Consciousness (Voice Only) | Send Me To Sleep
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So there is this really big conundrum at the heart of the philosophy of mind that which is referred to as the hard problem of consciousness, or sometimes the mind-body problem. And that conundrum is simply this. We all have a subjective experience, right? We all feel things, see things, taste things, smell things. And that experience, the experiencing of it, as it were, is intangible it seems to exist in a place we cannot find and i'm not just referring to neurons firing in the brain of course we can use modern science to observe conscious experience in its material way, the material effects of it happening. But the true experience, what is referred to as the experiencing of qualia, seems to be immaterial.
It seems to exist outside of what we can observe using the tools of modern science that purely deal with the reality of matter that is the atoms and photons and subatomic particles that make up this universe. In between all of those, we do not find consciousness. We do not find a place at which we can point and say, there is the mind, there is experience. as far as we know there is only the subjective, individual, unique experiencing of it.
What is consciousness and why is it considered a hard problem?
And so we have this problem because in one hand we cannot deny that these experiences are real. To do this would imply that they did not exist at all, which we know not to be true, as we all individuals experience them every day. And then, on the other hand, we cannot account for consciousness in the material world. We cannot understand the mechanism of consciousness using anything that we would frequently use in science. And so How do we justify this? How do we understand consciousness to operate as a phenomenon in the universe? And there are a few schools of thought on this. The two biggest schools of thought being monism and dualism. And these go back some time indeed. First discussed by the ancient Greek philosophers.
Now monism supports the idea or puts forward the idea that this physical reality is all that there is. We know that there is matter. We can account for atoms. We can account for the physical world we can use the tools of science to measure it and in doing so we find consciousness nowhere and therefore thusly consciousness must necessarily be intrinsically a part of that material world in a way as such, that it is illusory. In some way, monism says there must be a misinterpretation of what consciousness is. It is an illusion of sorts. Material is the only thing and this ethereal consciousness is not that. It is something unexplained and by virtue of faith in material science, it should be possible to explain it by measuring reality alone.
And then on the other side of this, we have dualism. Of course, monism is meaning the singular dualism, meaning two. So this school of thought puts forward the idea that yes, indeed, there is a material realm. It would be difficult not to acknowledge that. But consciousness This intangible, unaccountable thing must exist because it exists in a plane all of its own. The subjective realm, as it were. And that these two realms, material, objective, And consciousness, the mind, subjective, are completely distinct and separate.
And so the reason that you cannot find consciousness in the material realm is because it exists somewhere outside of it, and in some way interacts with it, but in a way
that cannot be fathomed or seen with objective measurement.
And though these have been the most popular ideas around consciousness, for some time Another popular idea is something that perhaps you will have heard of, although is very rarely explained fully. This idea of non-dualism. Now there are many
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