The Philosophy of Psychology

9 Consciousness: theWnal frontier?

Many people have thought that consciousness – particularly phenomenal
consciousness, or the sort of consciousness which is involved when one
undergoes states with a distinctive subjective phenomenology, or ‘feel’ – is
inherently, and perhaps irredeemably, mysterious (Nagel, 1974, 1986;
McGinn, 1991). And many would at least agree with Chalmers (1996) in
characterising consciousness as the ‘hard problem’, which forms one of the
few remaining ‘Wnal frontiers’ for science to conquer. In the present
chapter we discuss the prospects for a scientiWc explanation of conscious-
ness, arguing that the new ‘mysterians’ have been unduly pessimistic.

1 Preliminaries: distinctions and data

In this opening section of the chapter, weWrst review some important
distinctions which need to be drawn; and then discuss some of the evidence
which a good theory of consciousness should be able to explain.

1.1 Distinctions

One of the real advances made in recent years has been in distinguishing
between diVerent notions of consciousness (see particularly Rosenthal,
1986; Dretske, 1993; Block, 1995; and Lycan, 1996) – though not everyone
agrees on quitewhichdistinctions need to be drawn. All are agreed that we
should distinguishcreature-consciousness frommental-state-conscious-
ness. It is one thing to sayof an individual person or organismthat it is
conscious (either in general or of something in particular); and it is quite
another thing to sayof one of the mental statesof a creature that it is
conscious.
It is also agreed that within creature-consciousness itself we should
distinguish betweenintransitiveandtransitivevariants. To say of an or-
ganism that it is conscioussimpliciter(intransitive) is to say just that it is
awake, as opposed to asleep or comatose. There do not appear to be any

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