The problem with the “hard problem”

RobertLawrence Kuhn is well-known as the creator and host of the public televisionseries Closer to Truth , an invaluablesource of interviews with major contributors to a variety of contemporarydebates in philosophy, theology, and science. (Longtime readers will recall an exchange Kuhn and I had at First Things some years back on thequestion of why there is something rather than nothing, which you can find here,here,and here.)  Recently, Kuhn’s article “Alandscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications”    appeared in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.  It is an impressively exhaustive survey ofthe field, and will be extremely helpful to anyone looking for guidance throughits enormous and often bewildering literature. Kuhn kindly includes a section on my own contributions to the subject.

The “hard problem”

Whether bydesign or not, the article marks the thirtieth anniversary since David Chalmersintroduced the phrase “hard problem of consciousness” to label what has inrecent analytic philosophy of mind become a focus of obsessive attention.  Introducing the problem, Kuhn notes:

Key indeed are qualia, our internal, phenomenological, feltexperience – the sight of your newborn daughter, bundled up; the sound ofMahler's Second Symphony, fifth movement, choral finale; the smell of garlic,cooking in olive oil.  Qualia – the feltqualities of inner experience – are the crux of the mind-body problem.

Chalmers describes qualia as “the raw sensations of experience.” He says, “I see colors – reds, greens,blues – and they feel a certain way to me.  I see a red rose; I hear a clarinet; I smellmothballs.  All of these feel a certainway to me.  You must experience them toknow what they're like.  You couldprovide a perfect, complete map of my brain [down to elementary particles] – what'sgoing on when I see, hear, smell – but if I haven't seen, heard, smelled formyself, that brain map is not going to tell me about the quality of seeing red,hearing a clarinet, smelling mothballs. You must experience it.”

Those lasttwo sentences indicate why qualia areregarded by so many contemporary philosophers as problematic.  The problem has to do with the metaphysicalgap that seems to exist between physical facts on the one hand (including factsabout the brain) and facts about conscious experience on the other (especiallyfacts about qualia).

The natureand reality of this gap has been spelled out in various ways.  Consider Chalmers’ famous “zombieargument.”  It is possible atleast in principle, he says, for there to be a world physically identical toour own down to the last particle, but where there are none of the qualia ofconscious experience.  Thus, in thisimagined world, there are creatures who are not only anatomically but alsobehaviorally identical to us, in that they speak and act exactly as we do inresponse to the same stimuli.  But theypossess no inner life of the kind characterized by qualia.  They are “zombies” in the technical sensefamiliar to readers of contemporary work in the philosophy of mind (a sensevery different from that familiar from Nightof the Living Dead and similar movies). But if they can be physically identical without possessing qualia, thenthe facts about qualia must be something over and above the physical facts.

A relatedargument known as the “knowledgeargument” was famously put forward by Frank Jackson.  Imagine Mary, a scientist of the future who,for whatever reason, has spent her entire life in a black and white room, neverhaving experiences of colors.  She has,nevertheless, through her studies come to learn all the physical facts thereare to know about the physics and physiology of color perception.  For example, she knows down to the lastdetail what is going on in the surface of a red apple, and in the eyes andnervous system, when someone sees the apple. Suppose she leaves the room and finally comes to learn for herself whatit is like to see red.  In other words,she comes for the first time to have the qualia associated with the consciousexperience of seeing a red apple.  Surelyshe has learned something new.  Butsince, by hypothesis, she already knew all the physical facts there were toknow about the situation, her new knowledge of the qualia in question must beknowledge of something over and above the physical facts.

As you mightexpect, the lesson many draw from these arguments is that materialism, whichholds that the physical facts are all the facts there are, is false.  And this is taken to show in turn thatconsciousness will never be explicable in neuroscientific terms.  But while this certainly makes qualia aproblem for the materialist, you might wonder why they would be a problem foranyone else.  Can’t the dualist happilytake these implications to be, not a problem, but rather a confirmation of hisposition?  But it’s not that simple.  For arguments like the zombie argument alsoseem to imply that qualia are epiphenomenal, having no causal influence on thephysical world.  And if qualia have nocausal influence on anything we do or say, how are we even talking aboutthem?  Indeed, how can we know they arereally there?

