pcalau12i

This problem presupposes metaphysical realism, so you have to be a metaphysical realist to take the problem seriously. Metaphysical realism is a particular kind of indirect realism whereby you posit that everything we observe is in some sense not real, sometimes likened to a kind of "illusion" created by the mammalian brain (I've also seen people describe it as an "internal simulation"), called "consciousness" or sometimes "subjective experience" with the adjective "subjective" used to make it clear it is being interpreted as something unique to conscious subjects and not ontologically real.

If everything we observe is in some sense not reality, then "true" reality must by definition be independent of what we observe. If this is the case, then it opens up a whole bunch of confusing philosophical problems, as it would logically mean the entire universe is invisible/unobservable/nonexperiential, except in the precise configuration of matter in the human brain which somehow "gives rise to" this property of visibility/observability/experience. It seems difficult to explain this without just presupposing this property arbitrarily attaches itself to brains in a particular configuration, i.e. to treat it as strongly emergent, which is effectively just dualism, indeed the founder of the "hard problem of consciousness" is a self-described dualist.

This philosophical problem does not exist in direct realist schools of philosophy, however, such as Jocelyn Benoist's contextual realism, Carlo Rovelli's weak realism, or in Alexander Bogdanov's empiriomonism. It is solely a philosophical problem for metaphysical realists, because they begin by positing that there exists some fundamental gap between what we observe and "true" reality, then later have to figure out how to mend the gap. Direct realist philosophies never posit this gap in the first place and treat reality as precisely equivalent to what we observe it to be, so it simply does not posit the existence of "consciousness" and it would seem odd in a direct realist standpoint to even call experience "subjective."

The "hard problem" and the "mind-body problem" are the main reasons I consider myself a direct realist. I find that it is a completely insoluble contradiction at the heart of metaphysical realism, I don't think it even can be solved because you cannot posit a fundamental gap and then mend the gap later without contradicting yourself. There has to be no gap from the get-go. I see these "problems" as not things to be "solved," but just a proof-by-contradiction that metaphysical realism is incorrect. All the arguments against direct realism, on the other hand, are very weak and people who espouse them don't seem to give them much thought.

There is a strange phenomenon in academia of physicists so distraught over the fact that quantum mechanics is probabilistic that they invent a whole multiverse to get around it.

Let's say a photon hits a beam splitter and has a 25% chance of being reflected and a 75% chance of passing through. You could make this prediction deterministic if you claim the universe branches off into a grand multiverse where in 25% of the branches the photon is reflected and in 75% of the branches it passes through. The multiverse would branch off in this way with the same structure every single time, guaranteed.

Believe it or not, while they are a minority opinion, there are quite a few academics who unironically promote this idea just because they like that it restores determinism to the equations. One of them is David Deutsch who, to my knowledge, was the first to publish a paper arguing that he believed quantum computers delegate subtasks to branches of the multiverse.

It's just not true at all that the quantum chip gives any evidence for the multiverse, because believing in the multiverse does not make any new predictions. Everyone who proposes this multiverse view (called the Many-Worlds Interpretation) do not actually believe the other branches of the multiverse would actually be detectable. It is something purely philosophical in order to restore determinism, and so there is no test you could do to confirm it. If you believe the outcome of experiments are just random and there is one universe, you would also predict that we can build quantum computers, so the invention of quantum computers in no way proves a multiuverse.

It does not lend credence to the notion at all, that statement doesn't even make sense. Quantum computing is inline with the predictions of quantum mechanics, it is not new physics, it is engineering, the implementation of physics we already know to build stuff, so it does not even make sense to suggest engineering something is "discovering" something fundamentally new about nature.

MWI is just a philosophical worldview from people who dislike that quantum theory is random. Outcomes of experiments are nondeterministic. Bell's theorem proves you cannot simply interpret the nondeterminism as chaos, because any attempt to introduce a deterministic outcome at all would violate other known laws of physics, so you have to just accept it is nondeterministic.

