The philosophy of self examines the idea of the self
at a conceptual level. Many different ideas on what constitutes self
have been proposed, including the self being an activity, the self being
independent of the senses, the bundle theory of the self, the self as a narrative center of gravity, and the self as a linguistic or social construct rather than a physical entity. The self (or its non-existence) is also an important concept in Eastern philosophy, including Buddhist philosophy.
To another person, the way an individual behaves and speaks reflects their true inner self and can be used to gain insight into who they really are. Therefore, the intentions
of another individual can only be inferred from something that emanates
from that individual. The particular characteristics of the self
determine its identity.
Concepts of self
Self as an activity
Aristotle, following Plato, defined the psyche as the core essence of a living being, and while claiming that it did not exist apart from the body, he considered its so-called "intellect" part to be immortal and perpetual, in contrast to its organism-dependent vegetative/nutritive and perceptual functions. In his theory of causes and of act and potency,
Aristotle emphasizes beings in relation to their actual manifestation,
and in turn the soul was also defined by its actual effects. For
instance, if a knife had a soul, the act of cutting would be that soul,
because 'cutting' is part of the essence of what it is to be a knife.
More precisely, the soul is the "first activity" of a living body. This
is a state, or a potential for actual, or 'second', activity. "The axe
has an edge for cutting" was, for Aristotle, analogous to "humans have
bodies for rational activity," and the potential for rational activity
thus constituted the essence of a human soul. He states: "Soul is an
actuality or formulable essence of something that possesses a
potentiality of being besouled",
and also "When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears
as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and
eternal". Aristotle used his concept of the soul in many of his works; his main work on the subject is De Anima (On the Soul).
Aristotle also believed that there were four sections of the soul: the
calculative and scientific parts on the rational side used for making
decisions, and the desiderative and vegetative parts on the irrational
side responsible for identifying our needs. A division of the soul's
functions and activities is also found in Plato's tripartite theory. The problem of one in many is also remembered by Aristotle, nonetheless:
If
then the soul is of its very nature divisible, what holds it together?
Not the body, certainly: much rather the contrary seems to be true, that
the soul holds the body together; for when it departs, the body expires
and decomposes. If there is some other thing which makes it one, this
other is rather the soul. One would then have to ask, concerning this
other, whether it be one or of many parts. If it is one, why not call it
the soul straightway? But if it is divisible, reason again demands,
what it is that holds this together? And so on ad infinitum.
While he was imprisoned in a castle, Avicenna wrote his famous "floating man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality of the soul.
His thought experiment tells its readers to imagine themselves
suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argues that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness. He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms, but as a primary given, a substance. This argument was later refined and simplified by René Descartes in epistemic
terms when he stated: "I can abstract from the supposition of all
external things, but not from the supposition of my own consciousness."
David Hume
pointed out that we tend to think that we are the same person we were
five years ago. Although we have changed in many respects, the same
person appears present as was present then. We might start thinking
about which features can be changed without changing the underlying
self. Hume, however, denies that there is a distinction between the
various features of a person and the mysterious self that supposedly
bears those features. When we start introspecting, "we are never
intimately conscious of anything but a particular perception; man is a
bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another
with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement".
It is plain, that in the course of our thinking, and in
the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination runs easily from
one idea to any other that resembles it, and that this quality alone is
to the fancy a sufficient bond and association. It is likewise evident
that as the senses, in changing their objects, are necessitated to
change them regularly, and take them as they lie contiguous to each
other, the imagination must by long custom acquire the same method of
thinking, and run along the parts of space and time in conceiving its
objects."
In Hume's view, these perceptions do not belong to anything. Rather,
Hume compares the soul to a commonwealth, which retains its identity not
by virtue of some enduring core substance, but by being composed of
many different, related, and yet constantly changing elements. The
question of personal identity then becomes a matter of characterizing the loose cohesion of one's personal experience. (Note that in the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume said without elaboration that he was dissatisfied with his account of the self, yet he never returned to the issue.)
The paradox of the Ship of Theseus can be used as an analogy of the self as a bundle of parts in flux.
Self as a narrative center of gravity
Daniel Dennett has a deflationary theory of the "self". Selves are not physically detectable. Instead, they are a kind of convenient fiction, like a center of gravity,
which is convenient as a way of solving physics problems, although they
need not correspond to anything tangible — the center of gravity of a
hoop is a point in thin air. People constantly tell themselves stories
to make sense of their world, and they feature in the stories as a
character, and that convenient but fictional character is the self.
Self as merely syntactic
Aaron Sloman has proposed that words like self, selves, herself, itself, themselves, myself,
etc. do not refer to a special type of entity, but provide powerful
syntactical mechanisms for constructing utterances that repeatedly refer
to the same thing without tedious and obscure repetition of names or
other referring expressions.
Self in Eastern spirituality and philosophy
The spiritual goal of many traditions involves the dissolving of the ego, in contrast to the essential Self, allowing self-knowledge of one's own true nature to become experienced and enacted in the world. This is variously known as enlightenment, nirvana, presence, and the "here and now".
Hume's position is similar to Indian Buddhists’ theories and debates
about the self, which generally considers a bundle theory to describe
the mind phenomena grouped in aggregates (skandhas), such as sense-perceptions, intellective discrimination (saṃjñā), emotions and volition. Since the beginning of Buddhist philosophy,
several schools of interpretation assumed that a self cannot be
identified with the transient aggregates, as they are non-self, but some
traditions questioned further whether there can be an unchanging ground
which defines a real and permanent individual identity, sustaining the impermanent phenomena; concepts such as Buddha-nature are found in the Mahayana lineage, and of an ultimate reality in dzogchen tradition, for instance in Dolpopa and Longchenpa. Although Buddhists criticize the immutable ātman of Hinduism, some Buddhist schools problematized the notion of an individual personhood; even among early ones, such as the Pudgala
view, it was approached implicitly in questions such as "who is the
bearer of the bundle?", "what carries the aggregates?", "what
transmigrates from one rebirth to another?" or "what is the subject of self-improvement and enlightenment?".
