Abstract
I argue that the hard problem of consciousness occurs only in very limited contexts. My argument is based on the idea of explanatory perspectivalism, according to which what we want to know about a phenomenon determines the type of explanation we use to understand it. To that effect the hard problem arises only in regard to questions such as how is it that concepts of subjective experience can refer to physical properties, but not concerning questions such as what gives rise to qualia or why certain brain states have certain qualities and not others. In this sense we could for example fully explain why certain brain processes have certain subjective qualities, while we still don’t have a viable theory of concepts that explains co-referentiality of phenomenal and physical concepts. Given this limitation, the hard problem doesn’t pose a problem for the empirical study of consciousness.
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Notes
The creatures who are functionally, structurally, behaviorally indistinguishable from us humans, but who unlike us do not have subjective conscious experiences.
I’d like to thank Peter Machamer for introducing a very similar notion of investigator perspectivalism to me in the context of philosophy of experimentation.
Realization and supervenience are relations that hold between properties in the world, they are not explanations themselves, but explanations based on these relations normally explain by showing how the realization and supervenience bases are individuated.
This is a historical toy example. “C-fibre firing” stands for whatever actual neural mechanism of pain is. It is used as an analogy of the identity of macro concept of “water” and microphysical description “H2O”. In this toy example with qualia, the concept “pain” is a macro concept and “C-fibre firing” represents a microphysical description.
Assuming for the sake of discussion that it is true that physical processes indeed give rise to qualia.
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Acknowledgments
I am very much indebted for their tremendously helpful discussions and comments on various versions of this paper to: Philippe Huneman, Carl F. Craver, Paula Droege, Stephen Laurence, Peter Machamer, Joseph Levine, Raphael van Riel, Liz Schier and Duško Prelević. I would like to emphasize my enormous gratitude for their encouragement and support to: Paula Droege, Philippe Huneman and Carl F. Craver. My special thanks goes to Paual Giladi and Zorana Todorović for their meticulous job at proofreading the manuscript. I would also like to thank to two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments that helped me greatly improve this paper. The research in this paper is done within the project Dynamical Systems in Nature and Society: Philosophical and Empirical Aspects (project number: 179051) which is supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.
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Kostić, D. Explanatory Perspectivalism: Limiting the Scope of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Topoi 36, 119–125 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9262-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9262-7