MWI proponents, who really dislike nondeterminism (for some reason I don't particularly understand) came up with a "clever" workaround. Rather than interpreting probability distributions as just that, probability distributions, you instead interpret them as physical objects in an infinite-dimensional space. Let's say I flip four coins so the possible outcomes are HH, HT, TH, and TT, and each you can assign a probability value to. Rather than interpreting the probability values as the likelihood of events occurring, you interpret the "faceness" property of the coin as a multi-dimensional property that is physically "stretched" in four dimensions, where the amount it is "stretched" depends upon those values. For example, if the probabilities are 25% HH, 0% HT, 25% TH, and 50% TT, you interpret it as if the coin's "faceness" property is physically stretched out in four physical dimensions of 0.25 HH, 0 HT, 0.25 TH, and 0.5 TT.

Of course, in real quantum mechanics, it gets even more complicated than this because probability amplitudes are complex-valued, so you have an additional degree of freedom, so this would be an eight-dimensional physical space the "quantum" coins (like electron spin state) would be stretched out in. Additionally, notice how the number of dimensions depends upon the number of possible outcomes, which would grow exponentially by 2^N the more coins you have under consideration. MWI proponents thus posit that each description like this is actually just a limited description due to a limited perspective. In reality, the dimensions of this physical space would be 2^N where N=number of possible states of all particles in the entire universe, so basically infinite. The whole universe is a single giant infinite-dimensional object propagating through this infinite-dimensional space, something they called the "universal wave function."

If you believe this, then it kind of restores determinism. If there is a 50% probability a photon will reflect off of a beam splitter and a 50% probability it will pass through, what MWI argues is that there is in fact a 100% chance it will pass through and be reflected simulateously, because it basically is stretched out in proportions of 0.5 going both directions. When the observer goes to observe it, the observer themselves also would get stretched out in those proportions, of both simulateously seeing it it pass through and be reflected. Since this outcome is guaranteed, it is deterministic.

But why do we only perceive a single outcome? MWI proponents chalk it up to how our consciousness interprets the world, that it forms models based on a limited perspective, and these perspectives become separated from each other in the universal wave function during a process known as decoherence. This leads to an illusion that only a single perspective can be seen at a time, that even though the human observer is actually stretched out across all possible outcomes, they only believe they can perceive one of them at a time, and which one we settle on is random, I guess kind of like the blue-black/white-gold dress thing, your brain just kind of picks one at random, but the randomness is apparent rather than real.

This whole story really is not necessary if you are just fine with saying the outcome is random. There is nothing about quantum computers that changes this story. Crazy David has a bad habit of publishing embarrassingly bad papers in favor of MWI. One paper he defends MWI with a false dichotomy pitching MWI as if its only competition is Copenhagen, then straw manning Copenhagen by equating it to an objective collapse model, which no supporter of this interpretation I am aware of would ever agree to this characterization of it.

Another paper where he brings up quantum computing, he basically just argues that MWI must be right because it gives a more intuitive understanding of how quantum computing actually provides an advantage, that it delegates subtasks to different branches of the multiverse. It's bizarre to me how anyone could think something being "intuitive" or not (it's debatable whether or not it even is more intuitive) is evidence in favor of it. At best, it is an argument in favor of utility: if you personally find MWI intuitive (I don't) and it helps you solve problems, then have at ya, but pretending this somehow is evidence that there really is a multiverse makes no sense.

It’s absolutely not pointless to talk about the fact that we have an internal experience. The whole discussion you’ve hopped into is about whether this internal experience that we have can be explained purely in material terms.

First, I commented on objects of qualia ("red", "blue", "loudness," "quietness"), not experience. That is, again, a very very very separate concept, and I am not sure what the adjective "internal" is doing here.

It absolutely does not require that. There are mountains of research showing that other animals construct world models and use them to plan their actions. Corvids are one prominent example of this.

And there's evidence of them using objects in these internal models? Or is there evidence of them having certain behaviors which we associate those behaviors with our own conceptions of objects?

In fact, symbols and language require this underlying machinery to work, that’s why we can teach stuff like sign language to apes.

I'm not sure why you bring this up, nowhere did I deny that symbols and language require underlying machinery to work. Obviously a rock cannot make use of symbols or language.

I’ll try to explain this to you once again. Please try to actually read and understand what I’m saying before responding this time.

I read it every single time and respond to every point in great detail. Do not pretend I am not reading your posts.

The brain constructs an internal model using the data from the senses like eyes, ears, touch, and so on. This data is assembled into an internal model that is a representation of reality. The brain cannot simulate reality in its full fidelity because that would mean recreating the full complexity of the universe around us. Therefore, the model that is created must necessarily be an abstraction that loses detail. This has nothing to do with the universe being beyond our perception or being invisible.