The Buddha
in particular attacked all attempts to conceive of a fixed self, while
stating that holding the view "I have no self" is also mistaken. This is
an example of the Middle Way charted by the Buddha and the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. That absence of a self definition is directed to avoid clinging to the "I", seek reality and attain detachment, and it is found in many passages of the oldest Buddha sutras, recorded in the Pali Canon, such as this:
"Bhikkhus,
form is not-self. Were form self, then this form would not lead to
affliction, and one could have it of form: 'Let my form be thus, let my
form be not thus.' And since form is not-self, so it leads to
affliction, and none can have it of form: 'Let my form be thus, let my
form be not thus.'... Bhikkhus, feeling is not-self... Bhikkhus,
perception is not-self... Bhikkhus, determinations are not-self...
Bhikkhus, consciousness (vijñāna) is not self.... is form permanent or impermanent?..."
Both Western and Eastern civilizations
have been occupied with self-knowledge and underscored its importance
particularly citing the paradoxical combination of immediate
availability and profound obscurity involved in its pursuit. For Socrates, the goal of philosophy was to "know thyself". Lao Tzu, in his Tao Te Ching,
says "Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force. Mastering the self requires strength." The case is the same for the seers of Upanishads, who maintained that the ultimate real knowledge involves an understanding of the essence of the self and the nature of God. Adi Shankaracharya, in his commentary on Bhagavad Gita says "Self-knowledge alone eradicates misery". "Self-knowledge alone is the means to the highest bliss." Absolute perfection is the consummation of Self-knowledge."
A theory about self-knowledge describes the concept as the
capacity to detect that the sensations, thoughts, mental states, and
attitudes as one's own. It is linked to other concepts such as self-awareness and self-conception. The rationalist theory, which Immanuel Kant
has inspired, also claims that our ability to achieve self-knowledge
through rational reflection is partly derived from the fact that we view
ourselves as rational agents. This school rejects that self-knowledge is merely derived from observation as it acknowledges the subject as authoritative on account of his ability as an agent to shape his own states.
In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how
physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to
discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral
functions such as watching, listening, speaking (including generating an
utterance that appears to refer to personal behaviour or belief), and
so forth.
The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation: that is,
explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral, as each physical system
can be explained (at least in principle) purely by reference to the
"structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
Proponents of the hard problem argue that it is categorically
different from the easy problems since no mechanistic or behavioral
explanation could explain the character of an experience, not even in
principle. Even after all the relevant functional facts are explicated,
they argue, there will still remain a further question: "why is the
performance of these functions accompanied by experience?" To bolster their case, proponents of the hard problem frequently turn to various philosophical thought experiments, involving philosophical zombies (which, they claim, are conceivable) or inverted qualia, or the claimed ineffability of colour experiences, or the claimed unknowability of foreign states of consciousness, such as the experience of being a bat.
The terms 'hard problem' and 'easy problems' were coined by the philosopherDavid Chalmers in a 1994 talk given at The Science of Consciousness conference held in Tucson, Arizona. The following year, the main talking points of Chalmers talk was then published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies.
The publication gained significant attention from consciousness
researchers, and became the subject of a special volume of the journal
which was later published into a book. In 1996, Chalmers published The Conscious Mind: a book length treatment of the hard problem, in which he elaborated on his core arguments and responded to their counterarguments. His use of the word easy is "tongue-in-cheek". As the cognitive psychologistSteven Pinker
puts it, they are about as easy as going to Mars or curing cancer.
"That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough
brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century."
David Chalmers first formulated the hard problem in his paper "Facing up to the problem of consciousness" (1995) and expanded upon it in The Conscious Mind (1996). His works provoked comment. Some, such as David Lewis and Steven Pinker, have praised Chalmers for his argumentative rigour and "impeccable clarity".
Pinker later said, in 2018, "In the end I still think that the hard
problem is a meaningful conceptual problem, but agree with Dennett that
it is not a meaningful scientific problem. No one will ever get a grant
to study whether you are a zombie or whether the same Captain Kirk walks
on the deck of the Enterprise and the surface of Zakdorn. And I agree
with several other philosophers that it may be futile to hope for a
solution at all, precisely because it is a conceptual problem, or, more
accurately, a problem with our concepts." Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland,
among others, believe that the hard problem is best seen as a
collection of easy problems that will be solved through further analysis
of the brain and behaviour.
Consciousness is an ambiguous term. It can be used to mean self
consciousness, awareness, the state of being awake, and so on. Chalmers
uses Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness: the feeling of what it is like to be something. Consciousness, in this sense, is synonymous with experience.
Chalmers' formulation
.
. .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and
behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual
discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may
still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?
— David Chalmers, Facing up to the problem of consciousness
The problem of consciousness, Chalmers argues, is two problems: the easy problems and the hard problem.
Easy problems
The easy problems are amenable to reductive inquiry. They are a logical consequence
of lower level facts about the world, similar to how a clock's ability
to tell time is a logical consequence of its clockwork and structure, or
a hurricane is a logical consequence of the structures and functions of
certain weather patterns. A clock, a hurricane, and the easy problems,
are all the sum of their parts (as are most things).
The easy problems relevant to consciousness concern mechanistic
analysis of the neural processes that accompany behaviour. Examples of
these include how sensory systems work, how sensory data is processed in
the brain, how that data influences behaviour or verbal reports, the
neural basis of thought and emotion, and so on. They are problems that
can be analyzed through "structures and functions".
Hard problem
The hard problem, in contrast, is the problem of why and how those processes are accompanied by experience.
It may further include the question of why these processes are
accompanied by this or that particular experience, rather than some
other kind of experience. In other words, the hard problem is the
problem of explaining why certain mechanisms are accompanied by
conscious experience.
