[A_D_E_P_T]

It's not hard at all when you acknowledge that such senses exist in the world, and that you (like others) possess them. As an aside it tends to foster a certain tendency towards empathy.

In essence, you're asking why there's an inside to being a self-modeling system. But "inside" isn't something extraneous, something additional -- rather, it's what "self-modeling" means.

Really the "hard problem" has a very easy answer, but it's a physical/functional answer, and dualists and obscurantists simply don't like it.

[fnordlord]

It's embarrassingly silly to say but I've frequently just boiled down the hard question to the question of "where is the experience of the color blue stored in the universe?" Even as a non-dualist, I still haven't found much of an answer that I like. I'm all ears if you've got a book recommendation.

[A_D_E_P_T]

The question presupposes that "the experience of the color blue" is a discrete object that needs a storage location. But that's the dualist picture in disguise. On a functionalist view, blueness isn't stored; it's what certain neural activity constitutively is when you're that system observing that blue.

As an aside, isn't it more weird that violet and purple look indistinguishable despite being physically so different? It's said that this is because our L-cones (red-sensitive) have a secondary sensitivity peak at short wavelengths. So violet light triggers S-cones + a bit of L-cone. Purple light (red + blue) also triggers S-cones + L-cones. Similar activation pattern = same quale. It's all functional/physical.

Read Tom Cuda "Against Neural Chauvinism." Also Daniel Dennett.

[qsera]

>where is the experience of the color blue stored in the universe?

It is not stored anywhere. It is part of the consciousness that experience it. In other words consciousness comes bundled with everything it will ever feel.

[Sharlin]

So you say that the hard problem of consciousness is explained by the fact that we appear to be conscious?

[A_D_E_P_T]

The kneejerk response would be: Are you not conscious at this present moment? If we were to modulate your spatiotemporal senses with drugs or a lobotomy, do you doubt that you would be very differently conscious, or perhaps entirely unconscious?

I mean, there is a credible first-person answer to that question of yours, which each man can answer for himself.

But considered more seriously, the "hard problem" is an artifact of treating experience as a separate thing that needs to be generated. If you accept that self-modeling systems bounded in space and time exist, you've already accepted that experience exists -- because experience is what such a system is, from the inside. There's no second step where experience gets added. The question "why is there experience?" is exactly akin to "Why is there an interior to four walls and a roof?" The interior isn't a separate thing; it's necessarily constitutive.

[prmph]

How do you know they (and others) possess them?