I am talking about the origin of experience itself, that which is sensed/observed/visible/experienced, whatever you want to call it. Telling me about how the brain constructs a model based on sensory data does not tell me anything about this question.

This is no different from the act of a computer program creating a 3d scene using data from a camera. Nobody in their right mind would start claiming that this means that reality is beyond our perceptions, and if something is beyond our perceptions, it is invisible. The argument is equally absurd when applied to the human mind.

Yet again, an analogy that does not work at all. We can observe the camera, the computer, what the camera is recording, as well as the 3d scene that is being produced by the computer program. I am talking about the origin of experiences themselves. If we do not experience reality as it really is, then by definition reality lies outside of experience, and is something that is "given rise to" in the brain as you yourself stated in your own words, which is what I initially responded to. Hence, you have to explain how nonexperiential reality in a particular configuration can possibly weakly emerge experiences.

Again, try to think about how computer simulations work. What you’re saying has no logic behind it.

I know how computers work, I literally have a degree in computer science, and what you're saying has no relevance to the discussion at all. You keep providing examples of weakly emergent things, I know what weak emergence is. I do not need more examples of weak emergence. Every property of a system we know of, we know of because we observed/experienced it, and thus every example you provide of some property weakly emerging from other properties, those are all examples of things that can be observed/experienced weakly emerging new properties that can also be observed/experienced. None of these explain how experience itself could weakly emerge.

The fact that we are able to misinterpret logically requires that what we perceive is a model of reality otherwise the whole concept of misinterpreting would be impossible to begin with.

We form models of reality based on what we perceive, based on our sensory inputs. Our senses are not themselves models of anything. Saying that misinterpretation "logically requires" that the inputs themselves are incorrect models, I do not understand what this even means. The inputs are not models of anything, but the basis in which we use to form models of reality. It's kinda like data, that data we use to construct our interpretations and models of the world. The data itself cannot be right or wrong, it has no truth value. For something to have a truth value, it has to be compared to a normative standard. All truth values are assigned by basically answering the question, "are you interpreting the data correctly?" Which answering that question is in and of itself another interpretation.

That’s complete nonsense. A human that grows up in isolation would still have a world model and would be able to interact with their environment. Language and symbols emerge from the underlying model. Ironically, it is you who are arguing for dualism claiming that language and social structures exist separate from underlying physical reality.

This is just a lazy straw man. I never claimed social structures are separate from physical reality, you know I did not say that. Anyone can read what I quoted in saying that objects, labels, and symbols have no meaning in complete isolation, and then you turn around and switch it up to "they would still have a world model, so you're talking nonsense!" A model of reality does not need to be based on objects. You are entirely misrepresenting everything I am saying.

The reality in which we experience is not made up of discrete objects. It is a continuum. You cannot draw a hard-and-fast line between any two sets of objects which have no ambiguity at all as to its boundaries. Where does a mountain begin and where does it end? When does life begin and when does it pass away? There are no clear-cut boundaries, you can slice up reality in any way you want, set the boundaries anywhere that you find convenient.

There is no reason to form models of reality that have discrete and autonomous objects unless it is for the purpose of having symbols to communicate with others in a social setting. Reality is not actually composed of these kinds of discrete objects. As far as reality is concerned, there is no "cat," humans invent the word "cat" as a way to label and talk about a set of observable properties which have some relevance to us in our social context and thus we may wish to communicate with one another.

If an animal is in complete isolation from its birth, it would have no need for forming discrete conceptual objects because it would not need to communicate with anybody. It might develop a model that causes it to respond to a very loose collection of experiences, for example, it may see a bear and respond to it by running away. However, there is a key distinction here, which is that the animal never associates the loose collection of experiences which causes it to run away with a symbol like a "bear." It never promotes the experiences to objecthood, and the insistence that it does is anthropomorphizing the animal. This promotion only occurs if there is a need to communicate it.

That’s precisely the problem that shared environment solves. We are able to communicate with one another because symbols are rooted in the environmental context.

...? So you agree that the meaning of symbols is rooted in the social conditions?

If you grew up in isolation, you could absolutely create symbols that made sense to you. The fact that other people couldn’t decipher them without help is a completely separate issue. You’re conflating transmission of symbols with the origin of symbols here.