For example, why should neural processing in the brain lead to the felt
sensations of, say, feelings of hunger? And why should those neural
firings lead to feelings of hunger rather than some other feeling (such
as, for example, feelings of thirst)?
Chalmers argues that it is conceivable that the relevant
behaviours associated with hunger, or any other feeling, could occur
even in the absence of that feeling. This suggests that experience is irreducible to physical systems such as the brain. This is the topic of the next section.
How the easy and hard problems are related
Chalmers believes that the hard problem is irreducible to the easy
problems: solving the easy problems will not lead to a solution to the
hard problems. This is because the easy problems pertain to the causal
structure of the world while the hard problem pertains to consciousness,
and facts about consciousness include facts that go beyond mere causal
or structural description.
For example, suppose someone were to stub their foot and yelp. In this
scenario, the easy problems are mechanistic explanations that involve
the activity of the nervous system and brain and its relation to the
environment (such as the propagation of nerve signals from the toe to
the brain, the processing of that information and how it leads to
yelping, and so on). The hard problem is the question of why these
mechanisms are accompanied by the feeling of pain, or why these
feelings of pain feel the particular way that they do. Chalmers argues
that facts about the neural mechanisms of pain, and pain behaviours, do
not lead to facts about conscious experience. Facts about conscious
experience are, instead, further facts, not derivable from facts about the brain.
The
hard problem is often illustrated by appealing to the logical
possibility of inverted visible spectra. If there is no logical
contradiction in supposing that one's colour vision could be inverted,
it follows that mechanistic explanations of visual processing do not
determine facts about what it is like to see colours.
An explanation for all of the relevant physical facts about neural
processing would leave unexplained facts about what it is like to feel
pain. This is in part because functions and physical structures of any
sort could conceivably exist in the absence of experience.
Alternatively, they could exist alongside a different set of
experiences. For example, it is logically possible
for a perfect replica of Chalmers to have no experience at all, or for
it to have a different set of experiences (such as an inverted visible
spectrum, so that the blue-yellow red-green axes of its visual field are
flipped).
The same cannot be said about clocks, hurricanes, or other
physical things. In those cases, a structural or functional description
is a complete description. A perfect replica of a clock is a clock, a
perfect replica of a hurricane is a hurricane, and so on. The difference
is that physical things are nothing more than their physical
constituents. For example, water is nothing more than H2O molecules, and understanding everything about H2O
molecules is to understand everything there is to know about water. But
consciousness is not like this. Knowing everything there is to know
about the brain, or any physical system, is not to know everything there
is to know about consciousness. So consciousness, then, must not be
purely physical.
Chalmers's idea contradicts physicalism (sometimes labelled materialism).
This is the view that everything that exists is a physical or material
thing, so everything can be reduced to microphysical things (such as
subatomic particles and the interactions between them). For example, a
desk is a physical thing, because it is nothing more than a complex
arrangement of a large number of subatomic particles interacting in a
certain way. According to physicalism, everything can be explained by
appeal to its microphysical constituents, including consciousness.
Chalmers's hard problem presents a counterexample
to this view, since it suggests that consciousness cannot be
reductively explained by appealing to its microphysical constituents. So
if the hard problem is a real problem then physicalism must be false,
and if physicalism is true then the hard problem must not be a real
problem.
Though Chalmers rejects physicalism, he is still a naturalist.
Historical precedents
The hard problem of consciousness has scholarly antecedents
considerably earlier than Chalmers. Chalmers himself notes that "a
number of thinkers in the recent and distant past" have "recognised the
particular difficulties of explaining consciousness."
He states that all his original 1996 paper contributed to the
discussion was "a catchy name, a minor reformulation of philosophically
familiar points".
Philosopher Raamy Majeed argued in 2016 that the hard problem is associated with two "explanatory targets":
[PQ] Physical processing gives rise to experiences with a phenomenal character.
[Q] Our phenomenal qualities are thus-and-so.
The first fact concerns the relationship between the physical and the phenomenal (i.e., how and why are some physical states felt states), whereas the second concerns the very nature of the phenomenal itself (i.e., what does the felt state feel like?).
Wolfgang Fasching argues that the hard problem is not about
qualia, but about the what-it-is-like-ness of experience in Nagel's
sense—about the givenness of phenomenal contents:
Today there is a strong tendency to simply equate
consciousness with the qualia. Yet there is clearly something not quite
right about this. The "itchiness of itches" and the "hurtfulness of
pain" are qualities we are conscious of. So philosophy of mind
tends to treat consciousness as if it consisted simply of the contents
of consciousness (the phenomenal qualities), while it really is
precisely consciousness of contents, the very givenness of
whatever is subjectively given. And therefore the problem of
consciousness does not pertain so much to some alleged "mysterious,
nonpublic objects", i.e. objects that seem to be only "visible" to the
respective subject, but rather to the nature of "seeing" itself (and in
today’s philosophy of mind astonishingly little is said about the
latter).
The mind–body problem is the problem of how the mind and the body
relate. The mind body problem is more general than the hard problem of
consciousness, since it is the problem of discovering how the mind and
body relate in general, thereby implicating any theoretical framework
that broaches the topic. The hard problem, in contrast, is often
construed as a problem uniquely faced by physicialist or materialist
theories of mind.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel posited in his 1974 paper "What Is It
Like to Be a Bat?" that experiences are essentially subjective
(accessible only to the individual undergoing them—i.e., felt only by
the one feeling them), while physical states are essentially objective
(accessible to multiple individuals). So he argued we have no idea what
it could mean to claim that an essentially subjective state just is
an essentially non-subjective state (i.e., that a felt state is nothing
but a functional state). In other words, we have no idea of what
reductivism amounts to.
He believes "every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a
single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective,
physical theory will abandon that point of view."
