>>13272401Well, the good thing about the hard problem is that you don't need to be a neurologist to understand it. You just need a little applied thought and some basic idea of how abstract ideas don't exist in the same way as, say, the computer you are using exists.
There are people that take the stance you're providing, that subjective consciousness is just a fancy interaction between material phenomenon.
The best way I can think to put it directly (and it's hard, because explaining subjective consciousness is hard precisely because it is so fundamental), is that your experience (as in, the experience-as-itself, not "experience" as in an abstract idea but the legitimate reality of your life) HAS to exist in some capacity, and NOT as some sort of illusion precisely because of your awareness of it.
This is, literally, what "cogito, ergo sum" is saying.
It is important to note that the "I think, therefore I am" is NOT providing "special existence" to all "thinking material" (i.e. the brain) because it thinks, it is an observational point: we KNOW we exist BECAUSE we think, not we exist BECAUSE we think, only that we know.
Yet, the same cannot be said about other "emergent properties" or abstract ideas like evolution or the flow of blood in the veins. Or, it could, and it would be some sort of pan-psychism (which is the argument I have against the illusory idea of consciousness, but that is something different).
This "experience" I am trying to identify does not appear to be constituent of any sort of material in the way that the brain itself (atoms, chemicals, etc.) is. The experience (that we KNOW exists fundamentally as humans from our subjectivity) MUST exist in a meaningful sense (i.e. beyond that of an emergent property), yet it does not have any indication of being material, as atoms or the chair you're sitting on is.
