Relation to the world· Mind and consciousnessdifficulty
The enigma of consciousness
Can a science of the brain fully explain lived experience?
Pain, the red I see, the taste of coffee: cognitive science describes ever more finely the brain mechanisms that accompany them, but does it explain what it is like to undergo them? To take a position is to say whether lived experience is a mechanism like any other, an illusion of introspection, or the sign that the mind exceeds anything neuroscience will ever grasp.
Reductive physicalism
1Consciousness is nothing but the brain's activity: mental states are physical states that science will one day identify. There is no residual mystery, only complexity still poorly understood.
Explore this position →Epicureanismexplicit
The soul is corporeal: an assembly of very fine atoms that dissolves at death like the rest. Thought and sensation are material processes, with nothing immortal or immaterial.
Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus; Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, III
Substance dualism
2The brain will never fully explain experience, because consciousness is not its product: it is a reality of another nature, the soul, which could in principle exist apart. This is the spontaneous view of many, and that of many religions.
Explore this position →Descartesexplicit
The argument rests on a principle: what I clearly and distinctly conceive as able to exist apart really exists apart, since God could create it so. Now I can conceive my mind, pure thinking thing (res cogitans), with nothing corporeal attributed to it, and body, pure extension (res extensa), with no thought. My essence is therefore to think, and the mind is really distinct from the body, a substance of another nature than the brain. This substance dualism breaks with the Aristotelian soul, form of a body, and at one stroke frees matter for a purely mechanistic physics; yet it bequeaths the problem, which Descartes will struggle to solve, of their union and interaction.
Meditations on First Philosophy, VI
Platonismexplicit
What thinks cannot be of the same nature as what is thought from without: the soul knows the immaterial Forms, it moves itself and outlasts the body's states, traits no arrangement of matter could produce. Consciousness thus belongs to an order other than the sensible, prior to and independent of it, not to a bodily configuration that would generate it. Platonism thereby refuses in advance any reduction of mind to matter, where the Stoics will make the soul a corporeal breath.
Plato, Phaedo; Phaedrus
Property dualism
0The brain is physical, but it has irreducible properties: what it is like to see red or to suffer. This qualitative feel cannot be reduced to neurons, and this is the "hard problem" of consciousness.
Explore this position →No figure stands here, in this slice.
Panpsychism
2Experience did not arise by miracle in a dead universe: a form of inwardness is a fundamental property of matter, present everywhere in varying degrees, of which our consciousness would be the most elaborate form.
Explore this position →Show implicit positions (2)
Spinozainferable
Thought and extension are two attributes of one substance: the mind is the idea of the body, neither reducible to it nor separable from it. "All individuals are animate in varying degrees": a position close to dual-aspect monism and panpsychism.
Ethics, II, props. 7 and 13 (scholium)
Schopenhauerinferable
A double thesis: the intellect is a function of the brain, a secondary, late, and fatigable phenomenon, which has materialist overtones; but the ground of all things, from the mineral to man, is will. Less a panpsychism in the strict sense than a doctrine of the universal objectification of the Will: it is not mind that is everywhere, but blind willing.
On the Will in Nature
Illusionism
0The qualitative feel we think we grasp by introspection is an illusion the brain makes about itself. There are no qualia to explain: only mechanisms that make us believe there are.
Explore this position →No figure stands here, in this slice.
See the problem map in the Atlas →
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveThinking without a brain?
The mind is born, matures, and fails with the body, is befuddled by its wine, goes out under a blow: do these bonds prove that thought dies with the flesh, or only that the instrument conditions the playing without being the musician?
mind and brainAfter death - DescriptiveWho decides within me?
Am I transparent to myself when I choose, or do forces I am unaware of decide in my place, under the appearance of a free choice?
the selfFreedom of the will - DescriptiveThinking, or feeling
Reasoning is one thing, feeling another: a machine might compute everything without there being "something it is like" to be it, thought with no consciousness at all.
a machine's inner feelCan a machine think - Descriptive Thought experimentWhat only lived experience gives
Does objective, third-person knowledge grasp what it is to see red, to suffer, to love? Science presupposes a lifeworld it does not itself describe, and intuition reaches a duration that measurement lets slip.
what is livedPlace of science