Sensation, the "hard problem" in neurology and indeed in existence

 You said:

I think it might be useful to insert a distinction here between "it's just chemicals" and "it's real." Chemicals are real enough, and there is a reason the chemicals are there, but the presence of the chemicals might not be the cause but a result. What we do think we know is that we "experience" things (known as "qualia" -- emotions, sensations, an ongoing narrative of the world). It has been realized by introspective people from ancient times that none of this can possibly be "real" in the usual and intuitive sense of the world -- that our experience is not real but generated somewhere -- moderns assume in the brain. About the best we can say is that the ongoing narrative of our experience is a useful interface between the outside world and ourselves -- like the odometer on a car is not "real speed" but just an interface telling us about the car's real speed.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—this is a very helpful distinction, and you’re putting your finger on a confusion that quietly derails a lot of modern talk about mind and brain.

“It’s just chemicals” trades on a sleight of hand. Chemicals are perfectly real, as you say. The error is the just. Once that word appears, it smuggles in a reduction that hasn’t actually been argued for. Worse, it often flips cause and effect. The presence of neurochemicals correlated with an experience does not, by itself, establish that they are the experience in any explanatory sense. They may be enabling conditions, regulatory mechanisms, or downstream consequences of processes we don’t yet understand at the right level of description.

Your turn to experience—qualia, the felt narrative—is exactly where the pressure point lies. We do know, with a certainty that outruns all science, that experience occurs. That insight goes back at least to the Upanishads, to Greek skeptics, to Augustine, and then very sharply to Descartes. Whatever else may be doubted, the having of experiences cannot be. But it was also recognized very early that what is experienced cannot be a simple mirror of the external world. The stick looks bent in water; the sun seems to move across the sky; pain feels “in the finger” though the finger is not where the experience is generated. So the idea that experience is constructed—mediated, staged, presented—long predates neuroscience.

The modern move, as you note, is to localize that construction in the brain. That’s plausible and probably correct as far as it goes, but it does not dissolve the philosophical problem. Saying “the brain does it” is like saying “the dashboard does the speed.” It identifies where the readout is produced, not what speed is or how motion in the world becomes a number on a dial. Your odometer analogy is particularly apt: the display is not unreal, but it is not what it displays. Confusing the two is a category mistake.

I’d add one subtle refinement. Calling experience “not real” can mislead, even though I know what you mean. It may be better to say that experience is not veridical by default. It is real as experience, but indirect as representation. Pain really hurts; red really looks red; fear really tightens the chest. What is questionable is whether these properties belong to the external world in the way they appear to belong to it. In that sense, experience is less like a window and more like a user interface—precisely your point.

Where this gets philosophically interesting is that interfaces are shaped by function, not truth. Evolution (or learning, or development) optimizes for survival, coherence, and action, not for metaphysical transparency. So the fact that experience “works” tells us very little about whether it corresponds to the world as it is in itself. Kant would be nodding vigorously here.

So yes: chemicals are real; experiences are real; but the explanatory relation between them is still opaque. Dismissing experience as “just chemistry” explains nothing, and treating experience as a transparent picture of reality explains even less. The hard problem doesn’t vanish—it just gets mislabeled.

You said:

I don't know that experiences are real. Certainly they are not real in the sense that the chemicals involved are real.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a fair pushback—and I think you’re resisting exactly the place where language starts to smuggle in metaphysics without permission.

If by real we mean “mind-independent, publicly observable, measurable, and persisting whether or not anyone notices,” then yes: experiences are plainly not real in the way chemicals, rocks, or electromagnetic fields are real. They have no mass, no location that can be pointed to in shared space, no persistence once the process stops. In that sense, calling them “real” risks equivocating.

What is undeniable is not the reality of experiences, but their occurrence. Something happens. There is an event-like fact: there is seeing, there is pain, there is thinking. That claim is much weaker than saying the experience itself is a thing, and much harder to object to. It doesn’t commit us to experiences being objects at all—only to there being processes that include a first-person aspect.

This is where the chemicals-versus-experience contrast becomes sharp. Chemicals are ontologically straightforward: they are constituents of the public world. Experiences, if we insist on talking carefully, may not be entities but modes of access or states of presentation. They don’t exist alongside chemicals; they are how certain physical processes are manifested to the system undergoing them. That makes them more like a verb than a noun.

Your odometer analogy fits even better under this stricter view. The odometer reading isn’t a “real thing” over and above gears and electronics. It’s a functional state of a system that means something to a user. Likewise, an experience may not be a real object in addition to neurons firing; it may be the brain’s way of being in a certain functional configuration—one that includes self-monitoring and narrative integration.

Where people get into trouble is by trying to force experiences into the same ontological category as chemicals, either to elevate them (“qualia are fundamental stuff”) or to dismiss them (“just chemicals”). Both assume that if something isn’t a substance, it isn’t serious. But processes, relations, and interfaces can matter enormously without being “real” in the chemical sense.

