The How and Why of Consciousness?

Frontiers in Psychology

Tim S. Meese¹ 

关键词: consciousness;    free will;    social acceptability;    personal choice;    qualia;    epiphenomenalism;    physicalism;    philosophy of mind;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02173

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Understanding how subjective experience can arise from the nuts and bolts of matter is known as the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996). Nobody has come close to solving this. One approach, type-A materialism (Chalmers, 2002) (hereafter, hard-core physicalism), simply dismisses the hard problem altogether. On this view, nothing about subjectivity or qualia needs explanation beyond their functional underpinnings: consciousness is an illusion, and the states of our inner world, merely dispositions to act (Churchland, 1985; Dennett, 1988). Should we hope that by studying the “illusion” of consciousness (Dennett, 2003) we might unpick the real mechanism, in the way, for example, psychologists understand motion perception by studying the waterfall illusion (Mather et al., 2008)? According to hard-core physicalists—no, it's illusions all the way down; it has to be, because there is no true mechanism of consciousness to be revealed, it is simply the name we give to the inner state of the complex machine we are: the lights are not really on, it only seems that way.

【 授权许可】

CC BY