Chapter
Two
What is it like to be.. .?
correlates of consciousness (NCC), in the hope that when we can explain
the NCC in causal terms, this will make the problem of qualia clearer.
(2003, p. 119)Hunting for the NCCs is currently one of the most popular ways of scientifically
studying consciousness, and solving the hard problem is often presented as its
ultimate aim. One recent argument is that two common methods – using brain
scans to compare conscious and unconscious states, and to investigate specific
‘contents’ of consciousness – cannot meaningfully be used separately. Instead,
future research should combine the two in order to measure ‘the relative contribu-
tion of the mechanistically distinguishable subcomponents of the brain involved
in producing the astonishingly rich and often hearthbreakingly [sic] beautiful
phenomenal view of the world’ (Bachmann and Hudetz, 2014, p. 10). But this still
does not explain how any method for finding more detailed correlations between
neural activation and experience can be expected to bridge the gap. Invoking the
hard problem may sometimes be a way of sprinkling a little of the glamour of the
‘beautiful phenomenal view’ on to fashionable neuroscientific research. In such
cases, the researchers may think they are tackling the hard problem, but others
might say they are tackling the easy problems as though they were the hard one.
By contrast, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene claims that we have it all the
wrong way round:
My opinion is that Chalmers swapped the labels: it is the ‘easy’ problem
that is hard, while the hard problem just seems hard because it engages
ill-defined intuitions. Once our intuition is educated by cognitive
neuroscience and computer simulations, Chalmers’s hard problem will
evaporate [. . .] the science of consciousness will keep eating away at the
hard problem until it vanishes.
(2014, p. 262)Others again would say it is mistaken to think that the hard and the easy prob-
lems are separable at all.
4 IDENTIFY MORE HARD PROBLEMS
Looking for the neural correlates of conscious experience raises many interesting
questions about principles and methods, which we will consider in Chapter 4.
One is tackled by the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Steven Miller, who argues
that researchers working on NCCs often imply that finding them will help us iden-
tify the neural constitution of consciousness but fail to recognise that not every
neural correlate of a ‘conscious state’ is necessarily constitutive of that state. That
is, things might be going on in the brain that reliably accompany conscious expe-
rience but are not identical with it, and may even have nothing to do with causing
it. This means that any given experience may be caused by more than one pattern
of brain activity, and one pattern of brain activity may cause many different expe-
riences. Understanding these relationships may conceivably be within science’s
reach, but that does not necessarily mean these are ‘easy problems’. Miller asks,
‘might neural multiple-realizability problems be nevertheless equally hard prob-
lems to answer despite their being more easily conceived as scientific problems?’
(2007, p. 167).
‘it is the “easy” problem
that is hard, while the
hard problem just seems
hard because it engages
ill-defined intuitions’(Dehaene, 2014, p. 262)‘there is no real
distinction between
hard and easy problems
of consciousness, and
the illusion that there
is one is caused by the
pseudo-profundity that
often accompanies
category mistakes’(Pigliucci, 2013)