[staticassertion]

> The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function

Great, I'm a physicalist so uhhhh I reject this lol. I think you can define cognitive capabilities and phenomenal experience by reducing to structure and function. You're right that it's simple though.

[hackinthebochs]

I'm a physicalist as well. A commitment to physicalism doesn't force you to reject the hard problem. The hard problem doesn't entail that phenomenal consciousness is not grounded in physical structure and function. The hard problem is about what is needed to explain consciousness. Science typically involves defining some phenomena precisely in terms of structure and function, then giving a precise story about how some observed behavior captures the structure and function that defines the phenomena under question. For example, we define temperature by the height of mercury in a thermometer, then we mathematically derive the height of mercury given the average speed of molecules in the environment. Thus we successfully reduce temperature to average kinetic energy of molecules.

But the process of reduction starts by precisely defining the phenomena in terms of structure and function. If we are unable to give a precise definition that uncontroversially captures the target phenomena, then we cannot in principle give a scientific explanation of said phenomena. This is where we stand with consciousness. There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness. But this is an explanatory limit only. It doesn't necessitate some non-physical phenomena is involved. What we need are new concepts that can connect the phenomenal to the physical. But conceptual innovation is not something you get from more measurements and more data. This is what makes consciousness a philosophical problem.

[staticassertion]

I was rejecting your definition of the hard problem as it contains an assertion that a physicalist wouldn't accept.

Yes, reduction would be one very viable strategy. It doesn't require precisely defining the phenomenon in order for me to just say that it reduces based on the fact that reduction has been a successful approach for everything else in cognition.

> There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness.

Yeah this is what I reject. Why do you say that this is in principle a barrier? You're discussing it as an explanatory gap, not in principle.

[hackinthebochs]

The claim that you can't describe consciousness in principle is widely accepted by participants on all sides of the debate. Can you tell me what experiencing red is like to you such that someone who is red/green color blind will know what its like? Most people think not. Rather, phenomenal consciousness is something you must experience yourself. It just isn't something that one can learn descriptively. This is a premise of the hard problem and also the Mary's room thought experiment. People who reject the premise usually just reject phenomenal consciousness completely.

[GoblinSlayer]

Interpreting the hard problem as an epistemological problem looks trivial. There's nothing extraordinary in ignorance. The way you describe it implies we have the hard problem of ultrasound too.

I think it's ontological problem: structural description ontologically misses unobservable ideal substance, so the challenge is to provide a principle that would make ideal substance unnecessary. If you don't think too much, ideal substance ontologically solves consciousness, and it's not obvious how mere structural description can live without it.