Consciousness and Qualia – Page 5

Some people pin their hopes on future science for a solution of the problem of consciousness as if hope, which has a place in religion, has any place in a strictly scientific worldview. If we only knew enough about the brain, these people opine, we would understand how consciousness arises from it.

But consider an analogy. Suppose you explain to a person that the natural number series is infinite, that there is no largest natural number since for every n, there is n + 1. The person seems to understand, but then objects when you say that it is impossible that there be a largest natural number due to the very nature of the natural number series. Your use of 'impossible' sticks in the guy's craw. He tilts Leftward, you see, and he thinks, quite confusedly, that anything's possible. He doesn't like it when people invoke natures and impossibilities and necessities and lay claim to a priori knowledge. That's too rigid and static for his taste. So he says,

I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then phenomenally conscious states cannot be reduced to physical states with their objective mode of existence and third-person ontology. As a consequence, an exclusively third-person approach to mind is bound to leave something out. But there is an objection to irreducibility that needs to be considered, an objection that exploits Frege's distinction between sense and reference.

Continue reading “A Sense/Reference Objection to the Irreducibility of Phenomenally Conscious States”