The Hard Problem of Consciousness: A Question for Atheists

 

 

      Consciousness proves that causes or things within the universe cannot be explained purely from a materialistic paradigm. The hard problem of consciousness tries to explain why or how materialism can produce consciousness. Under materialism, there is an unbridgeable gap between physical things and the emergence of consciousness within human beings. Materialism refers to the idea that all that exists is just matter and motion. Atoms and molecules are all that exist while the existence of God and angels are impossible as they are not physical objects. If you are reading this blog post then you have consciousness but what is consciousness? It is the first-person experience of the world; it is the ability to be aware of the fact that we are aware. A computer is not aware of its own existence nor of its experiences. The second part of consciousness can be described through the example of a red apple. We have a particular way of experiencing that apple that is not explained in any of the physical components of the hat. We can examine the color red and can say from a scientific materialistic perspective that it is the reflection of light at a specific wavelength at a specific energy which gives it its properties. But all these properties do not explain anything of the property of the color red in itself. Redness of the apple is something that emerges in our mind as a conscious experience rather than something physical. If you met a person who was blind from birth and successfully explained to them about photons of light and wavelengths, you still could not explain to them what the color red looks like as it is indescribable. Science looks at what is describable in a third-person objective manner while consciousness is a first-person subjective experience. Consciousness cannot be explained by materialism, it cannot be quantified or put under a microscope. A theist’s understanding of God (generally) is not a physical object. Once it is proven that other things in one’s own experience such as their conscious everyday experience, it opens the door to other non-physical things such as God or heaven.

While we cut open a brain and look at all the veins and nerves and matter, looking at a computer’s binary code does not tell anything about the experience, a mind must be needed to decode it. A computer running on binary code does not give itself experience or realize its own awareness. A mind must be needed to understand what is going on inside the brain. Furthermore, if you see another person across the room, you do not need to see their brain to understand they are also conscious therefore you are concluding something that is not directly physically observable but they still have it which is consciousness. Even if one relates something such as the emotion of love to oxytocin for example, none of its properties that make it up such as the different carbons have love within it as it is not an attribute. It is a “mysterious” property that arises that cannot be reduced to what it physically is.

One can explain brain function in terms of input-output but one cannot explain the experience of it. The qualia or the first-person subjective experience cannot be explained. One could explain the function of the brain for the input and output for love but not the experience of love. In this same way, AI can never become conscious, there is an unbridgeable gap between input-output and the experience of it. This is similar to the Chinese room thought experiment by John Searle in which there is a person inside a room that does not know any Mandarin but there are Chinese people outside the room sending him letters inside. He does not know any Mandarin but has a rulebook explaining what symbols to write back and then he sends a letter back. To the people outside the room, they think he knows Mandarin but he is simply doing input-output without understanding. AI and Chat-GPT do not understand the experience of their messages but are solely input-output.

“What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience … there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” (Chalmers, D. 1995. Facing up to the problem of consciousness. J. Consciousness Stud. 2, 200–219.)

What makes us different from computers is there is not only a performance of functions that is accompanied by experience, there is not just the emotion of love but the experience of what it feels to love. This is what materialism cannot explain. Atheists often respond to this problem by claiming that we will know in the future and current science is not there yet. The problem with this response is that science deals with the external third-person objective analysis of the world but consciousness is a first-person subjective experience so there is a category error. Some other atheists claim that consciousness is just an illusion therefore nothing is conscious. Others claim that everything material is conscious and atoms have a proto-conscious and therefore consciousness is a brute fact without an explanation. Others claim that conscious matter exists and that gives rise to consciousness and therefore claims that consciousness gives rise to material objects and not the other way around. Theists posit that there is a necessary and independent creator, God, who willfully created humans to have consciousness and therefore there is an explanation. Once materialism is abandoned the world will make more sense and ideas of God and angels can be accepted.