I see this discussion come up a lot and it always results in arguments that I think maybe come about as a result of a lack of agreed upon definitions for certain terms, so I’ll start there. Here are some definitions that make sense to me surrounding the hard problem of consciousness, would love to hear if anyone else has had the same thoughts:
Subjective experience:
Essentially the range of qualia that I can say exists because I experience them. It’s the information you receive from your senses that is not quantifiable. For example, a description of the color red, no matter how detailed and scientifically accurate, will ever allow a person who has never experienced sight to understand what the color red looks like.
The mind and body:
The physical apparatus through which animals like us interact with the world. From the body we receive the necessary sensory information and nourishment to exert our will on the world. With the mind we interpret all sensory information gathered from the world.
Vast neural networks read, interpret, alter and conduct data received from the body’s various sensory organs. Our brains begin this process with inherited patterns of basic cognition. Certain neural pathways calcify from repeated activity, forming memories: a catalogue of previous experiences we attribute importance to. Memories, guided by our upbringing, form a scaffold with which personality forms around, totally unique to the circumstances of any individual. But at no point in this fundamentally material process do we see the necessity for qualia, subjective experience. Theoretically, would a fully accurate computer simulated brain not also experience qualia if we know for a fact that we do?
The ongoing process described above is how most people would describe consciousness. We find that messing with certain parts of the brain can interrupt consciousness, and therefore memory formation, but how can we be sure that some fundamental sensation never ends, totally divorced from the body and mind?
People who get too drunk may not remember it later, but they were certainly conscious at the time. If there exists some feeling before conception and after death, no one can know because the dead can’t speak and the living don’t remember it.
I like to lean towards the concept that objective natural law is the basic state of existence, and that it is then observed by consciousness and subjective experience/sense. This provides two perspectives of the universe: the objective and the subjective, which are both equally important IMO.
Objective/big-picture If life and/or humans never existed, or if we weren’t there to observe it, the universe would still run its course and end in eventual heat death, observed or unobserved it remains the same even if some of the atoms are re-arranged.
We may be able to use our free will and/or consciousness to re-arrange some of the atoms and direct some of the energy with the concept of cause and effect, but natural laws will remain unchanged, and in a big-picture sense, nothing (in terms of natural law) will be very different because of consciousness or human will. The laws of physics will remain the same, the end remains the same, the universe will be relatively unchanged; conscious or not.
In terms of after-death, it remains true; there may or may not be an afterlife, but just because we cannot sense it or are conscious when we are present in it does not mean it can’t exist or does not persist after we are unconscious. If there is a world after death, it too will continue to work despite consciousness, observed or unobserved.
Subjectuve/Individual Bringing in some psychology, humans absolutely love to assign significance to things. It’s in our nature. Thus our whole subjective worldview is based on our senses and how we assign significance to our experiences so in a subjective sense it would be impossible to know something outside our knowledge or current mode of operation.
But unlike the objective view of existence, this perspective adds purpose and importance to the world. A vital part to self discovery is forging your own purpose in life. Whether that is serving a Creator, investigating the secrets of the universe, or simply being happy, the essence of being conscious and sensing the world is about what you make of it, and how you forge it into something valuable to you.
In the end, we have the natural law that dictates what the universe is, independent of consciousness, then we have the subjective senses that feed into what we know to be consciousness, thus creating individual worldviews. In my opinion, both perspectives are important to understanding what it is to exist and to be conscious.
TLDR: Objective existence is the natural state, and is then observed through subjective consciousness– Objective existence will persist regardless of consciousness or perception– Subjective existence is based on humans assigning significance and forging their own purpose