Michael Pollan

Yeah, there's an inside.

There's an interiority that third person perspective can't penetrate.

It can speculate about.

But I think that's a very good point you make about sentience and its difference, that it is something we can perceive and make a judgment about from the outside.

I mean, there may be some slight inside to it, but basically it's a, we can, we can assess it from the outside and we can't with consciousness.

And that's a huge, I mean, that is the hard problem.

I'd put it, I'd add also it's, I mean, it's the problem of how do you get from matter, this, you know, three pounds of neurons in our head to, to mind, to, to subjective experience, if that is indeed the way it happens.

Yeah, and just to be clear for people, again, it's amazing how hard it is for many people to form an intuition about what makes the hard problem hard.

And some of the most celebrated thinkers in neuroscience and philosophy, many of them to my eye, have not had any kind of natural intuition for this.

And the symptom of that is they kind of blow past it, asserting some reductive explanation of consciousness as though they had solved the hard problem

whereas they really haven't even acknowledged it.

And so we might name some of these people.

But the heart problem predates Chalmers, and he gave it this name that was very, very sticky, but it goes all the way back to Leibniz, at least.

Leibniz invoked this image of a mill.

Just imagine you blow up the brain to the size of a mill and walk inside it,

at no point would you encounter anything that announced its sufficiency to produce the inner subjectivity of that organ.

And there are many other philosophers who've touched this, Saul Kripke and Ned Block and Frank Jackson and Joseph Levine.

I don't know if he pronounced it Levine or Levine, but he gave us this notion of the explanatory gap, which is just another way of saying the hard problem.

So there's this, the problem is that

whatever the right answer for the emergence of consciousness is, if in fact it emerges.