Archive for February, 2019

February 21, 2019

The hard problem of consciousness

by Neil Rickert

It has been a while since my last post.  And that’s because I have been struggling with a hard problem.

No, not the Chalmers hard problem.  I have my own hard problem.

The easy problem of consciousness:

The easy problem, for me, has been in understanding consciousness.  When I say “easy”, I do not mean trivially easy.  It has been difficult at times.

The hard problem of consciousness:

For me, the hard problem of consciousness has been attempting to communicate my understanding to others.  And, thus far, I have not found a successful way of doing that.

On truth

In a recent post at the the PeacefulScience forum, I wrote:

What it really boils down to, is that there is no such thing as metaphysical truth. There is only conventional truth. And different social groups will disagree over their social conventions.

Most people find this hard to swallow.  They probably see it as obviously wrong.  But they don’t point out where I went wrong, probably because they are unable to determine that.

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