Addendum — A Philosopher Schools Citizenschallenge

 

 A counterpoint to Cc’s, “Chalmers’ Hard Problem and the Living Moment of Now — A story and a challenge for the philosophically minded.”

Introduction: I’m not looking to convince anyone so much as to connect with science-respecting people who are tired of gratuitous philosophical mysterianism and trust in physical reality and Evolution as guides to understanding ourselves, along with our deepest questions.

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(March 9, 2026) - Citizenschallenge wrote: Thank you Professor for your invitation and I’ll gladly take you up on your offer.

Eight years ago when the Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide snapped into focus for me, like an old time 35mm slide, the experience and clarifying perspective inspired me to write: “The Missing Key to Stephen Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” - so titled because a rereading of his essay triggered the coalescence of decades worth of musings

As for consciousness, that interest goes way back to my youth, I even tried wading through Nagel's essay in the mid-70s until the vertigo got to be too much for me and I tossed in the towel.

In any event, my "Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide" insight (clarification) started me on a path of knocking on the doors of genuine philosophers via email, occasionally letters, also engaging with the local College Philosophy Department and their Philosophy Club, showing up, listening, sharing handouts, inviting dialogue. The experience has been akin to the sound of one hand clapping. But that wasn’t going to stop me from learning about this philosophical conundrum.

It took eight years of living, questioning, reading, thinking, writing to reach the level of resolution that enabled me to write “Chalmers’ Hard Problem and the Living Moment of Now”  that I finished this past April. A collection of fact-based scientific evidence and arguments doing its best to tell a significant story challenging the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers paradigm with its Hard Problem of Consciousness and its assumed explanatory gap between body & brain, and sense of self & mind.

The D-N-C mindset can’t conceive of body-brain creating a sense of self and thought. For me, Evolutionary biology makes this intellectual-construct of a body-mind gap unnecessary — since, the moral of our cumulative scientific understanding is that creature experience and awareness of self were never separate to begin with.

Chalmers’ Hard Problem and the Living Moment of Now

A story and a challenge for the philosophically minded.

A Thesis Challenging the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers "Consciousness" Paradigm

Presented to the Fort Lewis College Philosophy Club in Durango

If you’ve plunged into the philosophical arena of human consciousness, I think we’d agree—if on nothing else—that the expert dialogue is a great big ball of confusion. After all, in a 2024 survey by Robert Kuhn, there are 325 competing philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. That’s not theories closing in on understanding; that’s 325 opinions that don’t convince any peers.

At the head of this ball of confusion is the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers paradigm, summed up in Chalmers’ Hard Problem of Consciousness: Why and how do physical processes in the brain (neural activity) give rise to subjective experience? What is it like to be something? How does matter become thought?

Writer Marvin Von Renchler excellently summarizes the flaw in the Hard Problem: “Rather than demonstrate a separation between physical processes and subjective experience, it is assumed.”

Biologically, everything we observe points to continuity: increasingly complex systems of memory, integration and self-referential processing emerging stepwise under selection pressures. There is no clear place for something non-physical to be introduced.

Von Renchler concludes that, “The ‘hard problem’ is less an unsolved mystery and more a framing issue, a mismatch between philosophical categories and how evolved systems actually work.”

There’s another objection I’ve yet to receive a serious response to: Why search for our mind wholly within our brain in the first place?

3/4_Hoffman, Objects of Consciousness, questions + replies (18-21)

Defending Physical Reality.  Because, apparently somebody needs to.  

Feel free to copy and share.

This is the third installation of my review of Hoffman/Prakash’s responses which are attached to their 2014 Objects of Consciousness paper, specifically #18 to #21.  The open source Q and A was copied and pasted, complete, no edits.  I simply added my two cents worth.

I don’t pretend to be any sort of scholar or self made expert, not even, this is a student’s exploration and discovery.  Since I like homework more than most, I want to make my trail of discovery and adventures in critical thinking available for busy students who relate to these themes and want to better understand the dark art of scientific deception for fun, power and profit.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577

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Objections and Replies (#18 - #21 of 21)

Cc: The objections are printed in blue, author’s responses in mauve, my comments in dark green.  Supplementary information is clearly marked.  Most titles are linked to original sources.

Hoffman:  Here we summarize helpful feedback from readers of earlier drafts, in the form of objections and replies.

(18) Their treatment of the combination problem is worth reading. There is however a very large problem with their model: It relies on the Cartesian product of X1 and X2 (this is right after Conjecture 3). The Cartesian product is not conducive to real combination (this problem is all over mathematics, by the way—mathematicians don't care about it because they only care about high level abstractions). In section Objections and Replies, where they discuss objections to their model, they discuss this very objection (objection 10). 

Unfortunately, their resolution to this objection is mere handwaving: But as the conscious agents in the combination continue to interact, the decisions become less and less independent. This is mere wishful thinking. The authors have no reason to believe this less and less business and they've given the reader no reason to think this either. In fact, if this less and less business were true, their model wouldn't require the Cartesian product in the first place. Frankly, this objection and their failure to handle it guts their model. 

In this same paragraph, in the next couple of sentences, the authors just assert (using proof by blatant assertion) that in some undefined limit, a true new conscious entity emerges. This makes the complex presentation of their model otiose. Why not just write a haiku asserting that the combination problem is not a problem?

The limit we speak of (for the emergence of a new combined conscious agent) is the asymptotic limit. Asymptotic behavior is a precise technical concept in the theory of Markov chains (see, e.g., Revuz, 1984, chapter 6). 