In 1983, the philosopher Joseph Levine proposed that there is an explanatory gap between our understanding of the physical world and our understanding of consciousness.
Levine's disputes that conscious states are reducible to neuronal
or brain states. He uses the example of pain (as an example of a
conscious state) and its reduction to the firing of c-fibers
(a kind of nerve cell). The difficulty is as follows: even if
consciousness is physical, it is not clear which physical states
correspond to which conscious states. The bridges between the two levels
of description will be contingent, rather than necessary.
This is significant because in most contexts, relating two scientific
levels of descriptions (such as physics and chemistry) is done with the
assurance of necessary connections between the two theories (for
example, chemistry follows with necessity from physics).
Levine illustrates this with a thought experiment: Suppose that
humanity were to encounter an alien species, and suppose it is known
that the aliens do not have any c-fibers. Even if one knows this, it is
not obvious that the aliens do not feel pain: that would remain an open
question. This is because the fact that aliens do not have c-fibers does
not entail that they do not feel pain (in other words, feelings of pain
do not follow with logical necessity from the firing of c-fibers).
Levine thinks such thought experiments demonstrate an explanatory gap
between consciousness and the physical world: even if consciousness is
reducible to physical things, consciousness cannot be explained in terms
of physical things, because the link between physical things and
consciousness is contingent link.
Levine does not think that the explanatory gap means that
consciousness is not physical: he is open to the idea that the
explanatory gap is only an epistemological problem for physicalism. In contrast, Chalmers thinks that the hard problem of consciousness does show that consciousness is not physical.
Philosophical zombies are a thought experiment commonly used in discussions of the hard problem. They are hypothetical beings physically identical to humans but that lack conscious experience.
Philosophers such as Chalmers, Joseph Levine, and Francis Kripke take
zombies as impossible within the bounds of nature but possible within
the bounds of logic.
This would imply that facts about experience are not logically entailed
by the "physical" facts. Therefore, consciousness is irreducible. In
Chalmers' words, "after God (hypothetically) created the world, he had
more work to do." Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of mind, criticised the field's use of "the zombie hunch" which he deems an "embarrassment" that ought to "be dropped like a hot potato".
The knowledge argument, also known as Mary's Room, is another
common thought experiment: A hypothetical neuroscientist named Mary has
lived her whole life in a black-and-white room and has never seen colour
before. She also happens to know everything there is to know about the
brain and colour perception. Chalmers believes
that when Mary sees the colour red for the first time, she gains new
knowledge — the knowledge of "what red looks like" — which is distinct
from, and irreducible to, her prior physical knowledge of the brain or
visual system. A stronger form of the knowledge argument claims not merely that Mary would lack subjective knowledge of "what red looks like," but that she would lack knowledge of an objective fact
about the world: namely, "what red looks like," a non-physical fact
that can be learned only through direct experience (qualia). Others,
such as Thomas Nagel, take a "physicalist" position, disagree with the argument in its stronger and/or weaker forms. For example, Nagel
put forward a "speculative proposal" of devising a language that could
"explain to a person blind from birth what it is like to see." The knowledge argument implies that such a language could not exist.
Philosophical responses
David Chalmers' formulation of the hard problem of consciousness provoked considerable debate within philosophy of mind, as well as scientific research.
A
diagram showing the relationship between various views concerning the
relationship between consciousness and the physical world
The hard problem is considered a problem primarily for physicalist
views of the mind (the view that the mind is a physical object or
process), since physical explanations tend to be functional, or
structural. Because of this, some physicalists have responded to the
hard problem by seeking to show that it dissolves upon analysis. Other
researchers accept the problem as real and seek to develop a theory of
consciousness' place in the world that can solve it, by either modifying
physicalism or abandoning it in favour of an alternative ontology (such as panpsychism or dualism).
A third response has been to accept the hard problem as real but deny human cognitive faculties can solve it.
PhilPapers
is an organization that archives academic philosophy papers and
periodically surveys professional philosophers about their views. It can
be used to gauge professional attitudes towards the hard problem. As of
the 2020 survey results, it seems that the majority of philosophers
(62.42%) agree that the hard problem is real, with a substantial
minority that disagrees (29.76%).
Attitudes towards physicalism also differ among professionals. In
the 2009 PhilPapers survey, 56.5% of philosophers surveyed subscribed
to physicalism and 27.1% of philosophers surveyed rejected physicalism.
16.4% fell into the "other" category.
In the 2020 PhilPapers survey, 51.93% of philosophers surveyed
indicated that they "accept or lean towards" physicalism and 32.08%
indicated that they reject physicalism. 6.23% were "agnostic" or
"undecided".
Different solutions have been proposed to the hard problem of
consciousness. The sections below taxonomizes the various responses to
the hard problem. The shape of this taxonomy was first introduced by
Chalmers in a 2003 literature review on the topic.
The labelling convention of this taxonomy has been incorporated into
the technical vocabulary of analytic philosophy, being used by
philosophers such as Adrian Boutel, Raamy Majeed, Janet Levin, Pete Mandik & Josh Weisberg, Roberto Pereira, and Helen Yetter-Chappell.
Type-A materialism (also known as reductive materialism or a priori physicalism) is view characterized by a commitment to physicalism
and a full rejection of the hard problem. By this view, the hard
problem either does not exist or is just another easy problem, because
every fact about the mind is a fact about the performance of various
functions or behaviours. So, once all the relevant functions and
behaviours have been accounted for, there will not be any facts left
over in need of explanation. Thinkers who subscribe to type-A materialism include Paul and Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish, and Thomas Metzinger.
Some type-A materialists believe in the reality of phenomenal
consciousness but believe it is nothing extra in addition to certain
functions or behaviours. This view is sometimes referred to as strong reductionism. Other type-A materialists may reject the existence of phenomenal consciousness entirely. This view is referred to as eliminative materialism or illusionism.