If you agree that nobody could decipher the symbols, then the "you" of tomorrow would not be able to decipher the symbols created by the "you" of the past, at least in a way that the meaning could be derived with certainty and without any ambiguity. You cannot escape this by speaking of "conflating transmission with origin," because in order to use your own symbol consistently, you have to repeatedly transmit it to yourself. If it is impossible for me to transmit my symbols unambiguously, then even if I do use them tomorrow the same as I did today, I would have no way of even being certain that I am.

Once again you’re peddling dualism here.

No, you've just decided to devolve into straw man arguments. I was trying to have a genuine discussion with you but you're just being unreasonable. All your walls of text have constantly just avoided the question and are trying to run around it constantly, and now are trying to be "clever" by acting like you're somehow turning this on me by going "no you're the dualist!!!!"

I didn't even accuse you of dualism, I merely said that you need to make an argument regarding weak emergence. If experience is something that weakly emerges in the brain, then by definition what it emerges from must be nonexperiential, so you need to explain how nonexperiential reality can weakly emerge experience, or else you would fall into strong emergence which is logically parallel to dualism. The whole time has been me just asking you to make an argument. You have not explained anything at all, you just accuse people of not reading you when I clearly read everything you write and you just simply do not answer the question at all, and now want to intentionally misrepresent my point in order to avoid addressing it.

Since you have decided to turn this discussion into something that is not fruitful at all, I am just going to disengage from this discussion and do not plan to reply to you further, as I know nothing in your reply will even make an attempt to address how the crux of the matter.

I didn’t say qualia required any separate explanation. In fact, my whole argument is precisely that it doesn’t.

Then why bring it up? It's pointless to talk about qualia at all if you do not think it need some sort of separate explanation than any other objects. It's not relevant to the discussion.

However, saying that objects are just social norms is superficial because social norms and interactions themselves are a product of how our brains interpret the world. The concept of objects isn’t exclusive to humans either, other animals form these concepts as well without need to have social structures or language.

The concept of objects requires language and symbols. What other animals is there evidence of this?

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here to be honest or what you’re basing the argument on. You’re just stating this as fact without any reasoning provided.

I thought the reasoning was rather self-apparent, but I will explain in more detail. Weak emergence is when you can explain a system's properties as reducible to the laws that govern the behavior of what it is composed of in that particular configuration. Strong emergence is when you cannot reduce down a system's properties in this way. Strong emergence would be as if the property just appears when you have a particular configuration, with no underlying physical laws that could possibly explain where it comes from. All you can say for certain is that property comes into being when you have a particular configuration, and the properties are not reducible down to the individual parts.

Those aren't claims, but just definitions. All I am saying is that having a strong emergence view of consciousness is basically the same as dualism, because that's what dualism also posits, that in the arbitrary configuration of matter that is the human brain, consciousness just appears on top of it, and there is no explanation for it and it is not reducible to any physical laws that can explain its origin, as it would not be derivative of the physical laws that govern the brain's behavior. It is just a separate thing that is slapped on top of it, of which there can be no explanation as to its origin, only that it is always there whenever you have particular configurations of matter, such as the brains of living organisms.

If the universe is entirely invisible, you cannot explain how the visible world of our lived experiences "arises" without, at some point, just arbitrarily inserting it there, such as, in particular atomic configurations you can claim that experiences just appear. This is just a logical necessity and is unavoidable.

That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m actually arguing is that the reality we perceive is a simulation the brain creates internally based on the inputs from the senses. It’s a model of reality derived from the information that feeds into the brain.

That is absolutely and undeniably what you are saying. If you argue that what we perceive is not reality as it really is, but something else, then by unavoidable logical necessity, you are claiming that "true" reality is beyond our perceptions, and if something is beyond our perceptions, it is invisible. If you think "true reality" is invisible, then you will never be able to explain, from a weakly emergent standpoint, how a collection of invisible stuff gives rise to the visible world of our experiences, i.e. how is it that a world that is nonperceptual gives rise to perception.

There’s plenty of evidence that what we perceive does not directly correspond to reality. Stuff like optical illusions is a perfect example where our inner model diverges from the primary reality. Another example can be found in psychedelic drugs. Somebody tripping on shrooms is going to perceive reality in a very different way. This has absolutely nothing to do with dualism however.

