User:Tancre/2/thesis

Thesis

Part 1

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 . 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 is the result of a series of physical processes happening in the cerebral matter and determining our experience of controlling our body, 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 of mind David Chalmers published his article Facing up to the problem of consciousness , where he points out that the objective scientific explanation of the brain can solve only an easy problem. If we want to fully explain the mystery of the mind, instead, we have to face up the hard problem of consciousness: 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 kind of 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 and its subjective experience is an hard problem that the scientific objectivity can't directly access. Instead, scientists have to develop new methodologies, facing up that a hard problem exists — How is it possible that such a thing as the subjective experience of being me, here, now takes place in the brain? — and must be taken into consideration.

This new perspective distinguishing the subjective experience as phenomenal consciousness , echoes the mind-body problem initiated by Descartes and underlies whatever attempt to investigate the nature of our mind. It challenged the physicalist ontology of the scientific method. showing the unbridgeable explanatory gap between this dogmatic view of the world and the possibility to formulate a full understanding of consciousness. This produces the necessity of a paradigm shift in science allowing the study of consciousness from new alternative scientific methods embracing 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 (McGinn 1989, 2012) 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.