correlates of pain. [. . .] There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to
refer to this ‘what-it’s-likeness’ using concepts which don’t actually give us
the feeling.
(2003b, p. 6)In other words, we expect too much of the language we use to talk about the
physical side of the consciousness equation, and this blinds us to the fact that it is
an equation: that the physical activity equals the experience.
It may help to think in terms of two fallacies, Papineau suggests. The first, which
we may be familiar with from Romantic poetry, is the ‘pathetic fallacy’, in which
we attribute human feelings to nature – dramatic storm clouds reflect a stormy
mood, for example. The mistake we make when thinking about consciousness is
the opposite, the ‘antipathetic fallacy’, in which we fail to recognise that feelings
exist in parts of nature, such as brains. If we could stop committing the antipa-
thetic fallacy, then we would be able to accept the reality of materialism, and the
hard problem would melt away. The only thing that stands in the way of solving
the hard problem is an explanation of why materialism should seem false, even
though it is true. So, this position is somewhere between reformulating the hard
problem and denying that it exists.
Analytic philosopher Patricia Churchland goes
further. The hard problem is ‘ridiculous’, she says
(in Blackmore, 2005). It’s a ‘hornswoggle problem’
(Churchland, 1996) – a grand hoax. First, we cannot,
in advance, predict which problems will turn out
to be easy and which hard. For example, biologists
once argued that to understand the basis of hered-
ity we would have to solve the protein-folding prob-
lem first. In fact, base-pairing in DNA provided the
answer, and the protein-folding problem remains
unsolved. So how do we know that explaining sub-
jectivity is so much harder than the ‘easy’ problems?
Also, she questions whether the ‘hard’ things – the
qualia – are well enough defined to sustain the great
division. For example, do eye movements have
eye-movement qualia? Are there thought-qualia, or
does thinking have the qualia of auditory imagery
or talking to oneself? If things become so hazy so
soon after we leave behind the usual cases of seeing
the blue sky or feeling a brick land on our foot, per-
haps the great gulf is narrower than it seems. Finally,
the distinction depends on the false intuition that if
perception, attention, and so on were understood,
there would necessarily be something else left out –
the something that we have and a zombie does not.
Dennett likens the argument to that of a vitalist who
insists that even if all the ‘easy problems’ of repro-
duction, development, growth, and metabolism
were solved, there would still be the ‘really hard
‘There is no reason why
we shouldn’t be able to
refer to this “what-it’s-
likeness” using concepts
which don’t actually
give us the feeling’(Papineau, 2003b, p. 6)PRoFILe 2.2
Patricia Smith Churchland
(b. 1943)
Pat Churchland
is best known
for her books on
neurophilosophy
attempting to
unify the mind–
brain, and for
her outspoken views on the philosophy of mind. She
advocates eliminative materialism, and her motto is ‘To
understand the mind, we must understand the brain’.
She grew up on a poor but beautiful farm in British Co-
lumbia, where her parents were pioneers – of literal new
territories. She is now Professor of Philosophy Emerita at
the University of California, San Diego. She is married to
the philosopher Paul Churchland, and they work closely
together. She thinks the hard problem is a ‘Hornswoggle
problem’ which will go the way of phlogiston or caloric
fluid, that zombies demonstrate the feebleness of thought
experiments, and that quantum coherence in microtubules
is about as good a theory as pixie dust in the synapses.