The how and why of consciousness?

Abstract

Understanding how subjective experience can arise from the nuts and bolts of matter is known as the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996). Nobody has come close to solving this. One approach, type-A materialism (Chalmers, 2002) (hereafter, hard-core physicalism), simply dismisses the hard problem altogether. On this view, nothing about subjectivity or qualia needs explanation beyond their functional underpinnings: consciousness is an illusion, and the states of our inner world, merely dispositions to act (Churchland, 1985; Dennett, 1988). Should we hope that by studying the "illusion" of consciousness (Dennett, 2003) we might unpick the real mechanism, in the way, for example, psychologists understand motion perception by studying the waterfall illusion (Mather et al., 2008)? According to hard-core physicalists-no, it's illusions all the way down; it has to be, because there is no true mechanism of consciousness to be revealed, it is simply the name we give to the inner state of the complex machine we are: the lights are not really on, it only seems that way. Perhaps hard-core proponents are safer with the less controversial statement that consciousness is not what it seems. Numerous examples from experimental psychology support this: contrary to daily experience, our sensations and/or perceptions of the world are inhomogeneous (Baldwin et al., 2012), internally constructed (Ramachandran and Gregory, 1991), lossy (Pashler, 1988), and not even needed for some behaviors (Weiskrantz, 1985). However, I do not take these observations to empower the central hard-core claim that while direct experience is undeniably felt it must be discredited if we are to understand what needs to be understood about consciousness (Dennett, 2001). Indeed, this position leaves some people feeling as empty as the explanation itself (e.g., see Nagel, 2017). Might there be another answer, one that preserves the third-person tradition of objective science, while acknowledging the importance of there being something it is like (Nagel, 1974; Jackson, 1982) to be conscious? Type-B materialism (Chalmers, 2002) (hereafter, soft-core physicalism) is a widespread alternative. This position is common in neuroscience, where the hunt is on for the neural correlates of consciousness: the neural states that identify with conscious experiences. However, because identity is not explanatory, soft-core physicalism ends up looking more like property dualism than materialism (Chalmers, 1997).