The Problem of Consciousness: Easy, Hard or Tricky?

Topoi. An International Review of Philosophy.

I argue that the hard problem of consciousness occurs only in very limited contexts. My argument is based on the idea of explanatory perspectivalism, according to which what we want to know about a phenomenon determines the type of explanation we use to understand it. To that effect the hard problem arises only in regard to questions such as how is it that concepts of subjective experience can refer to physical properties, but not concerning questions such as what gives rise to qualia or why certain brain states have certain qualities and not others. In this sense we could for example fully explain why certain brain processes have certain subjective qualities, while we still don't have a viable theory of concepts that explains co-referentiality of phenomenal and physical concepts. Given this limitation, the hard problem doesn't pose a problem for the empirical study of consciousness.

Synthesis Philosophica, 2008

This paper proposes that the ‘problem of consciousness’, in its most popular formulation, is based upon a misinterpretation of the structure of experience. A contrast between my subjective perspective (A) and the shared world in which I take up that perspective (B) is part of my experience. However, descriptions of experience upon which the problem of consciousness is founded tend to emphasise only the former, remaining strangely oblivious to the fact that experience involves a sense of belonging to a world in which one occupies a contingent subjective perspective. The next step in formulating the problem is to muse over how this abstraction (A) can be integrated into the scientifically described world (C). I argue that the scientifically described world itself takes for granted the experientially constituted sense of a shared reality. Hence the problem of consciousness involves abstracting A from B, denying B and then trying to insert A into C, when C itself presupposes B. The problem in this form is symptomatic of serious phenomenological confusion. No wonder then that consciousness remains a mystery.

Topoi, 2017

2014

Consciousness and the feeling of existence have yet not been fully explained. There are interesting arguments from panpsychist as well as from eliminative materialistic (neuroscientific) positions. A panpsychist perspective is normally one where the innermost part of the physical world consists of some kind of mental entities or experiences, while the materialistic perspective claim such entities are only material (non-mental). In between these two positions there are numerous ideas how consciousness is to be explained. As long as no final explanation has been found, we can keep on presenting theories of mind. Philosophical argumentation will however not be sufficient to validate a specific standpoint. I argue in this paper that the problem of consciousness should not be isolated as a separate problem as argued by Chalmers (1995). He defines the hard problem, and also presents an outline of a theory of consciousness, claiming this covers possible solutions. Rupert Read (2008) argues...

the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness-in contrast with the apparently 'Easy Problem' 3 of understanding the relevant mechanical operations of the brain-and has provided the motivation for a great deal of the philosophical work I have mentioned. Of course there are quite different kinds of academic work also directed to the topic of consciousness. I shall touch briefly, for example, on the work of psychologist Merlin Donald, who as well as offering some illuminating ideas about how we should understand the place of consciousness in our mental economies, has little time for the Hard Problem. The Hard Problem, he remarks, is "nothing more than a local squabble between members of a species who are already able to represent what they know or don't know in words. The thing that really needs explaining is how a particular species (humans) came to be able to have such squabbles in the first place." 4 The question [of] what consciousness does, and thereby how it might have evolved, seems an obviously promising one. But the devotees of the Hard Problem have actually tended to rule out this approach, since they take the (unconscious) whirring of neural cogs as being sufficient to explain everything that humans can do, and consciousness therefore to be no more than an epiphenomenal gloss on this real neurological action 5. Consciousness is defined as being subjective, and the physicalism embraced by most contemporary philosophers holds that science-which is confidently expected to explain everything-is objective. So there is no room for consciousness to do anything or explain anything. 3 These terms appear to have originated in a much admired paper by David Chalmers at the 1994 conference in Tucson, "Toward a Science of Consciousness", which inaugurated a biennial series of meetings that has continued to the present.

2008

In this article, I perform an aesthetic analysis of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness, redescribing this intuition as the result of a creative activity affirming of the uniqueness and value of human engagements with the world rather than the result of an activity of self-knowing through which phenomenal awareness becomes aware of itself. During this analysis, I analogize the construction of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness to the construction of religious intuitions for sophisticated believers and the construction of aesthetic intuitions for sophisticated aesthetes. I find accounts of the 'mistake' of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness by authors such as Dennett are overly reductive and simplistic, even though I agree that phenomenal consciousness is a created illusion rather than a natural kind. The intuition of phenomenal consciousness is a sophisticated formation which testifies to the commitment of certain naturalistically inclined theorists to the inestimable value of private experience.

2012

Daniel Dennett (1996) has disputed David Chalmers’ (1995) assertion that there is a “hard problem of consciousness” worth solving in the philosophy of mind. In this paper I defend Chalmers against Dennett on this point: I argue that there is a hard problem of consciousness, that it is distinct in kind from the so-called easy problems, and that it is vital for the sake of honest and productive research in the cognitive sciences to be clear about the difference. But I have my own rebuke for Chalmers on the point of explanation. Chalmers (1995, 1996) proposes to “solve” the hard problem of consciousness by positing qualia as fundamental features of the universe, alongside such ontological basics as mass and space-time. But this is an inadequate solution: to posit, I will urge, is not to explain. To bolster this view, I borrow from an account of explanation by which it must provide “epistemic satisfaction” to be considered successful (Rowlands, 2001; Campbell, 2009), and show that Chalmers’ proposal fails on this account. I conclude that research in the science of consciousness cannot move forward without greater conceptual clarity in the field.

2002

TH Huxley'famously said:" How it is that anything so re-markable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp"(ibid., p. 19). We do not see how to explain a state of consciousness in terms of its neurological basis. This is the hard problem of consciousness. 2 My aim here is to present another problem of consciousness. The harder problem, as I shall call it, is more epistemological than the hard problem.