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Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (PDF)
In David Chalmersâ âFacing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,â he argues that it is futile to try to explain qualitative experience with a physicalist reductive strategy because there is a fundamental disconnect between the tools of functional analysis and the non-functional nature of experience. He describes the different ways in which scientists researching consciousness can address this problem, and argues that they are all incomplete because they fail to explain why and how experiential consciousness emerges from physical systems. He then proposes that in order to move forward on the problem of experiential consciousness, we must adopt the non-reductive view of ânaturalistic dualismâ which claims that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe analogous to the existence of electromagnetic charge and matter. I will argue here that Chalmersâ argument is not sufficient to show that consciousness is fundamental or non-physical because it relies on circular reasoning. A weaker version of his argument which merely claims that physical explanations are *unsatisfactory* is more sturdy, but his proposed solution of a non-reductive theory is no more satisfactory, and so he does not present any real challenge to the physicalist. I then propose a potential reason why reductive explanations of experience are notoriously difficult to accept as complete.
Chalmers begins by making an important distinction between awareness and experience as different things which are both often referred to as consciousness. He calls awareness and related aspects of consciousness the âeasy problems:â the ability to control our behavior, observe, react, and focus our attention. These are all things which we might not understand fully right now, but which we can reasonably expect to eventually understand through the empirical methods already available to us.
The ability of our current theories to explain experience, on the other hand, is a more contentious topic for debate. Chalmers claims that while cognitive science is good at describing physical functions and mechanisms, experiences have qualitative essences which are independent from function.
When we think and perceive ... there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel has put it, there is *something it is like* to be a conscious organism... How can we explain why there is something that it is like to entertain a mental image or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it arises.
This is what he calls the âhard problemâ of consciousness. In this paper, I will use the word âconsciousnessâ to refer specifically to the experiential consciousness which Chalmers claims poses a hard problem.
He goes on to describe a gap between functionalist analyses and the nature of experience, arguing that explanations of how information is handled and reported to different parts of the brain cannot explain how we experience it because experiences are defined by their particular essences.
I do not think this claim is well defended, because it doesn't seem at all clear to me that experience is not a function but an essence. Chalmers asks âWhy doesn't all of this information processing go on âin the dark,â free of any inner feel?â I respond by saying we donât know that it doesnât. I am not denying that Chalmers experiences the world and has what he describes as an âinner feel.â I do doubt, however, that he experiences a qualitative essence which is fundamentally impossible to reduce into its parts and their relationships, and I think that when Chalmers says âthe darkâ he means relationships between component physical parts, free from any distinct and irreducible essence.
Both the physicalist and dualist positions are coherent. The core question which Chalmers claims physicalists cannot answer, âWhy is the experience the way it is,â is to a physicalist akin to asking why circles are round. It is a trivial question. The only *something it is like* to see deep blue is the experience of deep blue itself. If we suppose the physicalist explanation is correct, and we suppose that the experience of color results from the complex interactions of neurons and has no other essence, then we don't find a contradiction. This reality would imply the possibility of reconstructing the experience and causing it to exist in a substrate other than the brain. It is not tied to any immaterial essence of experience.
The dualist argument says that if there were a molecule-for-molecule copy of you, a so-called âzombieâ which was not conscious but had the same mechanisms, functions, and behaviors, then physicalist models would be unable to tell the difference. Chalmers gives a version of this argument: âGiven any process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises.â However, this argument is circular, since in order for the physicalist to be wrong the world must be a dualist one. If we suppose that experiential consciousness does not result from any physical mechanism, then a purely physical explanation could not capture the full qualitative nature of experience. But if physical explanations are complete, then the conceptual coherence of a zombie falls away.
Chalmers lists several different possible strategies which could be taken when addressing the problem of experience, and criticizes all of them as incomplete, âtak[ing] the existence of experience for grantedâ and/or âtell[ing] us nothing about why experience should exist in the first place.â Even if we agree that physical explanations for consciousness could exist, Chalmersâ complaints here have some weight, because he wants to know why the systems give rise to experience rather than no experience. He is after an explanation which is satisfying. âFor a satisfactory theory, we need an account of why and how.â
However, he goes on to propose that in order to form a theory of consciousness we must use an explanation which does not attempt to reduce experience into smaller parts. Chalmersâ alternative is ânonreductiveâ in that it takes consciousness as a property of the universe which has fundamental laws and need not be explained. At first it appears that he is claiming that we can explain consciousness by taking it as something which cannot be explained, but he clarifies that accepting consciousness as a fundamental quality of the universe is no different from accepting that electromagnetic forces exist without an explanation of why. Once we accept something as a fundamental property, we can describe how it functions and begin to understand its natural laws.
This is very acceptable as a proposition. However, it does not meet Chalmersâ own standards because it does not give a how or why. Electromagnetic theories give rise to useful predictions which can be verified, and correct predictions are evidence which support the theory. Without the ability to produce similarly testable predictions, his proposition has no special merit. It is certainly not more satisfactory than a physical explanation which identifies the brain patterns associated with specific experiences. The advantage of the physicalist explanation is that it does not require the introduction of any new fundamental but ill-understood aspects to our model of the universe.
The âexplanatory gapâ between experience and function which Chalmers is so intent on bridging may be a gap between first and third person perspectives which need not be closed. I'd like to suggest a possible reason why physicalist explanations feel so unsatisfying to so many. Because experiences are felt directly and qualitatively, and the underlying physical processes are far too complex for us to understand, we are not capable of intuiting that one can result from the other. However, our self-aware reflexive consciousness system does not operate on the level of bits and bytes, or activation potentials and individual pathways. Instead, it operates on a much larger and equally complex level which is capable of recognizing experiences from a macroscopic view.
An analogy for qualitative experience might be a raster image. Given a list of numbers which encode colors and told the relationships in color difference and position between the pixels, we would not be capable of piecing together the information and then seeing the image. We can and do use computer programs to analyze this type of data and tell us what the picture contains. In order to know what is being shown, however, we need to see it all at once with disregard for the pixel-for-pixel relationships. This is far more computationally efficient. We do not imagine a separate âimage-partâ aspect of each pixel. Just so, we should not need to include experience as a new and separate part of our scientific model. Introducing experiential consciousness as a fundamental aspect of the universe in order to close a gap in perspective runs the risk of misrepresenting reality in order to create a more âsatisfactoryâ theory.
