In my view, consciousness is a bodily function of animals that was formed by evolutionary processes, much like noses, insulin production or memory, so nothing special.
OK, but if that is your view of consciousness it does not relate to the topic of this thread introduced by boolybooly, which was 'the body mind duality at a philosphical level'. If all you mean is brain function then I quite agree that it is nothing special in comparison to insulin production. It is the physiology of another organ.
I realise that there are a few disciplines and debate channels in which consciousness is viewed in this way, rather like 'intelligence', including a large chunk of the AI sector. However, in medicine and in philosophy and for most people in ordinary life it means something different. In simple terms, when you do not throw a drowning migrant back into the sea, it is not because their brain is functioning but because you think somewhere in side them there are feelings like hopes and fears like your own. Careful analysis may prove this to be an irrational sentimentality but it is the basis for all human social interaction. Most of us would be happy to throw a robot back into the sea, despite its processor functioning. And robots are capable of monitoring their 'selves' in functional terms.
I don't understand why consciousness would form an exception to the way we normally explain things.
This is the crucial bit. It is very much the exception. The problem is that consciousness deals with being aware of a world, or a self. And being aware is about a sense of red or a sense of size or a sense of isolation. None of these things have any explanations in physics because physics only deals with dynamic relations described mathematically. It makes no statements at all about the taste of cheddar cheese. Specifically, physics tells us nothing about what entity could be 'aware'.
Unfortunately, the common line of thought is like that of David Chalmers, to say that sensations and feelings are outside physics and need to be seen as part of some new fundamental 'force' or something. But Arthur Eddington pointed out, as did Bertrand Russell, that the is putting things back to front.
The way I tend to look at it is like this. A physics equation X = f(y,z) is a way of saying that the sensations an observer will get under certain time and place conditions X are given by a function of mathematical physical dynamic variables y and z. In order to make this a purely mathematical equation we have developed ways of calibrating our sensations in terms of standard situations where y and z are fixed. Red is the sensation you will get if the eye is preferentially exposed to 650nm EM radiation.
This calibration allows us to cancel out a crucial set of rules that so far we know nothing of - what internal dynamic events within the brain are needed to get a sense of red? The calibration allows us to build a mathematical structure for all events outside our brain that defines in great detail all the rules of causal relation while using the internal triggering of red as a measuring instrument without knowing anything about the rules for triggering red inside. We can even build a mathematical structure for events in brains looked at using microscopes or scanners.
So conscious awareness is always part of physics as the 'left hand side of the equation' but it does not appear anywhere in the mathematical structure because it is calibrated out. It has to be calibrated out because we have no way so far of working out the internal rules. There are also serious questions about what form those rules could possibly take. It might even be that they cannot be expressed mathematically because maths ultimately derives from external dynamics.
So the problem is hideously difficult, and the great philosophers have known this since the first writing of people like Parmenides.
But it is not actually, Diane (
@Diane O'Leary), the Hard Problem. David's Hard Problem reflects a failure to take on board what Eddington had said. There is no mystery in sensations arising from 'inert matter'. Modern physics, and in fact a lot of seventeenth century physics, realises that there is no such thing as 'matter' in the intuitive sense. There is no surprise in the fact that a sense of grey squishy stuff can come from what looks like grey squishy stuff. Our intuitive idea of matter, whether grey and squishy or rock hard is built out of our sensations. Physics is not about that. It is about the abstracted mathematical rules of causal interaction we can find in the world - divorced from 'being like anything'.
And since physical matter is by definition all those goings on that determine the patterns of sensations for observers there is absolutely no surprise that sensations for observers arise in physical matter - that is by definition going to be the case. There is no explanatory gap. The really hard bit is in finding the rules of correspondence of physical causal relations and specific 'qualia'.
