The Hard Problem

Many of the numerous studies of consciousness pose the question, usually at the outset, of how phenomenal consciousness, the feeling of "what it is like", can occur in the physical medium of brain tissue. There is an "explanatory gap" between the mental and the physical. It is impossible, by taking thought, to explain the basis of thought itself in relation to the body in a satisfactory, causally efficient way. It is equally impossible, so far, to establish the precise cause of mental processes by examining brain tissue. This conundrum is what David Chalmers termed "the Hard Problem", and it has been referred to as such ever since.

I don't have a solution; neither do the authors of thousands of books and papers on the subject. In the end they remain inconclusive. What they provide are a mind-boggling array of ways of thinking about it. I don't hope to do more than arrange my own thoughts, as concisely as possible.

Most approaches to the mind-body problem, as it is more widely called, reject the strong dualist position adopted by Descartes, on the grounds that it is impossible to see how a non-material substance can act on material substances. Few, however, opt for a thoroughgoing materialism, retaining the option of a weak dualism known as 'non-reductive materialism'.

I think this is a good place to start, simply because I cannot dispense with the certainty that a) I have a mind and b) that there is a world. As I maintained in my previous post the two are inextricably entwined . We know the world through the mind, that part of it at the forefront, as it were, via a the senses. The reflective part tries to make sense of it. I should note that this applies equally to scientific as to philosophical investigation. Experimental procedures are conducted by use of the senses and bodily manipulation, results assessed by reflection. One can't come out of the mental envelope in order to examine it, but if it is acknowledged that the mind is fully embedded in the world, of which the body is a part, I think it becomes easier to naturalise it, to see it as part of nature and thus in principle fully explicable.

I think now there is no doubt that the brain is the seat of consciousness. It's where the final explanation will be found, or the last part of the puzzle, the link in an elaborate chain of interactions between the human organism and its environment.