Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought
By Philip Goff, originally published by Scientific American.
In the 1990s the Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously framed the challenge of distinguishing between the “easy” problems and the “hard” problem of consciousness. Easy problems focus on explaining behavior, such as the ability to discriminate, categorize and react to surprises. Still incredibly challenging, they’re “easy” in the sense that they fit into standard scientific explanation: we postulate a mechanism to explain how the system—the brain—does what it does.
The hard problem comes after we’ve explained all of these functions of the brain, where we are still left with a puzzle: Why is the carrying out of these functions accompanied by experience? Why doesn’t all this mechanistic functioning go on “in the dark”? In my own work, I have argued that the hard problem is rooted in the way that the “father of modern science,” Galileo, designed physical science to exclude consciousness.
Chalmers made the quandary vivid by promoting the idea of a “philosophical zombie,” a complicated mechanism set up to behave exactly like a human being and with the same information processing in its brain, but with no consciousness. You stick a knife in such a zombie, and it screams and runs away. But it doesn’t actually feel pain. When a philosophical zombie crosses the street, it carefully checks that there is no traffic, but it doesn’t actually have any visual or auditory experience of the street.
Nobody thinks zombies are real, but they offer a vivid way of working out where you stand on the hard problem. Those on Team Chalmers believe that if all there was to a human being were the mechanistic processes of physical science, we’d all be zombies. Given that we’re not zombies, there must be something more going on in us to explain our consciousness. Solving the hard problem is then a matter of working out the extra ingredient, with one increasingly popular option being to posit very rudimentary forms of consciousness at the level of fundamental particles or fields.
For the opposing team, such as the late, great philosopher Daniel Dennett, this division between feeling and behavior makes no sense. The only task for a science of consciousness is explaining behavior, not just the external behavior of the organism but also that of its inner parts. This debate has rattled on for decades.
However, there has more recently been a new and interesting development in these philosophical debates. Growing numbers of philosophers suspect that the division between “feelings” and “behavior,” inspired by zombies and by the distinction between “hard” and “easy” problems, poses an even deeper challenge than Chalmers foresaw. This may tempt us to think Dennett was right after all, and the whole “hard problem” setup is a chimera.
Or it may lead us to think that the mind is more mysterious than has thus far been appreciated.
This article was originally published by Scientific American and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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