To put it simply, it problematizes this account of the mind-brain relationship. In your words, "the physical source of your thoughts can be quite straightforward for the rational-minded reader. Our current understanding of neuroscience informs us that thoughts are powered by action potentials along neurons."
For many rational, intelligent people, this explanation is insufficient for a certain category of thoughts, namely the kinds of private, subjective experiences called qualia.
Thomas Nagel, for instance, famously argued that even a complete understanding of bat neuroscience (IE a debug menu of everything going on in a bat's brain) would leave out something: the inner subjective experience, what it feels like to be a bat navigating with echolocation, which is completely different than anything in human perception. (It would be like explaining what the color red looks like to a blind person.)
In other words, the hard problem is the explanatory gap between a physicalist account of how the human brain works and the reality of subjective or phenomenal experience. Or, to put it another way, how and why is brain activity accompanied by subjective/phenomenal consciousness?
Have you ever written about the hard problem?
Haven’t heard of it until just now. Probably because I’m an amateur when it comes to philosophy by any stretch of the imagination
To put it simply, it problematizes this account of the mind-brain relationship. In your words, "the physical source of your thoughts can be quite straightforward for the rational-minded reader. Our current understanding of neuroscience informs us that thoughts are powered by action potentials along neurons."
For many rational, intelligent people, this explanation is insufficient for a certain category of thoughts, namely the kinds of private, subjective experiences called qualia.
Thomas Nagel, for instance, famously argued that even a complete understanding of bat neuroscience (IE a debug menu of everything going on in a bat's brain) would leave out something: the inner subjective experience, what it feels like to be a bat navigating with echolocation, which is completely different than anything in human perception. (It would be like explaining what the color red looks like to a blind person.)
In other words, the hard problem is the explanatory gap between a physicalist account of how the human brain works and the reality of subjective or phenomenal experience. Or, to put it another way, how and why is brain activity accompanied by subjective/phenomenal consciousness?