Strong reductionism
Many
philosophers have disputed that there is a hard problem of
consciousness distinct from what Chalmers calls the easy problems of
consciousness. Some among them, who are sometimes termed strong reductionists, hold that phenomenal consciousness (i.e., conscious experience) does exist but that it can be fully understood as reducible to the brain.
Broadly, strong reductionists accept that conscious experience is
real but argue it can be fully understood in functional terms as an
emergent property of the material brain.
In contrast to weak reductionists (see above), strong reductionists
reject ideas used to support the existence of a hard problem (that the
same functional organization could exist without consciousness, or that a
blind person who understood vision through a textbook would not know
everything about sight) as simply mistaken intuitions.
A notable family of strong reductionist accounts are the higher-order theories of consciousness. In 2005, the philosopher Peter Carruthers
wrote about "recognitional concepts of experience", that is, "a
capacity to recognize [a] type of experience when it occurs in one's own
mental life," and suggested that such a capacity could explain
phenomenal consciousness without positing qualia.
On the higher-order view, since consciousness is a representation, and
representation is fully functionally analyzable, there is no hard
problem of consciousness.
The philosophers Glenn Carruthers and Elizabeth Schier said in 2012 that the main arguments for the existence of a hard problem—philosophical zombies, Mary's room, and Nagel's bats—are
only persuasive if one already assumes that "consciousness must be
independent of the structure and function of mental states, i.e. that
there is a hard problem." Hence, the arguments beg the question.
The authors suggest that "instead of letting our conclusions on the
thought experiments guide our theories of consciousness, we should let
our theories of consciousness guide our conclusions from the thought
experiments."
The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci argued in 2013 that the hard problem is misguided, resulting from a "category mistake".
He said: "Of course an explanation isn't the same as an experience, but
that's because the two are completely independent categories, like
colors and triangles. It is obvious that I cannot experience what it is
like to be you, but I can potentially have a complete explanation of how
and why it is possible to be you."
In 2017, the philosopher Marco Stango, in a paper on John Dewey's
approach to the problem of consciousness (which preceded Chalmers'
formulation of the hard problem by over half a century), noted that
Dewey's approach would see the hard problem as the consequence of an
unjustified assumption that feelings and functional behaviors are not
the same physical process: "For the Deweyan philosopher, the 'hard
problem' of consciousness is a 'conceptual fact' only in the sense that
it is a philosophical mistake: the mistake of failing to see that the physical can be had as an episode of immediate sentiency."
The philosopher Thomas Metzinger likens the hard problem of consciousness to vitalism, a formerly widespread view in biology which was not so much solved as abandoned. Brian Jonathan Garrett has also argued that the hard problem suffers from flaws analogous to those of vitalism.
The philosopher Peter Hacker
argues that the hard problem is misguided in that it asks how
consciousness can emerge from matter, whereas in fact sentience emerges
from the evolution of living organisms.
He states: "The hard problem isn’t a hard problem at all. The really
hard problems are the problems the scientists are dealing with. [...]
The philosophical problem, like all philosophical problems, is a
confusion in the conceptual scheme."
Hacker's critique extends beyond Chalmers and the hard problem and is
directed against contemporary philosophy of mind and neuroscience more
broadly. Along with the neuroscientist Max Bennett, he has argued that most of contemporary neuroscience remains implicitly dualistic in its conceptualizations and is predicated on the mereological fallacy of ascribing psychological concepts to the brain that can properly be ascribed only to the person as a whole.
Hacker further states that "consciousness studies", as it exists today,
is "literally a total waste of time" and that "the conception of
consciousness which they have is incoherent".
Eliminative materialism or eliminativism is the view that many or all of the mental states used in folk psychology (i.e., common-sense ways of discussing the mind) do not, upon scientific examination, correspond to real brain mechanisms. According the 2020 PhilPapers survey, 4.51% of philosophers surveyed subscribe to eliminativism.
This stance has recently taken on the name of illusionism: the view that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. The term was popularized by the philosopher Keith Frankish.
Frankish argues that "illusionism" is preferable to "eliminativism" for
labelling the view that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. More
substantively, Frankish argues that illusionism about phenomenal
consciousness is preferable to realism about phenomenal consciousness.
He states: "Theories of consciousness typically address the hard
problem. They accept that phenomenal consciousness is real and aim to
explain how it comes to exist. There is, however, another approach,
which holds that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion and aims to
explain why it seems to exist."
Frankish concludes that illusionism "replaces the hard problem with the
illusion problem—the problem of explaining how the illusion of
phenomenality arises and why it is so powerful."
The philosopher Daniel Dennett is another prominent figure associated with illusionism. After Frankish published a paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies titled Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, Dennett responded with his own paper with the spin-off title Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness.
Dennett has been arguing for the illusory status of consciousness since
early on in his career. For example, in 1979 he published a paper
titled On the Absence of Phenomenology (where he argues for the nonexistence of phenomenal consciousness). Similar ideas have been explicated in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained.
Dennett argues that the so-called "hard problem" will be solved in the
process of solving what Chalmers terms the "easy problems". He compares consciousness to stage magic and its capability to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things.
To show how people might be commonly fooled into overstating the
accuracy of their introspective abilities, he describes a phenomenon
called change blindness, a visual process that involves failure to detect scenery changes in a series of alternating images.
He accordingly argues that consciousness need not be what it seems to
be based on introspection. To address the question of the hard problem,
or how and why physical processes give rise to experience, Dennett
states that the phenomenon of having experience is nothing more than the
performance of functions or the production of behavior, which can also
be referred to as the easy problems of consciousness.
Thus, Dennett argues that the hard problem of experience is included
among—not separate from—the easy problems, and therefore they can only
be explained together as a cohesive unit.
