Faith and Philosophy

Volume 26, Issue 5, 2009

Science and Human Nature

“The Hard Problem of Consciousness” and Two Arguments for Interactionism

The paper begins with a restatement of Chalmers’s “hard problem of consciousness.” It is suggested that an interactionist approach is one of the possible solutions of this problem. Some fresh arguments against the identity theory and epiphenomenalism as main rivals of interactionism are developed. One of these arguments has among its corollaries a denial of local supervenience, although not of the causal closure principle. As a result of these considerations a version of “local interactionism” (compatible with causal closure) is proposed. It is argued that local interactionism may offer a fruitful path for resolving the “hard problem.”