I addressed this in my very first reply. Illusions are not even close to an argument that we do not perceive reality as it really is. It is only evidence that we can misinterpret what we perceive.

Of course they exist independently within the brain. They’re part of the world model that the brain constructs. Words we use in our language are merely labels for the concepts encoded within the structure of our brains.

No, they are labels encoded within the social structure which would not only have no meaning but also have no purpose if you lived in complete isolation. These objects only have existence and meaning as a correlation between the brain and the social structure, but not independently within the brain.

The reason we’re able to communicate with other humans and even animals is precisely because we form similar underlying representations of the world. For example, you can give directions to a dog and it can understand them.

We can form similar representations because we are all taught to associate our experiences with the same symbols in the same social structure. We all have different physical bodies and experience the world differently, but are all taught under the same social institutions to assign the same set of stimuli with the same words, allowing us to then have a shared language. We agree on what "red" is or what "cats" are not because we all have the same physical object of "red" or "cat" floating around in our skull, but because we all live in the same society where everyone is taught to associate "red" and "cat" with the same set of stimuli.

The rule-following paradox has to do with problems of structuring formal systems. This has nothing to do with encoding concepts within the brain.

That is not the rule-following paradox. The rule-following paradox is the notion that symbols cannot encode meaning independent of a social structure. If a person in complete isolation invented their own symbols to refer to what they categorize as different objects, and you discovered these symbols, it would be impossible to actually derive their meaning with certainty. If you want to define a symbol, you can do it using other symbols, but at some point, but this will be entirely circular unless at some point you connect the symbol to empirical content. If those symbols are connected to something like a basket of examples, the point of the rule-following paradox is that every basket is inherently ambiguous, because there is always an infinite number of way to interpret the meaning of the symbol from the basket. If you cannot derive the meaning of the symbols from the basket, then neither could the person who produced the basket, i.e. if you were in complete isolation, you could never have certainty that you are even using the symbols you are using today with the same meaning that you were using them yesterday. Enforcement of the consistent use of symbols requires social institutions, and those symbols are ambiguous unless they are correlated with those social institutions.

The objects don’t just magically appear within the brain. They’re a product of reinforcement learning through our interactions with the environment.

Yes, they only exist as a relationship between the brain and its social environment, hence they cannot be found in the brain, but only in correlations between the brain and the social structure.

I mean we all obviously have a qualia of experience. That’s not really in question. What’s in question is whether it’s a product of the physical world or not.

Again, all objects are socially constructed norms. Objects of qualia do not demand a separate explanation from any other object.

That’s not true. Let’s say we develop technology that allows us to connect two brains together. This isn’t purely hypothetical as there are cases of siamese twins who report having such shared experience.

If you connect two brains together then they are the same physical system. I'm not really sure the point you're trying to make here.

I don’t see consciousness as a dualistic split. I see it as an emergent phenomena that arises from the chatter of neurons within the brain. Much the same way a virtual world in a video game can be created from the underlying computation performed on a computer chip.

Both the virtual world and the computer chip can be observed, yet what you are arguing that observability itself arises from things that are fundamentally unobservable. I fail to see how this could ever be explained in a weakly emergent sense, as I fail to see how any arbitrary configuration of unobservable stuff could weakly emerge the property of observability. It would seem to inevitably have to be something strongly emergent, which is basically dualism, even if you call this strongly emergent property "physical," it would only be a change in language, not in kind.

Although, again, I am not advocating dualism, I am rejecting the premise that the reality we perceive is an illusionary product of the mammalian brain, but merely stating that what we perceive is reality, i.e. I am a direct realist. I am criticizing indirect realism as I fail to see how you can get from nonobservability to observability, nor have you provided a reason to believe that this supposedly entirely invisible reality even exists. As far as I am concerned, what we perceive is reality.

Again, I’m not suggesting that there is any separate realm. I’m arguing against such notion.

Then stop asking for explanations of qualia if you agree that they do not demand a special explanation.

I disagree here. The primary purpose of the brain is to create a simulation of the world that can be used to extrapolate into the future to facilitate decision making. The objects are a part of the model the brain constructs, and that’s the basis for social interactions. These would not be possible in the first place without our brains having a common internal representation of the world around us.