Elimativists differ on the role they believe intuitive judgement plays in creating the apparent reality of consciousness. The philosopher Jacy Reese Anthis
is of the position that this issue is born of an overreliance on
intuition, calling philosophical discussions on the topic of
consciousness a form of "intuition jousting". But when the issue is tackled with "formal argumentation" and "precise semantics" then the hard problem will dissolve.
The philosopher Elizabeth Irvine, in contrast, can be read as having
the opposite view, since she argues that phenomenal properties (that is,
properties of consciousness) do not exist in our common-sense view of the world.
She states that "the hard problem of consciousness may not be a genuine
problem for non-philosophers (despite its overwhelming obviousness to
philosophers)."
A complete illusionist theory of consciousness must include the description of a mechanism
by which the illusion of subjective experience is had and reported by
people. Various philosophers and scientists have proposed possible
theories. For example, in his book Consciousness and the Social Brain neuroscientist Michael Graziano advocates what he calls attention schema theory,
in which our perception of being conscious is merely an error in
perception, held by brains which evolved to hold erroneous and
incomplete models of their own internal workings, just as they hold
erroneous and incomplete models of their own bodies and of the external
world.
Criticisms of Eliminative Materialism / Illusionism
The
main criticisms of eliminative materialism and illusion hinge on the
counterintuitive nature of the view. Arguments of this form are called Moorean Arguments. A Moorean argument seeks to undermine the conclusion of an argument by asserting that the negation of that conclusion is more certain than the premises of the argument.
The roots of the Moorean Argument against illusionism extend back to Augustine of Hippo
who stated that he could not be deceived regarding his own existence,
since the very act of being deceived secures the existence of a being
there to be the recipient of that deception.
In the Early-Modern era, these arguments were repopularized by René Descartes, who coined the now famous phrase "Je pense, donc je suis" ("I think, therefore I am").
Descartes argued that even if he was maximally deceived (because, for
example, an evil demon was manipulating all his senses) he would still
know with certainty that his mind exists, because the state of being
deceived requires a mind as a prerequisite.
This same general argumentative structure is still in use today.
For example, in 2002 David Chalmers published an explicitly Moorean
argument against illusionism. The argument goes like this: The reality
of consciousness is more certain than any theoretical commitments (to,
for example, physicalism) that may be motivating the illusionist to deny
the existence of consciousness. The reason for this is because we have
direct "acquaintance" with consciousness, but we do not have direct
acquaintance with anything else (including anything that could inform
our beliefs in consciousness being an illusion). In other words:
consciousness can be known directly, so the reality of consciousness is
more certain than any philosophical or scientific theory that says
otherwise.
Chalmers concludes that "there is little doubt that something like the
Moorean argument is the reason that most people reject illusionism and
many find it crazy."
Eliminative materialism and illusionism have been the subject of
criticism within the popular press. One highly cited example comes from
the philosopher Galen Strawson who wrote an article in the New York Review of Books titled The Consciousness Deniers.
In it, Strawson describes illusionism as the "silliest claim ever
made", next to which "every known religious belief is only a little less
sensible than the belief that the grass is green." Another notable example comes from Christof Koch (a neuroscientist and one of the leading proponents of Integrated Information Theory) in his popular science book The Feeling of Life Itself.
In the early pages of the book, Koch describes eliminativism as the
"metaphysical counterpart to Cotard's syndrome, a psychiatric condition
in which patients deny being alive."
Koch takes the prevalence of eliminativism as evidence that "much of
twentieth-century analytic philosophy has gone to the dogs".
Type-B Materialism, also known as Weak Reductionism or A Posteriori Physicalism, is the view the hard problem stems from human psychology, and is therefore not indicative of a genuine ontological gap between consciousness and the physical world. Like Type-A Materialists, Type-B Materialists are committed to physicalism. Unlike Type-A Materialists, however, Type-B Materialists do
accept inconceivability arguments often cited in support of the hard
problem, but with a key caveat: that inconceivability arguments give us
insight only into how the human mind tends to conceptualize the relationship between mind and matter, but not into what the true nature of this relationship actually is.
According to this view, there is a gap between two ways of knowing
(introspection and neuroscience) that will not be resolved by
understanding all the underlying neurobiology, but still believe that
consciousness and neurobiology are one and the same in reality.
While Type-B Materialists all agree that intuitions about the
hard problem are psychological rather than ontological in origin, they
differ as to whether our intuitions about the hard problem are innate or
culturally conditioned. This has been dubbed the "hard-wired/soft-wired
distinction."
In relation to Type-B Materialism, those who believe that our
intuitions about the hard problem are innate (and therefore common to
all humans) subscribe to the "hard-wired view".
Those that believe our intuitions are culturally conditioned subscribe
to the "soft-wired view". Unless otherwise specified, the term 'Type-B
Materialism' refers to the hard-wired view.
Notable philosophers who subscribe to Type-B Materialism include David Papineau, Joseph Levine and Janet Levine.
The Hard-Wired View
Joseph Levine (who formulated the notion of the explanatory gap) states: "The explanatory gap argument doesn't demonstrate a gap in nature, but a gap in our understanding of nature." He nevertheless contends that full scientific understanding will not close the gap, and that analogous gaps do not exist for other identities in nature, such as that between water and H2O. The philosophers Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker
agree that facts about what a conscious experience is like to the one
experiencing it cannot be deduced from knowing all the facts about the
underlying physiology, but by contrast argue that such gaps of knowledge
are also present in many other cases in nature, such as the distinction between water and H2O.
To explain why these two ways of knowing (i.e. third-person
scientific observation and first-person introspection) yield such
different understandings of consciousness, weak reductionists often
invoke the phenomenal concepts strategy, which argues the difference stems from our inaccurate phenomenal concepts (i.e., how we think about consciousness), not from the nature of consciousness itself.
By this view, the hard problem of consciousness stems from a dualism of
concepts, not from a dualism of properties or substances.
