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The Problem with the "Hard Problem"
Robert Lawrence Kuhn is well-known as the creator and host of the public television series Closer to Truth , an invaluable source of intervi...
Robert Lawrence Kuhn is well-known as the creator and host of the public television series Closer to Truth, an invaluable source of interviews with major contributors to a variety of contemporary debates in philosophy, theology, and science. Key indeed are qualia, our internal, phenomenological, felt experience – the sight of your newborn daughter, bundled up; the sound of Mahler's Second Symphony, fifth movement, choral finale; the smell of garlic, cooking in olive oil. In particular, we need to abandon the background modern philosophical assumptions that generate the “hard problem of consciousness” and other variations on the mind-body problem.For instance, we need to reject the reductionist-cum-mathematicized conception of the material world we’ve inherited from early modern philosophy’s mechanical world picture.With natural substances, it is simply a mistake to think of them as no more than the sum of their parts, and to suppose that to understand them involves determining how their higher-level features arise out of lower-level features in a strictly bottom-up way.
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