2 (previously logically determined) unbridgeable conceptual categories, namely ‘the physical/material’ and the supposedly ‘non-physical/material subjective & mental’? Obviously can’t be done without transgressing normal rules of rationality & logic. However, let that not prevent another attempt at the impossible, and the favoured method currently is to ‘complicate arguments’ such that one enters into a realm of conceptual ‘mysticism’ (convincing bafflement by complexity), ie bits of quantum, mathematical formulae, hard-to-understand descriptions, scientific/technological authoritarianism etc etc: ending up with something like ‘you don’t/can’t appreciate the new quantum/mathematical resolution to the problem of consciousness because you’re too thick’. Well, maybe. But the real problem was not identified to begin with: the problem with conscious awareness and subjectivity (and all the rest of it) is not how do you present a convincing argument (to convince whom exactly?) but what’s the ultimate point of experiential consciousness (whether subjective immaterial or brain dependent, both or neither or something else altogether) to the experiencing cogniser? What’s it all for? In the last resort, who cares what Hawking or Nagel or anyone can argue, what’s the point of ‘knowing cognition’? This is the ultimate metaphysical question which cannot be answered by conceptual gimcrackery and argumentation and dogmatic authoritarianism because it includes the totality (at all times) of all such gimcrackery in its existential inquiry. It can be pushed even further: what’s the point of their being a point? Basic metaphysical inquiry is not destroyed by conceptual complexity and (supposedly) convincing argumentation; nor can it be resolved at the level of intellectual chatter; something altogether more primordial is being called for.
