[svara]

There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step:

How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?

[DangitBobby]

Maybe I misunderstood you. You said this:

> A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.

Which I took to mean, people who think it's possible for math to result in consciousness is a "type error".

You gave this in response to:

> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?

So overall I'm confused what you actually believe and what you think is the "type error" here.

Maybe you meant that emperical proof is not possible. Which seems obvious, which is (I think) entirely the point of asking that rhetorical question: they know no one has had the emperical proof required to suggest consciousness doesn't arrive from math.

[chr1]

In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain.

If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.

What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true but also completely irrelevant to anything that the sims do.

[DangitBobby]

> If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.

I don't agree any more than I'd agree that knowledge of the strong force being a fundamental aspect of the way the universe functions is the same thing as understanding why there is a strong force (ignoring any version of the anthropic principle of course).

The hard problem asks _why_ consciousness exists, not just the mechanism. You can take the position that p-zombies are not possible and I would with you. That might give me some insight into consciousness to the effect of "consciousness is a requirement for introspection and desired preservation of self which improves the fitness of an organism that develops it" but it doesn't tell me _why_ or _how_ subjective arises.

[svara]

I don't think the question of whether subjective phenomena are casual has any bearing on whether there's a 'hard problem' and I also don't think the term 'hard problem' is used like that by others.

Whether subjective experience is casual or not is a different, additional question.