Flesh Solves The Hard ProblemMIT Screening and panel discussion: “Just Atoms and Molecules? Or Something More?” Screening and Discussion, Wednesday, April 12, 2023. About MGH series: SEARCHING: OUR QUEST FOR MEANING IN THE AGE OF SCIENCEPanelist Nancy Kanwisher was asserting the Hard Problem to Kieran Setiya by saying that with the help of AI, we now have a very accurate model of what it going on the the visual system, but that does not make the AI system conscious of the objects it is seeing. Imagine you are in a sensory deprivation tank and you get a single pin prick. Do you need any magical explanation of feeling that pin prick? I am not finished reading Pennartz, but he seems to be saying that the consciousness of what we see happens in V1. That consciousness is widely distributed around the brain and it is simple awareness. It is a waste fo time to think that the visual information is going to have a secondary representation. To the extent that we see blue, it is happening in V4. |
It is a leap of faith, but, we do not need to solve the hard problem. Thus, I claim that flesh solves the hard problem as a knife cutting the Gordian Knot. The left side of the image is a study of my understanding of DNA as a college student. There is an image of my Champagne Sabre and Cajal's Pyramid Cells as the flesh.