How toresolve such puzzles, and determining whether it is materialism, dualism, orsome alternative view that will survive when they are resolved, is what the“hard problem” is all about.  An enormousamount of ink has been spilled on it in recent decades, as Kuhn’s article shows.  Now, philosophical work can often be of greatvalue even when it is based on erroneous presuppositions, because it can teachus about the logical relationships between certain concepts, and theconsequences of following out consistently certain philosophicalassumptions.  That is why it will alwaysbe important for philosophers to study thinkers of genius who got things badlywrong (which would in my view include Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Ockham,Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and many others).

In myopinion, the literature on the hard problem is of value in just this way.  We learn from it important things about therelationships between key philosophical ideas, such as the conceptions ofmatter and of consciousness that have dominated modern philosophy.  And it shows us, in my view, that materialismis false, since the conception of matter the materialist operates with rulesout any materialist explanation of consciousness, and denying the existence ofconsciousness in order to get around this problem would be incoherent.  This literature also illuminates the problemthat post-Cartesian forms of dualism have in explainingthe tight integration between mind and body that everyday experiencereveals to us to be real.

Origin of the problem

All thesame, the so called “hard problem” is, in my view, a pseudo-problem that restson a set of mistakes.  There is a reasonwhy ancient and medieval philosophy knew nothing of the “mind-body problem” asmodern philosophers conceive of it, and nothing of the so-called “hard problemof consciousness” in particular.  Andit’s not because they somehow overlooked some obvious features of mind andmatter that make their relationship problematic.  It’s because the problem only arises if onemakes certain assumptions about the nature of mind and/or matter that ancientand medieval philosophers generally did not make, but modern philosophers oftendo make. 

Points likethe ones to follow have often been made not only by Aristotelian-Thomisticphilosophers like me but also by Wittgensteinians like PeterHacker and Maxwell Bennett and Heideggerians like FrederickOlafson.  The key moves thatgenerated the so-called mind-body problem can be found in Descartes, so thatThomists, Wittgensteinians, Heideggerians, and others commonly characterizethem as “Cartesian.”  But variations onthese moves are found in early modern thinkers more generally. 

On the sideof the body, modern philosophy introduced a conception of matter that isessentially reductionist and mathematicized.  It is reductionist insofar as it essentiallytakes everyday material objects to be aggregates of microscopic particles.  A stone, an apple, a tree, a dog, a humanbody – all of these things are, on this view, really “nothing but” collectionsof particles of the same type, so that the differences between the everydayobjects are as superficial as the differences between sandcastles of diverseshapes.  The new conception of matter ismathematicized insofar as it holds that the only properties of the microscopicparticles are those that can be given a mathematical characterization.  This would include size, shape, position in space,movement through space, and the like, which came to be called the “primaryqualities” of matter. 

With color,sound, heat, cold, and other so-called “secondary qualities,” the idea was thatthere is nothing in matter itself that corresponds to the way we experiencethem.  For example, there is nothing inan apple that in any way resembles the red we see, and nothing in ice waterthat in any way resembles the cold we feel. The redness and coldness exist only in our experience of the apple andthe water, in something like the way the redness we see when looking throughred-tinted glasses exists only in the glasses rather than in the objects we seethrough them.  Physical objects, on thisconception, are nothing more than collections of colorless, soundless,odorless, tasteless particles.  Thisincludes the brain, which is as devoid of these qualities as apples and waterare.

On the sideof the mind, meanwhile, the modern picture makes of it the repository of thesequalities that are said not truly to exist in matter.  Redness, coldness, and the like, are on thisview not the qualities of physical things, but rather of our consciousexperiences of physical things.  They arethe “qualia” of experience.  Oftenassociated with this view is an indirectrealist theory of perception, according to which the immediate objects ofperception are not physical objects themselves, but only mental representationsof such objects.  For example, when yousee an apple, the immediate object of your perception is not the apple outsideyou, but rather an inner representation of it. The situation is analogous to looking at someone who is ringing yourdoorbell through a security camera that is generating an image of the person ona computer screen.  What you are directlylooking at is the screen rather thanthe person, and the colors you see on the screen are strictly speaking featuresof the screen rather than the person(even if they are caused by something really there in the person). 

