How not to go into the hard problem of consciousness?
DOI: n/a
Much of contemporary philosophy of mind is devoted to studying and attempting to solve the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996). The aim is to understand why, when some physical processes occur in the brain, the subject has a conscious experience that has phenomenal character; there is something like being in that state (Nagel, 1974). The ambition of the paper is to show, in the vein of Descombes (1995) and Hacker (2013), that we can refuse to go into this problem, because it is actually based on untenable intellectual constructs that abuse our imagination. On the one hand, the idea of the zombie twin, which is supposed to enable us to isolate phenomenal consciousness, is incoherent – which does not lead to a physicalist conclusion; and secondly, the opposition between functional concepts and phenomenal concepts, which philosophers of mind wonder whether they target two different dimensions of our mental states – of which the zombie would have only one – or are two epistemic ways to the same reality, is ill-construed and distorts our psychological concepts, which are expressive in nature.
Pour citer cet article :
Anselin Gautier (2025/2). How not to go into the hard problem of consciousness? In Regular papers (Eds), Intellectica: Issue 83, Intellectica, 83, (pp.165-185), DOI: n/a.