The Soft-Wired View
Some
consciousness researchers have argued that the hard problem is a
cultural artifact, unique to contemporary Western Culture. This is
similar to Type-B Materialism, but it makes the further claim that the
psychological facts that cause us to intuit the hard problem are not
innate, but culturally conditioned. Notable researchers who hold this
view include Anna Wierzbicka, Hakwan Lau and Matthias Michel.
Wierzbicka (who is a linguist) argues that the vocabulary used by consciousness researchers (including words like experience and consciousness) are not universally translatable, and are "parochially English."
Weirzbicka calls David Chalmers out by name for using these words,
arguing that if philosophers "were to use panhuman concepts expressed in
crosstranslatable words" (such as know, think, or feel) then the hard problem would dissolve.
David Chalmers has responded to these criticisms by saying that he will
not "apologize for using technical terms in an academic article . . .
they play a key role in efficient communication in every discipline,
including Wierzbicka’s".
Dualism views consciousness as either a non-physical substance separate from the brain or a non-physical property of the physical brain. Dualism is the view that the mind is irreducible to the physical body.
There are multiple dualist accounts of the causal relationship between
the mental and the physical, of which interactionism and
epiphenomenalism are the most common today. Interactionism posits that
the mental and physical causally impact one another, and is associated
with the thought of René Descartes (1596–1650). Epiphenomalism holds the mental is causally dependent on the physical, but does not in turn causally impact it.
In contemporary philosophy, interactionism has been defended by philosophers including Martine Nida-Rümelin, while epiphenomenalism has been defended by philosophers including Frank Jackson (although Jackson later changed his stance to physicalism). Chalmers has also defended versions of both positions as plausible. Traditional dualists such as Descartes believed the mental and the physical to be two separate substances, or fundamental types of entities (hence "substance dualism"); some more recent dualists, however, accept only one substance, the physical, but state it has both mental and physical properties (hence "property dualism").
Meanwhile, panpsychism and neutral monism, broadly speaking, view consciousness as intrinsic to matter.
In its most basic form, panpsychism holds that all physical entities
have minds (though its proponents take more qualified positions),
while neutral monism, in at least some variations, holds that entities
are composed of a substance with mental and physical aspects—and is thus
sometimes described as a type of panpsychism.
Forms of panpsychism and neutral monism were defended in the early twentieth century by the psychologist William James, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the physicist Arthur Eddington, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and interest in these views has been revived in recent decades by philosophers including Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, and David Chalmers. Chalmers describes his overall view as "naturalistic dualism", but he says panpsychism is in a sense a form of physicalism, as does Strawson.
Proponents of panpsychism argue it solves the hard problem of
consciousness parsimoniously by making consciousness a fundamental
feature of reality.
A traditional solution to the hard problem is idealism,
according to which consciousness is fundamental and not simply an
emergent property of matter. It is claimed that this avoids the hard
problem entirely. Objective idealism and cosmopsychism
consider mind or consciousness to be the fundamental substance of the
universe. Proponents claim that this approach is immune to both the hard
problem of consciousness and the combination problem that affects panpsychism.
From an idealist perspective, matter is a representation or image
of mental processes. Supporters suggest that this avoids the problems
associated with the materialist view of mind as an emergent property of a
physical brain. Critics point out that you then have a decombination problem,
in terms of explaining individual subjective experience. In response,
Bernardo Kastrup claims that nature hints at a mechanism for this in the
condition Dissociative identity disorder (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder).
Kastrup proposes dissociation as an example from nature showing that
multiple minds with their own individual subjective experience could
develop within a single universal mind.
Cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman uses a mathematical model based around conscious agents, within a fundamentally conscious universe, to support conscious realism
as a description of nature—one that falls within the objective idealism
approaches to the hard problem: "The objective world, i.e., the world
whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular
conscious agent, consists entirely of conscious agents."
David Chalmers calls this form of idealism one of "the handful of promising approaches to the mind–body problem."
New mysterianism, most significantly associated with the philosopher Colin McGinn, proposes that the human mind, in its current form, will not be able to explain consciousness. McGinn draws on Noam Chomsky's
distinction between problems, which are in principle solvable, and
mysteries, which human cognitive faculties are unequipped to ever
understand, and places the mind–body problem in the latter category. His position is that a naturalistic explanation does exist but that the human mind is cognitively closed to it due to its limited range of intellectual abilities. He cites Jerry Fodor's concept of the modularity of mind in support of cognitive closure.
While in McGinn's strong form, new mysterianism states that the relationship between consciousness and the material world can never
be understood by the human mind, there are also weaker forms that argue
it cannot be understood within existing paradigms but that advances in
science or philosophy may open the way to other solutions (see above). The ideas of Thomas Nagel and Joseph Levine fall into the second category. Steven Pinker has also endorsed this weaker version of the view, summarizing it as follows:
And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher
Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a
quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as
animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't
hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional
space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information
processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective
experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit
that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius—a Darwin or
Einstein of consciousness—comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that
suddenly makes it all clear to us.
Relationship to scientific frameworks
Most
neuroscientists and cognitive scientists believe that Chalmers' alleged
"hard problem" will be solved, or be shown to not be a real problem, in
the course of the solution of the so-called "easy problems", although a
significant minority disagrees.
Since 1990, researchers including the molecular biologist Francis Crick and the neuroscientist Christof Koch
have made significant progress toward identifying which neurobiological
events occur concurrently to the experience of subjective
consciousness. These postulated events are referred to as neural correlates of consciousness or NCCs. However, this research arguably addresses the question of which neurobiological mechanisms are linked to consciousness but not the question of why
they should give rise to consciousness at all, the latter being the
hard problem of consciousness as Chalmers formulated it. In "On the
Search for the Neural Correlate of Consciousness", Chalmers said he is
confident that, granting the principle that something such as what he
terms global availability can be used as an indicator of consciousness,
the neural correlates will be discovered "in a century or two". Nevertheless, he stated regarding their relationship to the hard problem of consciousness:
One can always ask why these processes of availability
should give rise to consciousness in the first place. As yet we cannot
explain why they do so, and it may well be that full details about the
processes of availability will still fail to answer this question.
