COMMENTS
What is the so-called ‘hard problem’? Vlastimil thinks it is the problem of specifying which natural (physical) item a given mental item is identical to. But this is a misuse of the term ‘hard problem.’ As used in contemporary literature, its meaning is rather more specific. Although the problem so-labelled has been around for a long time, the label ‘hard problem’ as used in contemporary discussions was first introduced by David Chalmers in a 1995 article and then fully explained in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. It is to be understood by contrast with (supposedly) ‘easy problems’ in the philosophy of mind. So what is the hard problem? And what is an example of a (supposedly) easy problem?
The Hard Problem
Suppose I inadvertently touch a hot stove top, experience a pain sensation, and withdraw my hand. My behavior (stove-touching, hand-withdrawal) is third-person accessible: I see it and others around me see it. And if no one around me is present? They could see it if they were present. But surely there is more to pain than pain-behavior. There is the sensation itself. But what is the sensation itself? There are two ways of considering it. In one way it too is third-person accessible or outwardly observable. In the other way it is not.
The first way is by taking the pain sensation to be a state or event or process literally internal to (spatially inside of) the organism. In the present example, the organism is the animal that wears my clothes. So the sensation is a physical process occurring in BV’s brain-body composite. This physical process is then plausibly taken to be the salient cause of the aversive behavior whether physical or verbal (the hand-withdrawal and/or various spoken obscenities.)
The second way I’ll call phenomenological. The subject of the painful experience simply attends by introspection to the felt pain precisely as it is felt while bracketing (in roughly Husserl’s sense) all such considerations as the causation of the experience and its location in the organism. In so doing, the subject does not deny that the felt pain has a cause or that the pain has neural correlates located in the brain. He does not even doubt their existence. He simply leaves those factors out of consideration, and makes no use of them, the better to focus on the undeniable (pace Dennett the Denier) phen0menological datum, the felt pain precisely as it is felt. The subject focuses his attention exclusively on the phenomenal or qualitative features of the experience he is enduring.
The so-called ‘hard problem’ can now be stated. It is the problem of giving an account, consistent with (metaphysical) naturalism, of these qualitative features or properties of sensations, the so-called qualia (singular: quale), when the sensations are taken, not behavioristically, nor neuro-scientifically, but precisely as they themselves appear from the first-person point of view (POV) of the subjects who consciously experience them. There is something it is like to experience the phenomenal pain consequent on touching a hot stove. This Nagelian ‘what it is like’ is undeniably real — is there anything more real than pain? — but it cannot be slotted into a wholly third-personal naturalistic ontology. The felt pain is ineluctably subjective: there is simply for it in a naturalist world-scheme.
Now suppose you are, for whatever reasons, committed to that naturalist scheme. Then you face a very hard problem indeed, so hard, I would say, as to count as insoluble. The problem is well-formulated in the inconsistent triad Vlastimil cites at the top of the page. Scroll up and take another look at it. The third proposition cannot be denied on pain of the naturalist’s ceasing to be a naturalist. The first cannot be denied unless our naturalist is an eliminativist about consciousness, a position with absolute nothing to recommend it. The naturalist’s only hope is somehow to hold onto the second proposition — consciousness is not physical. But how? By going mysterian. But first a word about easy problems, one of which is intentionality.
A (Supposedly) Easy Problem
Not every episode of consciousness is object-directed. The felt pain I have been using as an example is not object-directed, or an instance of intentionality. It has a cause outside the body, the hot stove, and a neural correlate inside the brain, Delta-A fiber excitation let us suppose, but the felt pain does not reveal or display or make manifest anything in the way my seeing of a glorious Arizona sunset reveals said sunset to me. The pain is not of or about anything; the seeing is. We have to distinguish between consciousness and consciousness-of. Of course, an episode of consciousness-of may have some associated qualia, if I am, say, watching a glorious sunset or moonrise, but there are qualia free object-directed mental states. But this is a complicated special topic we cannot now discuss. I will just refer you to an earlier entry, Intentionality not a ‘Hard Problem’ for Physicalists?
Mysterianism
What our friend Vlastimil is calling mysterianism about consciousness I take to be the thesis that, while humans either do or can — unclear which he means — know that, in general, every mental item (whether intentional or non-intentional) is identical to some natural item or other, what they cannot know, and what must remain a mystery to them, is whether any given mental item such as a phenomenal pain felt on a given occasion by a particular subject is both natural and mental. They cannot know it as both mental and physical. While experiencing headache pain, for example, I can and do know it self-evidently to be a mental datum, but I cannot also know it to be wholly natural, even if in reality it is! Thus our friend is advocating the mysterianism of Colin McGinn.
Vlastimil distinguishes this mysterian form of naturalism about the mind from an old-school anti-naturalist mysterianism according to which we cannot recognize mental items to be natural items because there are no natural items to which they could be identical.
But here I must raise a question about the tenability of this distinction. If a particular felt pain cannot be identified with, and thus reduced to, a particular instance of Delta-A fiber stimulation because the former has properties the latter cannot have, and vice versa, why call this mysterianism? Where is the mystery? What we would have here is a straight-forward argument which, if sound, shows that some or all mental items cannot be reduced to natural items. What we would have is an argument for dualism, whether property dualism or substance dualism.
To have a mystery in the strict sense you need propositions that appear and cannot fail to appear to intellects of our constitution as logically inconsistent, but in reality, and beyond our ken, are somehow consistent. Trinity and Incarnation are mysteries in this sense.
Similarly for McGinn: We cannot understand how qualia, which are undeniably real, are identical to natural items, and yet they are! It is imply beyond our ken. Our cognitive architecture is so structured as to disallow any insight on our part as to how this pain I am feeling is nothing more than a physical occurrence!