These objects only exist as a relationship between the brain and the social structure and do not exist independently within the brain. Nobody has ever been able to peer into someone's brain and find a conceptual object. They can only correlate brain patterns to a set of stimuli which are pre-associated with some sort of socially recognized symbol, such as the experimenter has to first specify a symbol, such a "dog," then specify what set of stimuli would correspond to a "dog" in that particular social setting, then they have to show this to the patient, and then you can correlate these to the person's brain patterns. Everyone's brain patterns are different, and so it is not even possible to build a general mind-reading machine, as each machine has to be trained specifically on the person's brain and its associations with social symbols which require a specific social setting.

I’m familiar with Wittgenstein, but I don’t agree with all of his ideas. He also also been demonstrably wrong on a grand scale with Principia Mathematica where he tried to show that formal systems can be proven to be self consistent. This whole notion was shown to be fundamentally misguided by Gödel.

Okay, but that's not relevant, I am talking specifically about the rule-following problem. If you think objects exist autonomously inside of the brain, then how do you solve the rule-following paradox that this belief leads to? Since you are familiar with Wittgenstein, you should be able to address this paradox.

We possess subjective experiences or “qualia,” which are inherent to our individual consciousness and cannot be directly communicated or proven in others.

The whole point of my post was to say that no, there is no such thing as "subjective experiences" because experiences are not products of the subject.

This makes it impossible for us to confirm whether another being also has qualia, as it remains an internal property of their experience that is uniquely personal and not sharable with others.

This is purely a linguistic issue. Perspectives are defined according to an object used as their basis, and so it definitionally would not make sense for one object to adopt the perspective of another, because doing so would require it to become that other object, and thus would cease to be itself any longer.

For example, my perspective and yours differ, we are standing in a different location, we have a different nose in the front of our face, etc. I could make my perspective more and more similar to yours by erasing differences between us, but I will never fully occupy your perspective until all differences are erased, which would mean I would literally become you, and so I would no longer occupy your perspective, because "I" would no longer exist.

There is literally no physical reason I could gradually move closer to your perspective, it is merely a linguistic issue that would prevent me from fully occupying it, because then by definition I would no longer be me.

In the absence of concrete proof, we are left with two fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. One perspective, dualism, posits that qualia or subjective experiences originate from a separate, non-physical realm distinct from the material reality we perceive. Conversely, materialism proposes that qualia is derived from physical processes within our brain and body, suggesting they should be understood as emergent properties of neural activity rather than supernatural phenomena.

There is no "consciousness," you have not established that there is, and so your "solutions" are not justified either. That was basically the whole point of my original comment. There is no convincing justification for such a dualistic split in the first place, so all these "solutions" are also unnecessary.

"Qualia" is also not interchangeable with "experience," as qualia is a set of abstract objects like blue, red, loud, quiet, etc. Like all objects, they are normative and socially constructed ways of judging a set of experiences to be something. They do not fundamentally occupy any sort of different realm than any other kind of object that demands a separate explanation.

In my view, dualism lacks any further explanatory value when compared to materialism. Given that it necessitates additional assumptions that require further justification, I find it more reasonable to consider qualia as an emergent property of the physical system in which our minds are a product. This perspective allows for a more straightforward explanation of consciousness and subjective experience within the framework of known physical laws and principles.

Objects of qualia, or any category of objects at all, do not "emerge" from the brain, they are social constructs. You cannot dig into the brain and find them, you will never find "blue" or "red" in the brain any more than you will "cats" or "trees" or "circles" or "triangles." Objects are socially constructed norms which only have ontological reality in how they are applied in a social setting, and do not have autonomous existence inside of brains.

I would recommend you research Wittgenstein's "rule-following problem." The book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a good overview of this.

We don’t have conclusive proof of how consciousness arises in the brain, but that just means we have more research to do in this area.

The hard problem cannot be solved by "more research" because it’s not a scientific question but a contradiction within metaphysical realist philosophy. Such contradictions can’t be resolved through discovery, as it’s conceptually impossible to even begin to imagine what a possible solution could even look like. A philosophy built on contradictions is fundamentally flawed and must abandon its premises to progress, and that cannot be escaped through scientific discovery.

In Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland, he discusses how Lenin misunderstood Bogdanov's critique of metaphysical realism, falsely accusing him of idealism. Lenin couldn't let go of the idea that what we experience is a "reflection" of reality rather than reality itself, keeping dialectical materialism tethered to metaphysical assumptions.

