![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Subjective life
Jul. 24th, 2004 08:28 amDavid Chalmers is widely known for having asked a question he calls the "Hard Problem" of consciousness: Why should there occur an experienced subjective "inner life," the experience of what it is like to be me?
To pick an example familiar to philosophers, why should the firing of C-fibers (the nerves that carry pain signals) be accompanied by a subjective experience of "painy stuff"? There is no reason, Chalmers claims, that pain signals, if they are nothing other than neurochemical messages sliding along neural pathways, should be accompanied by a subjective, qualitative experience.
If I sit still and simply watch and listen, I can sense a great deal of qualitative stuff all at once: the sound of rain outside the window, the feel of cool breeze as it passes over my skin, the low light of the room illuminating the computer desk and wall and a cabinet adjacent to the computer desk in blue-grey light, even the sounds of the TV in the next room. All of this combines into a simultaneous panoramic smorgasbord of sensory "qualia."
This fact is made all the more confusing by the observation that there is no single piece of the brain where all sensory signals are processed into a single panoramic subjective "take" of the world around us.
What makes this even more puzzling is that when we dedicate ourselves deeply to the performance of certain tasks, we "lose ourselves" in the process, sometimes overlooking direct bodily sensory input. For example, we can easily "lose ourselves" into the subjectiveness of a movie or book; or, when we are driving we "lose ourselves" into the subjectiveness of perceiving the world as though we are a large squat being with four wheels.
There is a measurable delay (which can be up to half a second) between the actual act of sensation and the subjective experience of it. Many philosophers like Daniel Dennett consider this to be a nail in the coffin of the idea that subjective experience is fundamental and unexplainable. Even more puzzling is the occurrence of "blindsight", a condition caused by damage to a certain part of the brain. The brain continues to process certain kinds of visual data, but this data is not translated into visual subjective experience. The person is subjectively blind -- that is, she does not have the subjective experience of sight -- but is often able to "guess" quite accurately where specific objects or people are around her.
To pick an example familiar to philosophers, why should the firing of C-fibers (the nerves that carry pain signals) be accompanied by a subjective experience of "painy stuff"? There is no reason, Chalmers claims, that pain signals, if they are nothing other than neurochemical messages sliding along neural pathways, should be accompanied by a subjective, qualitative experience.
If I sit still and simply watch and listen, I can sense a great deal of qualitative stuff all at once: the sound of rain outside the window, the feel of cool breeze as it passes over my skin, the low light of the room illuminating the computer desk and wall and a cabinet adjacent to the computer desk in blue-grey light, even the sounds of the TV in the next room. All of this combines into a simultaneous panoramic smorgasbord of sensory "qualia."
This fact is made all the more confusing by the observation that there is no single piece of the brain where all sensory signals are processed into a single panoramic subjective "take" of the world around us.
What makes this even more puzzling is that when we dedicate ourselves deeply to the performance of certain tasks, we "lose ourselves" in the process, sometimes overlooking direct bodily sensory input. For example, we can easily "lose ourselves" into the subjectiveness of a movie or book; or, when we are driving we "lose ourselves" into the subjectiveness of perceiving the world as though we are a large squat being with four wheels.
There is a measurable delay (which can be up to half a second) between the actual act of sensation and the subjective experience of it. Many philosophers like Daniel Dennett consider this to be a nail in the coffin of the idea that subjective experience is fundamental and unexplainable. Even more puzzling is the occurrence of "blindsight", a condition caused by damage to a certain part of the brain. The brain continues to process certain kinds of visual data, but this data is not translated into visual subjective experience. The person is subjectively blind -- that is, she does not have the subjective experience of sight -- but is often able to "guess" quite accurately where specific objects or people are around her.
