1. You misuse the concept of inertia here.
2. The 'intrinsic nature of matter' is relational. For example, in particle physics, the different fundamental particles are *defined* by how they relate. For example, an electron is a particle with a certain mass, spin, and charge, which says how it interacts with the different force carriers. That *is* its 'nature'.
The search for an 'intrinsic nature' that is different from the relational is, I think, a serious mistake.
As for the rest, I don't think there really *is* a 'hard problem' of consciousness. Consciousness is *also* relational and interactive at base. It is a form of information processing and matter does that quite well.
Unfounded assertions. Interaction without 'discernment' is not 'knowledge'. Two or billion billiard balls may interact but that is not information unless someone cognises that. But it is good to note that we agree that science deals with dispositions and not with the intrinsic. I disagree, however, that dispositional nature and intrinsic nature are the same. They are not same. But I will not argue on that point here since that is not the subject of the OP.
On other matters, we have gone through the following arguments many times. It seems to me that you read nothing of what I write since you repeat the same
unfounded assertions again and again. Have you ever explained how subjective perceptions can be explained by physical parameters? Assertions that go against the grain of direct experiences are characteristic of fundamentalists. And there is not much point in trying to communicate in such a situation. I hope that you will take pains to read the references and respond to the actual points, leaving aside the standard unfounded assertions.
The Hard Problem of consciousness cannot be just wished away. Some physicalists such are Dennet et al are so obsessed with their physicalism that they try to sweep the first-person subjective experiences as ‘illusions’ — forgetting that illusions are subjective perceptions. By calling the first-person subjective experience as an illusion, he validates the existence of the Hard problem for the physicalist worldview.
There is nothing experiential in any of the physical parameters and no one can derive ‘how it feels to see color red’ from the physical parameters or from brain states. Further, it can be safely generalised that (a) all scientific knowledge is based on sense perception, and (b) none the less the scientific views of natural processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and therefore cannot account for the latter.
Below, I have reproduced a portion from the writing of Erwin Schrodinger to demonstrate my point. KINDLY READ.
From: Erwin Schrodinger. “What Is Life?”
If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electro-magnetic waves of wavelength in the neighbourhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in ? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow. ….
We may further ask: Is radiation in the neighbourhood of wave-length 590 /x/x the only one to produce the sensation of yellow? The answer is: Not at all. If waves of 760 /x/x, which by themselves produce the sensation of red, are mixed in a definite proportion with waves of 535 /x/x, which by themselves produce the sensation of green, this mixture produces a yellow that is indistinguishable from the one produced by 590 /x/x. Two adjacent fields illuminated, one by the mixture, the other by the single spectral light, look exactly alike, you cannot tell which is which. Could this be foretold from the wave-lengths— is there a numerical connection with these physical, objective characteristics of the waves? No. Of course, the chart of all mixtures of this kind has been plotted empirically; it is called the colour triangle. But it is not simply connected with the wave-lengths. There is no general rule that a mixture of two spectral lights matches one between them; for example a mixture of ‘ red ’ and ‘ blue ’ from the extremities of the spectrum gives ‘purple’, which is not produced by any single spectral light. Moreover, the said chart, the colour triangle, varies slightly from one person to the other, and differs considerably for some persons, called anomalous trichromates (who are not colour-blind).
The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain ? I do not think so. We could at best attain to an objective knowledge of what nerve fibres are excited and in what proportion, perhaps even to know exactly the processes they produce in certain brain cells—whenever our mind registers the sensation of yellow in a particular direction or domain of our field of vision. But even such intimate knowledge would not tell us anything about the sensation of colour, more particularly of yellow in this direction —the same physiological processes might conceivably result in a sensation of sweet taste, or anything else. I mean to say simply this, that we may be sure there is no nervous process whose objective description includes the characteristic ‘yellow colour ’ or ‘sweet taste ’.
Schrodinger explains in great detail the auditory proves that I have not reproduced. After explaining the auditory process, he further says:
Erwin Schrodinger. “What Is Life?”
