[theobromananda]

Sorry, you are part of the 90% confusing the hard and soft problem without understanding what is hard about the hard problem. In fact, merely realizing the hard problem of consciousness is one of the first stages that is reached in modern vipassana meditation.

The hard problem is not stating "we can't know anything about any internal state", it is about the mere subjective existence of the internal state and not about the contents of internal experience or any objective fact about that internal state. I don't know why this is seems often so hard, but in consciousness research and meditators' language (or in my native language at least), most of this seems pretty well-definded.

It has no relation to proving that humans or machines are conscious. It is about no objective fact at all, and thus cannot be investigated using objective methods. That is why it is unsolvable by objective science.

To use a koan-like: It is about this.

[FrustratedMonky]

I was probably unclear. Meant, "we can't know 'others' internal state". We can examine our own, but all we can do is try to express it in language. Someone else hearing our description can only get a vague idea. And vice versa. Each person has their own individual internal subjective perspective, which can't be communicated with 100% clarity or accuracy. Since we can't examine or measure others internal state, we deem it 'hard' and 'impossible'. Because of course it is hard to express something that can't be communicated.

I would say that this examination of the problem of our internal view of the world, versus the reality of the world, subject versus object, goes back thousands of years.

I've also meditated a long time, and I do understand the hard problem. I just don't think eastern philosophies have the answer either. Eastern philosophies definitely had a jump start on the West with examining the mind, and really it was Buddhism that informed western philosophies from Schopenhauer onward. They helped defining some vocabulary and hierarchies, like outlining Skanda's or parts.

BUT, the typical eastern answer, that it is just 'this" and other 'wooo-wooo' answers are just as far from any explanation to the 'hard' problem as anybody in the west has. Meditation can get you awareness of the hard problem, some insight, but it still isn't an explanation. It just gets you another perspective that is still "Internal". I can meditate forever, but any 'realization' is still internal to me, it isn't providing any answers or explanation.

This comes up a lot right now with AI getting so human like (recent advancements), and I would say that at some point we'll create something that will be indistinguishable from a human, and at that time if the AI speaks convincingly of their realization of 'this is it', we wont have any ability to disprove that they really have had the same 'wooo-wooo' feelings. There is no way to prove anything.

So what I am speculating here, is that at some time in near future, we will be able to correlate soft and hard problems, so we have a map from one to another. And we'll have to realize that our own internal 'experience of reality' is just our neural net in our brain reacting and processing to stimuli, and we'll be able to examine the same things in silicon. And we'll have to accept that we aren't some super mystical beings or that our 'consciousness' is not all that special a development in the universe.

[FrustratedMonky]

Or more to the point. In humans, our thoughts arise on their own. We don't think about what we are going to think about. The thoughts just appear. We are going through the day processing stimuli and reacting, thoughts popping into our head and leading us along. Our brain is just on a game loop, processing events. Except in biological humans, instead of math, it's calcium ions and potentials. Just an analog computer.

So lets say in current models', or future, in very large neural nets, that there will not be some internal subjective awareness, just like we have. We've mapped the entire neural network/nervous system, of a nematode worm and translated it into software. The 'software worm' appears to behaves the same as the real worm, so what is that software experiencing?