Certainly, nothing in the standard methodology I have outlined answers
the question; that methodology assumes a relation between availability
and consciousness, and therefore does nothing to explain it. [...] So
the hard problem remains. But who knows: Somewhere along the line we may
be led to the relevant insights that show why the link is there, and
the hard problem may then be solved.
The neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel
wrote that locating the NCCs would not solve the hard problem, but
rather one of the so-called easy problems to which the hard problem is
contrasted. Kandel went on to note Crick and Koch's suggestion that once the binding problem—understanding what accounts for the unity of experience—is solved, it will be possible to solve the hard problem empirically. However, neuroscientist Anil Seth
argued that emphasis on the so-called hard problem is a distraction
from what he calls the "real problem": understanding the neurobiology
underlying consciousness, namely the neural correlates of various
conscious processes. This more modest goal is the focus of most scientists working on consciousness. Psychologist Susan Blackmore
believes, by contrast, that the search for the neural correlates of
consciousness is futile and itself predicated on an erroneous belief in
the hard problem of consciousness.
Integrated information theory (IIT), developed by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi
in 2004 and more recently also advocated by Koch, is one of the most
discussed models of consciousness in neuroscience and elsewhere. The theory proposes an identity
between consciousness and integrated information, with the latter item
(denoted as Φ) defined mathematically and thus in principle measurable. The hard problem of consciousness, write Tononi and Koch, may indeed be intractable when working from matter to consciousness.
However, because IIT inverts this relationship and works from
phenomenological axioms to matter, they say it could be able to solve
the hard problem.
In this vein, proponents have said the theory goes beyond identifying
human neural correlates and can be extrapolated to all physical systems.
Tononi wrote (along with two colleagues):
While identifying the "neural correlates of
consciousness" is undoubtedly important, it is hard to see how it could
ever lead to a satisfactory explanation of what consciousness is and how
it comes about. As will be illustrated below, IIT offers a way to
analyze systems of mechanisms to determine if they are properly
structured to give rise to consciousness, how much of it, and of which
kind.
As part of a broader critique of IIT, Michael Cerullo suggested that
the theory's proposed explanation is in fact for what he dubs (following
Scott Aaronson)
the "Pretty Hard Problem" of methodically inferring which physical
systems are conscious—but would not solve Chalmers' hard problem. "Even if IIT is correct," he argues, "it does not explain why integrated information generates (or is) consciousness." Chalmers agrees that IIT, if correct, would solve the "Pretty Hard Problem" rather than the hard problem.
Global workspace theory (GWT) is a cognitive architecture and theory of consciousness proposed by the cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars in 1988. Baars explains the theory with the metaphor of a theater, with conscious processes represented by an illuminated stage.
This theater integrates inputs from a variety of unconscious and
otherwise autonomous networks in the brain and then broadcasts them to
unconscious networks (represented in the metaphor by a broad, unlit
"audience"). The theory has since been expanded upon by other scientists including cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene.
In his original paper outlining the hard problem of
consciousness, Chalmers discussed GWT as a theory that only targets one
of the "easy problems" of consciousness.
In particular, he said GWT provided a promising account of how
information in the brain could become globally accessible, but argued
that "now the question arises in a different form: why should global
accessibility give rise to conscious experience? As always, this
bridging question is unanswered." J. W. Dalton similarly criticized GWT on the grounds that it provides, at best, an account of the cognitive function of consciousness, and fails to explain its experiential aspect.
By contrast, A. C. Elitzur argued: "While [GWT] does not address the
'hard problem', namely, the very nature of consciousness, it constrains
any theory that attempts to do so and provides important insights into
the relation between consciousness and cognition."
For his part, Baars writes (along with two colleagues) that there is no hard problem of explaining qualia
over and above the problem of explaining causal functions, because
qualia are entailed by neural activity and themselves causal. Dehaene, in his 2014 book Consciousness and the Brain, rejected the concept of qualia and argued that Chalmers' "easy problems" of consciousness are actually the hard problems.
He further stated that the "hard problem" is based only upon
ill-defined intuitions that are continually shifting as understanding
evolves:
Once our intuitions are educated by cognitive
neuroscience and computer simulations, Chalmers' hard problem will
evaporate. The hypothetical concept of qualia, pure mental experience,
detached from any information-processing role, will be viewed as a
peculiar idea of the prescientific era, much like vitalism...
[Just as science dispatched vitalism] the science of consciousness will
keep eating away at the hard problem of consciousness until it
vanishes.
The meta-problem
In 2018, Chalmers highlighted what he calls the "meta-problem of consciousness", another problem related to the hard problem of consciousness:
The meta-problem of consciousness is (to a first
approximation) the problem of explaining why we think that there is a
[hard] problem of consciousness.
In his "second approximation", he says it is the problem of explaining the behavior of "phenomenal reports", and the behavior of expressing a belief that there is a hard problem of consciousness.
Explaining its significance, he says:
Although the meta-problem is strictly speaking an easy
problem, it is deeply connected to the hard problem. We can reasonably
hope that a solution to the meta-problem will shed significant light on
the hard problem. A particularly strong line holds that a solution to
the meta-problem will solve or dissolve the hard problem. A weaker line
holds that it will not remove the hard problem, but it will constrain
the form of a solution.
In other words, the 'strong
line' holds that the solution to the meta-problem would provide an
explanation of our beliefs about consciousness that is independent of
consciousness. That would debunk our beliefs about consciousness, in the
same way that explaining beliefs about god in evolutionary terms may
provide arguments against theism itself.
In popular culture
British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard's play The Hard Problem,
first produced in 2015, is named after the hard problem of
consciousness, which Stoppard defines as having "subjective First Person
experiences".