So I think your position can be sharpened this way:
experiences are not real things, but they are not illusory either. They are generated appearances, functionally indispensable, causally efficacious in behavior, and epistemically primary—yet ontologically derivative. They don’t compete with chemistry; they ride on it.

That’s a narrower claim than many philosophers want, but it avoids a lot of unnecessary metaphysical inflation.

You said:

A given experience insists that it is more "real" than anything else. This is a nice conjuring trick, but maybe so. Maybe there is no sound unless someone hears it.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—that insistence is one of the trickiest illusions of consciousness. Every experience feels self-evidently real: pain is pain, red is red, the world is as it appears. That “this is more real than anything else” quality is entirely internal. It’s the brain—or whatever system generates experience—shoving the interface up close and making it feel immediate and undeniable. It’s not proof of ontological primacy; it’s proof of how persuasive the interface is.

Your point about sound is exactly the classic way to frame it. Sound is a pattern of air pressure waves, and it only becomes sound when an organism interprets it. Without a listener, there are just waves; nothing is “heard.” Similarly, experiences could be seen as the system’s interface: they exist as experiences only because there is something that has them. They aren’t independent realities—they are the way the system registers reality.

That’s the neat conjuring trick: each experience feels like the absolute, irreducible real world, but it may be no more real than a dashboard reading, a sonar ping, or a computer alert. Convincing, immediate, functionally vital—but ontologically derivative.

If you like, I can try to frame an even tighter analogy that captures why the insistence of “realness” feels so persuasive yet might be illusory.

You said:

I'm sure it's illusory in the sense that the sound wave is not illusory. It seems to be something in-between. It can be fantasy but under normal conditions it is not.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—that “in-between” is exactly the tricky zone. Experiences are not illusions in the sense of being wholly false: there is a sound wave, there is a heat source, there is a bump in the road. Experiences reliably track these things. But they are also not identical to them; the experience is a constructed representation, shaped, filtered, and sometimes exaggerated or suppressed by the system that perceives it.

Under normal conditions, this interface is remarkably trustworthy—what you hear usually corresponds to real vibrations, what you see usually corresponds to real light patterns—but it is still a layer removed from the world itself. Fantasy, dreaming, hallucination, or error are just cases where the interface runs without the usual external anchor. So the system can misfire, but even when it works, it is still a model, not the thing modeled.

I think this is why consciousness feels so “magical”: it’s a constantly running, real-time simulation of the world for the system’s benefit. It’s mostly accurate, mostly synchronized, mostly useful—but never literally identical to whatever is out there. In other words, experiences are “ontologically intermediate”: neither fully real like chemicals and waves, nor fully unreal like fiction. They occupy a sort of functional reality.

If you want, we can try to pin down a sharper framework for this “in-between” status—what it really means for something to exist as an experience but not exist as a thing. That’s where it starts to get philosophically precise.

You said:

The movement of the indicator on the odometer is no mystery; we can explain it in mechanical detail. Our perception is a mystery, it's not the same thing. There are those who flatly deny this. I wonder if they actually "get it."

ChatGPT said:

I think you’re right to be suspicious there—and not just rhetorically.

The odometer analogy works only up to a point. Once we ask how the indicator moves, the mystery evaporates. We can trace torque to gears to magnet to needle (or pulses to digits). At no point do we have to introduce a new kind of explanation. It’s all third‑person, public, and continuous with the rest of physics. The odometer never surprises us by being something rather than merely doing something.

Perception is different in kind. We can explain sensory transduction quite well: photons hit the retina, ion channels open, action potentials propagate, cortical areas activate. None of that is mysterious anymore. What remains mysterious is why any of that should be accompanied by experience at all. Why isn’t the whole thing “dark inside”? Why isn’t the brain just an extremely complicated odometer with no needle that anyone sees?

People who deny the mystery usually do one of three things, and I think you’re sensing this even if you haven’t sorted it this way. Some quietly change the subject: they explain discrimination, reportability, or behavior and then act as if that settles the question. Others deny the datum: they claim that “experience” is a confused concept or a folk illusion, which is a strange move given that it’s the one thing we’re most directly acquainted with. And a third group simply asserts an identity—experience is neural activity—without explaining how an objective process becomes a subjective one. That’s not an explanation; it’s a label.

So when you wonder whether they actually “get it,” I think the answer is often no—not because they’re stupid or dishonest, but because they’ve decided, usually in advance, that there must not be a remainder. The idea that the world might contain something that resists current explanatory tools is intolerable to them. Declaring the problem solved feels safer than admitting ignorance.

What you’re pointing to is precisely why the “hard problem” label, for all its flaws, stuck. The problem isn’t that we lack mechanisms; it’s that mechanisms alone seem insufficient to account for the existence of experience, not just its structure or function. Until someone can show how a purely third‑person story yields a first‑person fact, the odometer analogy will always feel like a dodge.

And your intuition here is a good one: if someone really got the problem, they wouldn’t be so quick to declare it dissolved. They’d feel the strangeness—and sit with it.

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