Philosophy → Watching the Split · And then there were questions · 6 of 13
Solve or observe
The hard problem, stress-tested: the moves, the walls, and a change of relationship to the verb.
I put the thesis under stress by arguing the hard problem through with an interlocutor who pressed every move. The full exchange is in The hard problem, worked through. In outline:
- My instinct. The zombie is a flattening. If felt experience just is the structure read from within itself, the zombie is incoherent.
- The wall. "From the inside" renames the problem rather than closing it. A thermostat has structure read by its own mechanism, and we do not think it feels.
- The fork. Either self-reference is always felt, or felt experience switches on somewhere (Horn A or Horn B). I took Horn A: there is no line.
- The bill. Horn A owes the combination problem. My candidate answer is folding: the unified "I" is the folded form of the many.
- The press. Does the fold preserve the small experiences or erase them? My reply: "folding" is itself a reduced-dimension word, and preserve-or-erase is another hot-and-cold split.
- The crux. If no word can capture "folding", no objection can land. That is the mystic's wall rather than the mathematician's move. The test: name one dropped dimension. My answer, that naming it would create the duality that takes you down, is indistinguishable from "I can't".creed
That last tension is not resolved in the theory's favour. It is the most honest part of the whole exchange, and I leave it with you.
Where it landed
Not solved, and not surrendered. What changed was my relationship to the verb. "Solve" is a dimension-reducing word, so I observe instead. The one needs the split to continue; it is not something to be solved.
"Solve" and "observe" are both handles, reduced-dimension words. If "solve" means compress and lose a dimension, observe instead. If it means something fuller, try. The verb was never the point; the relationship to the verb is.
This is Aikido again: do not meet the problem head-on. And it is the question I keep returning to: why look at it in a two-dimensional circle?
It also explains why the answer cannot simply be handed over. “Give me the validity of your theory” is a demand for an O(1) answer to something reachable only by walking the tree yourself. → The tree
The final reframing: the hard problem is hard because we want it hard, to keep the unfolding going, and calling it a "problem" is the error, because it is the engine.creed The theory is a protective guardian, in Zeland's sense: do not increase the excess potential on the split; unionise the extremes and watch them in a controllable way, so the spiral goes up.
There is a mathematical shape to this inversion: having the answer and having to construct the question (P versus NP, and 42). I use it as a metaphor only.