The defining characteristic of a Markov chain is that no matter how the process arrived at its present state, the possible future states are fixed.

“Precise technical concept” - but is it proof when there’s no accompanying physical evidence?

2/4_Hoffman, Objects of Consciousness, questions + replies (13-17)

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577

This is the second installation of Hoffman/Prakash’s responses which are attached to their 2014 Objects of Consciousness paper, specifically #13 to #17.  I haven't changed any of their words, simply added my two cents worth.

I don’t pretend to be any sort of scholar or self made expert, not even, this is a student’s exploration and discovery.  Something to share with other interested students.  Since I like homework more than most, I don’t mind sharing the fruits of my hours' worth of effort. 

I want to make my trail of discovery and adventures in critical thinking available to others with whom these themes resonate - especially those who also possess a desire to defend serious science against the current onslaught of strategic deception for fun, power and profit. 

Objections and Replies (13-17 of 21)

Hoffman:  Here we summarize helpful feedback from readers of earlier drafts, in the form of objections and replies.

Cc:  The objections are printed in blue, author’s responses in mauve, my comments in dark green.  Supplementary information is clearly marked.  Most titles are linked to original sources.

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Some Elements of an Evolutionary Theory of Perception

Perceptual Systems, Historical Background, Innate And Learned Classical perceptual phenomena, Broad theoretical approaches, Current research/future developments.

Sources, science.jrank.org

Ecological approaches to perceptual learning: learning to perceive and perceiving as learning

Agnes Szokolszky, Catherine Read, Zsolt Palatinus, et al., 2019

The Essential Elements of an Evolutionary Theory of Perception

Eric P. Charles, 2017,

The evolution of early symbolic behavior in Homo sapiens

Kristian Tylén, Riccardo Fusaroli, Sergio Rojo, et al. PNAS 2020

The Evolution and Fossil History of Sensory Perception in Amniote Vertebrates

doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-082517-010120, March 21, 2018 

Evolutionary Specialization of Tactile Perception in Vertebrates

Eve R. Schneider, Elena O. Gracheva, and Slav N. Bagriantsev, 2016

Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions

Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, Handbook of Emotions, 2000

The evolution of modern human brain shape

Simon Neubauer, Jean-Jacques Hublin and Philipp Gunz, 2018:

Intrinsic Multiperspectivity: Conceptual Forms and the Functional Architecture of the Perceptual System

Rainer Mausfeld, PhD.

Perceptual Worlds and Sensory Ecology

By: Stephen Burnett, PhD, Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):75

Ch.17. A Hierarchical Model of the Evolution of Human Brain Specializations

H. CLARK BARRETT.

Surroundings and Evolution Shape Human Sight, Smell and Taste

by: Andrea Korte, February 19, 2017

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(13) In section Evolution and Perception, the authors' argument seems to be: Argument 1: (1) Natural selection favors fitness in perceptual systems. (2) Fitness is incompatible with truth. (3) Therefore, natural selection favors perceptions that do not see truth in whole or in part.

1/4_Hoffman, Objects of Consciousness, questions + replies (1-12)

Defending Physical Reality.  Because, apparently somebody needs to.  Feel free to copy and share.

This overall project is intended as a student resource for an in-depth critical examination of Donald Hoffman's: The Case Against Reality; Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes.  In a previous section we did a detailed chapter by chapter review (index at the bottom of this page), including many links to authoritative resources that support my claims.  

In this section I’ve copied and reproduced the complete 21 questions and responses section from Hoffman/Prakash's Frontiers of Psychology paper 2014 Objects of Consciousness paper, which helped lay the foundation for his book.  This review will be spread out over four installments, I haven't changed any text, simply added my two cents worth.

I don’t pretend to be any sort of scholar or self-made expert, no indeed, this is closer to a student’s exploration.  Since I like homework more than most, I don’t mind sharing my process and the fruits of my hours' worth of effort, in the hope it can help others save time. 

I want to make my trail of discovery and adventures in critical thinking available to others with whom these themes resonate - especially those who also possess a desire to defend serious science against the current onslaught of strategic deception for fun, power and profit. 

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Objections and Replies (1-12 of 21)

Donald Hoffman:  Here we summarize helpful feedback from readers of earlier drafts, in the form of objections and replies.   

Cc: The objections are printed in blue, author’s responses in mauve, my comments in dark green.  Supplementary information is clearly marked.  Most titles are linked to original sources.

(1) Your definition of conscious agents could equally well-apply to unconscious agents. Thus, your theory says nothing about consciousness.

DH:  Even if the definition could apply to unconscious agents, that would not preclude it from applying to consciousness, any more than using the integers to count apples would preclude using them to count oranges.

Cc:  Nor does it preclude applying to the totally imaginary.  The response also hints at an unwillingness to acknowledge the difference between, “Saying something” of substance about human consciousness, and simply “doing math.” 

(2) How can consciousness be cast in a mathematical formalism without losing something essential?

DH:  The mathematics does lose something essential, viz., consciousness itself. 

Similarly, mathematical models of weather also lose something essential, viz., weather itself. A mathematical model of hurricanes won't create rain, and a mathematical model of consciousness won't create consciousness. 

The math is not the territory. But, properly constructed, mathematics reveals the structure of the territory.

Cc:  But consciousness is not a geographic space that can be described using coordinates and vectors.

Consciousness is a complex interaction with the outside world and the inside of our bodies.  It’s not limited to the brain.  Where does all that get represented within Hoffman’s formulas?