Chapter 14
Subjective and Objective Knowledge:
Persistent Puzzles
Ron Amundson
A central issue in contemporary philosophy of mind is the relation between sub-
jective awareness, termedphenomenalconsciousness, and the objective facts about
the brain and nervous system of the person who has that awareness. This subjec-
tive–objective dichotomy has been prominently labeled‘the hard problem’ by
metaphysician David Chalmers (Chalmers 1995 ). Chalmers described‘easy prob-
lems’as a set of problems that brain scientists would consider immensely difficult,
such as the abilities of brains (of cognitive systems) to learn, to categorize complex
environmental stimuli, to deliberate, and to respond appropriately. If these brain
science problems are easy, what makes a problemhard? Here is the hard problem:
What makes a brain processconscious? How can an embodied brain (or how canI,
to make the matter personal) be aware of a red patch in a visualfield, perhaps a red
patch that was caused by a stop sign in front of me? The task of explaining how a
brain performs brain functions is one matter, and we have seen some achievements.
But the task of explainingconsciousness itself, and how it arises from physical
processes, is quite a different matter. Philosophers today generally concede that we
do not even know where to begin with the hard problem. Disagreements are based
on conjectures about eventual solutions, all of which are far in the future.
Chalmers and many others believe that there can be no physical explanation of
the mental phenomenon of consciousness (see also Searle 2005 ). These thinkers are
termed dualists, in that two distinct kinds of explanation are needed for mental and
physical phenomena. Another group, called physicalist, believes that progress in
neurology will eventually result in an explanation (or possibly many explanations)
for how brains produce (or constitute) conscious states (Dennett 1991 ; Churchland
R. Amundson (&)
Department of Philosophy (Emeritus), University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hilo, Hawaii, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
L.L. Sievert and D.E. Brown (eds.),Biological Measures of Human
Experience across the Lifespan: Making Visible the Invisible,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44103-0_14
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