Abstract

It has seemed to many philosophers, even some well disposed towards materialism, that an insurmountable barrier blocks the path to a thorough-going materialist view of the world. That barrier is the problem of consciousness. The problem has two parts. The one has to do with the difficulty of providing an exhaustive reductive account of the qualitative or phenomenological features of our sensations. The other part—which will be the focus of this paper—has to do with intentionality, the directedness of mental states upon an object. To put it crudely, how can this stuff in my skull—no matter how wondrously organized it might be—be of or about anything? How can states of the brain or central nervous system have such semantic properties as truth and falsehood? How can a merely physical system be sensitive to meanings and reasons? How can the appearing of a world be nothing but physical processes within the world?