Tobias A. Wagner-Altendorf (University of Lübeck), "Progress in understanding consciousness? Easy and hard problems, and philosophical and empirical perspectives"
Acta Analytica, 2024
My paper focusses on the different perspectives on the topic of consciousness that neuroscience and philosophy incorporate – and, relatedly, on the different notions of progress in understanding consciousness that both disciplines can reasonably assume to have taken place.
More than 25 years ago, David Chalmers distinguished the “hard problem” and the “easy problem” of consciousness, arguing that progress on the “easy problem” – i.e., on the elaboration of the physical processes underlying conscious experience – will not necessarily contribute to progress on the hard problem – i.e., on explaining why consciousness, in the first place, arises out of (a certain type of) physical processing.
Chalmers, however, was hopeful that refined theorizing and careful conceptual analysis would eventually lead to philosophical progress. In particular, he argued that taking conscious experience as a fundamental and putatively ubiquitous feature of the world – which arguably implies a form of panpsychism – might be a candidate account to solve the hard problem.
In my paper, I provide a concise stock-take on both the empirical-neuroscientific progress on consciousness, and on the philosophical-conceptual progress on consciousness, in the panpsychist sense, that has been achieved within the past decades.
It turns out that, whereas empirical progress is indisputable and immense, philosophical progress on consciousness is much less pronounced and much more controversial. While Chalmers was right, I argue, in emphasizing that distinctive types of problems of consciousness must be distinguished, his prediction of progress on the so-called hard problem was overly optimistic. Empirical and philosophical progress on consciousness are essentially uncoupled – in the sense that empirical data on consciousness does not drive philosophical progress on the “hard problem” –and a more skeptical perspective on progress in philosophy in general is appropriate.
Thus, whereas the primary aim of my paper is to argue against the (physicalist) view that progress towards the hard problem can be driven by empirical progress, as a second target, I also argue against the – as I take it – too-optimistic view about progress on the hard problem as stated by Chalmers in his 1995 seminal publication.