I have gone into some detail here. In order to make you feel that neither the physicist’s description, nor that of the physiologist, contains any trait of the sensation of sound. Any description of this kind is bound to end with a sentence like: those nerve impulses are conducted to a certain portion of the brain, where they are registered as a sequence of sounds. We can follow the pressure changes in the air as they produce vibrations of the ear-drum, we can see how its motion is transferred by a chain of tiny bones to another membrane, and eventually to parts of the membrane inside the cochlea, composed of fibres of varying length, described above. We may reach an understanding of how such a vibrating fibre sets up an electrical and chemical process of conduction in the nervous fibre with which it is in touch. We may follow this conduction to the cerebral cortex and we may even obtain some objective knowledge of some of the things that happen there. But nowhere shall we hit on this ‘ registering as sound ’, which simply is not contained in our scientific picture, but is only in the mind of the person whose ear and brain we are speaking of.
Based on the detailed analysis of the mental and sensual cognition process, Schrodinger offers the following two conclusions.
Erwin Schrodinger. “What Is Life?”
…. Two general facts (a) that all scientific knowledge is based on sense perception, and (b) that none the less the scientific views of natural processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and therefore cannot account for the latter.”
Regarding, consciousness being ‘relational’, you are bluffing, or you are superimposing your fixed commitment to physicalism. Without a preexisting commitment to physicalism, the view that in consciousness there are intrinsic features present to the mind is the natural option. It is plain and simple that consciousness is not relational in its foundation. For example, you can discern change of states moment to moment, suppose from state A to state B and then State C .. and so forth. It is true that the states are distinguishable from each other based on relational changes. But THE DISCERNMENT of the states is not relational. THE DISCERNMENT is not relational.
We can understand this with an example. Consider the back-up mechanism of a single file ‘F’. We implement the back-up, recording only the changes made in the file ‘F’ from moment to moment. But, suppose there is no file ‘F’? Can we reconstruct ‘F’ from the change of states only? Another example is of the natural number system. Without ‘zero’ being here no number can have any meaning.
As above, I take the help of William Seager to further elaborate on this point.
From: Seager. “Radical Wing of Consciousness Studies”
Of course, the difficulty with this approach (the physicalism — my edit) is that it leaves the problem of consciousness in exactly the same place we started. The primary challenge that consciousness intuitively presents is precisely that there seems to be an intrinsic residue left over after we have tried to characterize it in purely structural or relational terms. The venerable inverted color-spectrum thought experiment is clearly supposed to illustrate this unavoidable lacuna. Such qualities do not reduce without remainder to their place in some abstractly definable structure.
In fact, we can prove this. Let us suppose a species, perhaps not so different from our own, with a perfectly symmetrical experiential color space9. For reductio, suppose that the abstract structure of these creatures’ color quality space is an exhaustive representation of the phenomenology associated with their color vision. Then we can immediately adapt an argument of Hilbert and Kalderon (2000). If the quality space is perfectly symmetrical then any wholesale transformation, such as inversion (or even small shifts), will make no difference to the overall relational structure. Then by our assumption there can be no difference in “experiential quality due to the shift, which is absurd since one region of the space maps to, say, the reddish quality and another to the green. The situation would be akin to having a sphere with one hemisphere painted red and the other green but where it is claimed that the features of every point on the sphere are exhaustively represented by the relational properties of that point with respect to all other points on the sphere. Since every point stands in exactly the same such relation to its fellows, rotating the sphere should not change anything yet one such sphere set beside a rotated one would obviously be different.
……But without a preexisting commitment to physicalism, the view that in consciousness there are intrinsic features present to the mind is the natural option.
So, as reasoned above the hard problem of consciousness is very much an unsolvable issue in the physicalistic worldview. And Consciousness is not relational. Discernment at its foundation is 'knowing' -- nit is not relational. The 'knowing' is the intrinsic nature of us.
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