On theindirect realist theory of perception, conscious experience is experience ofthe inner “screen” of the mind itself rather than of the physical world.  The physical world is the cause of what we see on this innerscreen, just as the person ringing your doorbell is the cause of what you seeon your computer.  But we have no directaccess to it, and can know it only by inference from what we see on the innerscreen.  Our awareness of the screeninvolves something called “introspection,” which is analogous to perceptionexcept that its objects are purely mental and known directly, whereas theobjects of perception are physical and known indirectly.  For example, by introspection you directlyknow your experience of the apple and the reddish, sweet, fragrant, etc. qualiaof this experience.  Perception involvesindirect knowledge of an external physical object that is the cause of yourhaving this experience and those qualia.

The mind asconceived of on this picture is often called the “Cartesian theater.”  The reductionist-cum-mathematicizedconception of the physical world I described is often called the “mechanicalworld picture.”  The modern mind-bodyproblem is essentially the problem of determining how these two pictures arerelated to one another, which is why no such problem existed in ancient andmedieval philosophy (or at least not in its mainstreams, though the ancientatomist Democritus noteda paradox facing his own position that is at least in the ballpark).

The problemis that, on the one hand, since the Cartesian theater is characterized byproperties that the mechanical world picture entirely extrudes from thematerial world, that theater itself cannot be part of the material world.  Thus are we left with Cartesian dualism orsomething in its ballpark.  But on theother hand, the separation between them is so radical that it becomes utterlymysterious how the Cartesian theater can get into any sort of epistemic orcausal contact with the mechanistically described material world.  Thus are we left with skepticism and with theinteractionproblem or something in its ballpark.

The “hardproblem of consciousness” is just the latest riff on this post-Cartesianproblematic.  On the one hand, it issaid, neuroscience can shed light on the relatively “easy problems” about howneural processes mediate between sensory input and bodily behavior, but not onthe “hard problem” of why any of this processing is associated withqualia.  On the other hand, it is said, itis hard to see how qualia could be other than epiphenomenal given the “causalclosure of the physical.”  The formerpoint recapitulates traditional Cartesian arguments against materialism and thelatter recapitulates the interaction problem the materialist traditionally raisesagainst the Cartesian.

Dissolution of the problem

From thepoint of view of Aristotelians, Wittgensteinians, Heideggerians and others, whatis needed is, not further efforts to try to find a way to stop this merry-go-round,but rather not to get on it in the first place.  In particular, we need to abandon the backgroundmodern philosophical assumptions that generate the “hard problem of consciousness”and other variations on the mind-body problem. For instance, we need to reject the reductionist-cum-mathematicizedconception of the material world we’ve inherited from early modern philosophy’smechanical world picture.  With naturalsubstances, it is simply a mistake to think of them as no more than the sum oftheir parts, and to suppose that to understand them involves determining howtheir higher-level features arise out of lower-level features in a strictly bottom-upway.

In the caseof a human being or non-human animal, it is a mistake to look for consciousnessat the level of the particles of which the body is made, or at the level of nervecells, or even at the level of the brain as a whole.  Consciousness is a property of the organism as a whole.  The mathematicized description of matter thatthe physicist gives us, and the neural description the physiologist gives us,are abstractions from the organism asa whole, useful for certain purposes but in no way capturing the entirety ofthe organism, any more than a blueprint captures all there is to a home.  We should no more expect to findconsciousness at the level of physics or neuroscience than we should expect tofind Sunday dinner, movie night, or other aspects of everyday home life in theblueprint of a house.

We shouldalso reject the assumptions about perception and introspection inherited from post-Cartesianphilosophy of mind.  As Bennett andHacker show in detail in their book PhilosophicalFoundations of Neuroscience and elsewhere,discussions of the hard problem of consciousness routinely characterize therelevant phenomena in ways that are not only tendentious, but bizarre from thepoint of view of common sense no less than of Aristotelian and Wittgensteinian philosophy. 

For example,consider Chalmers’ remark, quoted above, that seeing a red rose, hearing aclarinet, and smelling mothballs all “feel a certain way.”  It is common in the literature on qualia andconsciousness to see claims like this. The idea seems to be that different kinds of conscious experience aredifferentiated from one another insofar as each has a unique “feel” to it.  But this is not the way people normallytalk.  Suppose you asked the averageperson what it feels like to see a red rose, hear a clarinet, or smellmothballs.  He might suppose that whatyou had in mind was whether these perceptions evoked certain emotions ormemories or the like.  For example, hemight imagine that what you are wondering about is whether seeing the rose evokesa feeling of longing for a girlfriend to whom you once gave such a rose, orwhether hearing the clarinet evokes happy memories of first hearing a BennyGoodman record, or whether smelling mothballs generates a feeling ofnausea. 

