User:Tancre/2/thesis

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Science used to address the challenge of explaining the mind by disassembling it in its functional, dynamical and structural properties [note]. Consciousness has been described as cognition, thought, knowledge, intelligence, self-awareness, agency and so on, assuming that explaining the physical brain will resolve the mystery of the mind. From this perspective, our brain works as a complex mechanism that eventually triggers some sort of behavior. Consciousness, in all its forms, is the result of a series of physical processes happening in the cerebral matter and determining not only the automatisms of our body but also the subjective experience of thinking and feeling. This view has been able to explain many incognita of what happens in our mind, leading some to think that in a not-too-distant future we will be able to fully explain its inner secrets.

In 1995 the philosopher David Chalmers published his article 'Facing up to the problem of consciousness' [note], where he points out that to explain the mind the scientific approach is no longer sustainable. We have to distinguish between an 'easy problem' and a 'hard problem' of consciousness. If we want to fully explain the mystery of the mind, a detailed description of the brain can resolve only the 'easy problem' but does not answer the question:

How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and of the world? Why is there a subjective, first-person, experience of having a particular brain?

Explaining the brain as an objective mechanism is a relatively 'easy problem' that eventually could be solved in a matter of time. But a complete understanding of consciousness could be a 'hard' problem not sufficiently answered through a third-person perspective explanation of its mechanisms. Instead, it could require to reconsider it from new scientific points of view, facing up to the fact that a 'hard problem' exists and must be taken into consideration. How is it possible that such a thing as the subjective experience of being 'me, here, now' takes place in the brain? This new perspective, addressing subjective experience and being called 'phenomenal consciousness', echoes the 'mind-body problem' initiated by Descartes [note] and underlies whatever attempt to investigate the nature of our mind, questioning directly the physicalist ontology of the scientific method. It shows the unbridgeable 'explanatory gap' [note] between a dogmatic scientific view of the world and the possibility to formulate a full understanding of consciousness through not yet explored alternative scientific methods. This produces the necessity of a paradigm shift in science allowing the study of consciousness from new perspectives capable to respond to the challenge of investigating phenomenal consciousness.

The reactions to Chalmer's paper range between a total denial of the issue (Ryle 1949, Dennett 1978, 1988, Wilkes 1984, Rey 1997) to panpsychist positions (Nagel 1979, Bohme 1980, Tononi and Koch 2015), with some isolated case of mysterianism [note] advocating the impossibility to solve such a mystery. In any case, the last 30 years have seen exponential growth in multidisciplinary researches facing the 'hard problem' with a constant struggle to build the blocks of a science of consciousness accepted as a valid field of study. This is a central subject of this thesis and we will regularly return to this contested field later in this text.