Chapter
Two
What is it like to be.. .?
phenomenon would be. (This is reminiscent of one of the main objections to the
thought experiment about Mary: how can we actually conceive of knowing all
the physical facts about vision?) Colin McGinn (1999) describes the problem as a
‘yawning conceptual divide’ (p. 51), an irreducible duality in the way we come to
learn about mind and brain. As he puts it:
You can look into your mind until you burst, and you will not discover
neurons and synapses and all the rest; and you can stare at someone’s
brain from dawn till dusk and you will not perceive the consciousness that
is so apparent to the person whose brain you are so rudely eye-balling.
(1999, p. 47)He claims that we are ‘cognitively closed’ with respect to this problem – much as
a dog is cognitively closed with respect to reading the newspaper or listening to
poetry. However hard the dog tried, it would not be able to master mathematics,
because it does not have the right sort of intelligence. Similarly, our human kind
of intelligence is wrongly designed for understanding consciousness. In McGinn’s
view, we can still study the neural correlates of conscious states (what Chalmers
would call one of the easy problems), but we cannot understand how brains give
rise to consciousness in the first place.
Psychologist Steven Pinker is equally defeatist. He thinks we can still get on with
the job of understanding how the mind works, but our own awareness is ‘the ulti-
mate tease [. . .] forever beyond our conceptual grasp’ (1997, p. 565).
Although the new mysterianism, unlike that of James’s day, is a naturalistic posi-
tion rather than a supernaturalist one, it has also been described as a fundamen-
tally postmodern challenge to the belief that science will eventually explain the
whole of the natural world (Flanagan, 1992, p. 9). Thinkers in this category, who
also include philosopher Jesse Prinz, all agree that there is a hard problem, and
agree that we will never solve it.
2 TRY TO SOLVE IT
Some theorists believe that the problem is really hard but still soluble. Trying to
solve the hard problem may, however, involve first restating it in different words.
For example, Gray redefines the problem as ‘How does the brain create qualia? ’
(2004, p. 301) or more specifically, ‘how does the unconscious brain create and
inspect the display medium of conscious perception?’ (p. 123). These questions,
particularly the second, limit in advance the range of possible solutions to the
problem, as we will see when (in Chapter 8) we look at Gray’s theory as an attempt
to answer them.
Others argue that a solution requires some fundamental new understanding of
the universe – what Pat Churchland calls ‘a real humdinger of a solution’ (1996, p.
40). We have already met Libet’s conscious mental field, which he deemed nec-
essary because ‘a knowledge of nerve cell structures and functions can never, in
itself, explain or describe conscious subjective experience’ (2004, p. 184). And as
we have seen, Chalmers’s own (1995a, 1996, 2007) attempt at a solution is a kind
of dualism: a dual-aspect theory of information in which all information has two
basic aspects, physical and experiential. So, whenever there is conscious expe-
rience, it is one aspect of an information state, and the other aspect lies in the
‘our intelligence is
wrongly designed
for understanding
consciousness.’(McGinn, 1999, p. xi)‘the new mysterianism is
a postmodern position
designed to drive a
railroad spike through
the heart of scientism’(Flanagan, 1992, p. 9)