These assumptions boil down to Kant’s division between phenomenon (reality as experienced) and noumenon (reality independent of experience). Most modern philosophy implicitly maintains this dualism. Thomas Nagel argued that perception is brain-generated because reality, being independent of perspective, cannot match our perspective-dependent experiences. David Chalmers encapsulated this in the term "consciousness," describing experience as distinct from reality.

This metaphysical framework assumes that reality is separate from perception, leading to the question of how the brain "gives rise" to perception. But this question is meaningless. If reality is independent of perception, it’s unobservable, and the claim becomes entirely metaphysical. Material sciences study observable reality, so distancing "true reality" from observation creates an unbridgeable gap that cannot explain how reality produces experience, and can't even explain how we know anything at all, as supposedly the material sciences would be based in studying something we can never even hope to ever have evidence even exists!

While too many materialists cling to metaphysics and vaguely promise science will solve this problem, this "promissory materialism" fails because the hard problem stems from a flawed metaphysical premise. Idealists fare no better, adding mysticism to resolve the same contradictions. The solution is not to "solve" the problem but to reject the framework that creates it.

Metaphysical realism, logically similar to Kant's dualism in its structure, assumes perception is separate from reality. Nagel’s and Donald Hoffman’s arguments for this fail: Nagel seems to have missed that in neither general relativity nor quantum field theory can you assign properties to physical systems without specifying a perspective, so there cannot meaningfully even be a perspective-independent reality, and thus the need for this division he demands isn't justified. Hoffman misinterprets illusions as proof we don’t perceive reality as it really is because, supposedly, we perceive things that are false. However, reality is neither true nor false—it just is what it is. Misinterpretation is a failure of the observer, not of reality. There are no "illusions," only misunderstandings.

Lenin still clung to the dualism implicit in metaphysical realism, insisting that what we experience is not reality itself, but a "reflection" of it created by the "mind." He thus misunderstood and basically slander Bogdanov, accusing him of being an "idealist" for believing everything is "mind," thinking he was denying that there even exists a reality independent of "consciousness." But that was not even close to Bogdanov's position. Bogdanov did not even believe experiences are "mind" or "consciousness" or some separate substance the brain "gives rise to." The reality we experience just is reality. It is not a denial of reality, it is an embracing of it: the world we are immersed in every day, that surrounds us, that is the object of study of the material sciences, that is reality.

This supposed imaginary thing that Lenin claims is being "reflected" is entirely metaphysical. In Jocelyn Benoist's Toward a Contextual Realism, this is why he rejects equally Kant's notion of the phenomenon. The term "phenomenon" literally means "the appearance of," suggesting that what is being perceived is merely the appearance of, reality as opposed to reality itself, kind of like a reflection of it. But this is not the stance of direct realism. The stance of direct realism is that what we observe is reality. It is neither the "appearance of" nor the "reflection of" anything. It just is, and what it is is neither true nor false, it is only real.

There is no "mind" or "consciousness" producing experience—it is not a product of anything or a reflection of anything, but simply is reality itself, which is precisely the subject of study of the material sciences. By rejecting this dualism, questions like "why does perception arise?" vanish because they stem from a false premise. The whole premise of Chalmers' notion of "consciousness" is just nonsensical and should be rejected. The moment you buy into it, you have already bought into dualistic premises, and you will never "solve" this problem through some future scientific discovery, because it is not a scientific problem.

There are, of course, many scientific problems involved in understanding human brains, intelligence, problem-solving, self-awareness, etc, but there is absolutely no problem of "consciousness" because there is no such thing as "consciousness." Indeed, even Chalmers admits that the notion of "consciousness" would be something that it would be impossible to distinguish between something that possesses it and something that does not, yet, somehow he doesn't realize that this argument only demonstrates just how absolutely meaningless his notion of "consciousness" is, how it is just completely pure abstract metaphysics without any real content.

Even if we can create a complete replica of human intelligence in machines, there will still be people debating over whether or not it has "consciousness." We can solve literally every scientific problem relating to understanding human minds and it would not even come close to putting to rest this debate, hence why no scientific discovery will yield anything here. We have to realize our premises are flawed and the "debate" is misguided in the first place, because "consciousness" should be entirely abandoned as a concept, as it relies on an unjustified metaphysical premise.