Consciousness — the subjective, felt character of experience — is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in [[index|philosophy]] and science. What is it for there to be "something it is like" to be you? How does awareness arise from matter?
Philosopher David Chalmers coined the term "the hard problem of consciousness" (1995):
- The easy problems — explaining attention, memory, perception, behavioral control — are hard scientifically, but in principle explainable by cognitive science and neuroscience
- The hard problem — why is there subjective experience at all? Why don't we process information "in the dark," without any inner felt quality?
Even a complete physical account of the brain would not obviously explain why firing neurons feel like anything. This explanatory gap motivates non-physicalist views.
Qualia are the subjective, intrinsic qualities of experience:
- The redness of red as you experience it
- The painfulness of pain
- The taste of coffee
Frank Jackson's Mary's Room thought experiment: Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room, reading everything about color vision. When she leaves and sees red for the first time, does she learn something new? If yes — she already knew all the physical facts — it seems there are non-physical facts about experience.
Mental states are physical states. Consciousness is identical to (or realized by, or supervenes on) brain processes.
- Identity theory — mental states are identical to brain states
- Functionalism — mental states are defined by causal roles; they can be realized in different physical substrates ("multiple realizability")
- Eliminative materialism — folk psychology (beliefs, desires) will be eliminated by a mature neuroscience
Mental and physical are fundamentally distinct:
- Substance dualism ([[Descartes]]) — mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa) are distinct substances. See [[Descartes]].
- Property dualism — one substance, but mental and physical are irreducibly distinct properties. Chalmers' position.
- Epiphenomenalism — mental events are caused by physical events but have no causal power themselves
Consciousness (or proto-conscious properties) is fundamental and universal — present to some degree in all matter. Not the folk view that rocks are conscious, but that consciousness is not reducible to something else. Gaining serious defenders in contemporary philosophy (Galen Strawson, Chalmers).
Consciousness as ordinarily conceived is an illusion — we are systematically wrong about the intrinsic qualities of experience. Dan Dennett's position: there is no "Cartesian theater" of inner experience; introspection is unreliable.
[[Descartes]]' substance dualism placed the conscious mind outside the physical world. The mind-body problem he created — how do non-physical mind and physical body interact? — remains central to the field. See [[Descartes]].
[[Hume]]'s bundle theory: the self is not a unified, persisting entity but a bundle of perceptions. There is no "inner self" that has experiences — only the experiences themselves in succession. See [[Hume]].
For [[Hegel]], consciousness is not a private inner world but a dynamic, socially embedded self that develops through [[Dialectics]] — particularly through the Master-Slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
[[Phenomenology]] (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) investigates the structure of conscious experience from the first-person perspective — the intentional directedness of consciousness, the role of the body, the constitution of time and space. See [[Phenomenology]].
[[Wittgenstein]]'s private language argument challenges the idea that we have privileged, infallible access to our own mental states. Mental concepts get their meaning from public criteria, not private ostension.
Do animals have phenomenal consciousness? The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012) affirmed that many non-human animals possess the neurological substrates for consciousness. This has direct implications for [[Ethics]] and animal welfare.
If consciousness is entirely determined by neural processes, does this undermine [[Free Will]]? See [[Free Will]] for the philosophical debate. Libet's experiments (showing neural activity precedes conscious decision) have been widely (perhaps too widely) invoked in this debate.
- [[Descartes]] — the origin of the modern mind-body problem
- [[Hume]] — bundle theory of the self
- [[Hegel]] — consciousness as dialectical self-development
- [[Phenomenology]] — first-person investigation of experience
- [[Wittgenstein]] — private language and the limits of introspection
- [[Existentialism]] — consciousness as radical freedom and self-creation
- [[Free Will]] — neural determinism and the feeling of agency
- [[Metaphysics]] — what kind of thing is the mind?
- [[Epistemology]] — is introspection a reliable source of knowledge?