their home domain; or provided that in addition to these mechanisms we
also have somegeneral-purpose learning-mechanisms (and surely one or
other of these possibilitiesmustbe the case, or else cognitive closure would
be a familiar fact of everyday life); then it may well be thatalldomains can
yield, eventually, to systematic enquiry. But what really matters, for our
purposes, is McGinn’s second premise. For even if we thought (contrathe
Wrst premise) that there is no good reason toexpecttoWnd areas of
cognitiveclosure, we shouldstill need to look at his case for saying that, as a
matter of fact, phenomenal consciousness, in particular, must forever
remain mysterious to us.
McGinn suggests that the problem of phenomenal consciousness lies in
an explanatory gap between the subjective, orfelt, qualities of experience,
on the one hand, and the underlying neural events in our brains, on the
other. And there are, he argues, just two ways in which we might hope to
close this gap.Eitherwe can use introspection to dig deeper into the
phenomenal properties of our experiences, perhaps seeking a more sophis-
ticated set of phenomenal concepts with which to categorise and describe
the subjective qualities of those experiences.Orwe can work from the
other end, investigating the physical events in our brains, hoping to
achieve from there (perhaps by means of some sort of inference to the best
explanation) an understanding of phenomenal consciousness.
But we can see in advance that neither of these strategies stands any
chance of being successful. For there is plainly no prospect that further
introspective investigation of our experiences could ever lead us to see how
those very experiences could be neurological events in our brains. Nor does
it seem possible that further scientiWc investigation of our brains could ever
lead us to postulate that those events possess phenomenal characteristics.
For our only mode of access to brain states (when characterised as such –
remember, McGinn allows that conscious statesprobably arebrain states)
is observational, from a third-person perspective. And it is hard to see how
any sequence of inferences to the best explanation, starting from the
observed properties of such states, could ever lead us to something which is
inherently subjective, namely the felt characteristics of our experiences. So
although McGinn allows that phenomenal consciousness is almost cer-
tainly a physical characteristic of our brains, he thinks it must forever
remain mysterious just how it can be so.
There are at least two major faults in this argument. TheWrst is that
McGinn seems entirely to forget that there may be many diVerent levels
of scientiWc enquiry and description between neuroscience and common-
sense psychology, including a variety of forms of computationalism, to-
gether with the kinds of functional description characteristic of much
cognitive psychology. For it can easily seem mysterious howanythingin
238 Consciousness: theWnal frontier?