Abstract
One of the persistent debates that has animated thinkers concerns the nature of consciousness. Is it merely an epiphenomenon that can be reduced to matter or does it belong to a different ontological domain? In recent times, this question has been reformulated as the hard problem of how material brain states can give rise to the mental states that we seem to experience. One of the answers to the hard problem has been to deflate the question and simply deny that there is a problem. This chapter argues that this approach often associated with Dennett and embraced by Siderits is problematic within the framework of Buddhist philosophy given the latter’s strong insistence on observing how things appear to the mind. This essay further argues that Buddhism offers resources to deal with the hard problem through the Madhyamaka philosophy, which argues that it does not make sense to think how things are and that we should be content to deal with how things appear. In this perspective, the task of explaining consciousness is neither to eliminate appearances à la Dennett nor to discover what the mind really is in itself, but to learn how to correlate better the various appearances though which the mental is given (the first and third person perspectives). In this way, the hard problem ceases to be a mystery and becomes an object of scientific inquiry that relies on the ever tighter observation of the neuro-phenomenological correlation between first and third person perspectives.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank all the people who have helped me in sorting these difficult ideas. I cannot mention all of them, but particular thanks are due to Joseph Cruz, Evan Thompson, Mark Siderits, Tom Tillemans, Natasha Judson and many others for their useful comments and feedback.
- 2.
For a study of Abhidharma reductionism, see Siderits (2003).
- 3.
Special thanks to Evan Thompson for helping me to formulate this point.
- 4.
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Dreyfus, G. (2023). But Aren’t We Conscious? A Buddhist Reflection on the Hard Problem. In: Coseru, C. (eds) Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13995-6_2
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