Suppose yousaid to him “No, I don’t mean anything like that.  I mean, what is the feel that the experience of seeing red has even apart from thatsort of thing, and how does it differ from the feel that the experience of hearing a clarinet has?”  He would likely not know what you are talkingabout.  In the ordinary sense of the word“feel,” it doesn’t “feel like” anything to see a red rose or hear a clarinet.  Seeing an object is one thing, hearing aclarinet played is another, and “feeling” something (like an emotion) is yetanother thing, and not at all like the first two.  Discussions of qualia routinely take forgranted that there must be some special “feeling” that demarcates one experiencefrom another.  But as Bennett and Hackernote, that is not how we ordinarily do in fact distinguish one experience fromanother.  Instead, we distinguish them byreference to the object of theexperience (a rose versus a clarinet, say) or the modality of the experience (seeing as opposed to hearing).  There is no “feel” on top of that that playsa role in distinguishing one experience from another.

Similarly,it is often said that each experience has a distinct “qualitative character” toit.  There is, we are told, a “qualitativecharacter” to an experience of seeing one’s newborn daughter that is differentfrom the “qualitative character” of an experience of smelling garlic cooking inolive oil.  But as Bennett and Hackerpoint out, this too is an odd way of speaking, and certainly not what the ordinaryspeaker would say.  To be sure, seeingone’s newborn daughter may cause one to feel affectionate, and smelling garlic cookingin olive oil may make one hungry.  Inthat sense there is a different feel or qualitative character to theexperiences.  But all this means, asBennett and Hacker stress, is that personfeels a certain way as a result of the experiences.  It’s not a matter of the experiences themselves possessing some sort of “feel”or “qualitative character.”

Then thereis the fact that in discussions of the hard problem, it is constantly assertedthat one’s experiences involve areddish color, a garlicky smell, and so on. But here too, that is simply not the way people ordinarily talk.  They would say that the rose is red, not that their experienceof the rose is red, and that the garlichas a certain distinctive smell, not that their experience of garlic does. Common sense treats colors, smells, and the like as qualities of thingsout there in the physical world, not as the qualia of our experience of thatworld. 

Now, theseodd ways of talking become intelligible (sort of, anyway) if one thinks of themind on the model of the Cartesian theater. Suppose that what we are directly aware of are only innerrepresentations of physical things, rather than the things themselves.  Then it might seem that we cannot entirely distinguishdifferent experiences by reference to the objects or modalities of theexperiences.  For the experiences could,on this model, be just as they are even if the physical objects didn’t existand indeed even if the organs associated with the different modalities (eyes,ears, etc.) didn’t exist.  How todifferentiate them, then?  Positing aunique “feel” or “qualitative character” for each experience might seemnecessary.  Similarly, if it is only ourown experiences, rather than physical things themselves, that we are directlyaware of, then it is understandable why it would seem that in experiencing areddish color, a garlicky smell, etc. we are encountering the qualia of experiences rather than the qualitiesof physical objects.

Aristotelians,Wittgensteinians, Heideggerians, and others would say that this way of carvingup the conceptual territory is wrong, and that common sense is right.  Of course, others would say that common sensehas it wrong, and that post-Cartesian philosophy was correct to go in thedirection it did.  The point, though, isthat the “hard problem of consciousness” is not something that arises just froma consideration of the relevant phenomena. Rather, it is an artifact of a certain set of philosophical assumptionsthat are read into thephenomena.  And those assumptions are byno means unproblematic or unavoidable. Indeed, the fact that they generate the “hard problem of consciousness”is itself a good reason to question them. (I have argued against the mechanical world picture and the Cartesiantheater conception of the mind in several places.  For example, I do so at length in Aristotle’sRevenge, and also in ImmortalSouls, in chapters 6 and 7 especially.)

All thesame, the contemporary debate about the “hard problem” remains worthy of study –not because it teaches us where the truth about human nature lies, but ratherbecause it illuminates the nature and consequences of certain very common andtenacious errors.