Thursday, May 05, 2005
The person who has done the most (in my opinion) to resurrect the problem of consciousness and bring it back to the forefront of analytic philosophy is David Chalmers. Chalmers has achieved two very important and unrelated things.
First, he overpowered Daniel Dennett in a knockdown, take no prisoners metaphorical battle. (This battle was also a generational conflict in that it pitted a boomer against a Gen-X). Two of the very best books on consciousness in the 90s were Daniel Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_ and David Chalmers' _The Conscious Mind_. Dennett's book is about the best you can do if you wanted to fit consciousness into the existing scientific framework. In retrospect, Dennett's deconstruction of the self - as a "center of narrative gravity" wherein the one and the many are simply two focal endpoints in perspective - is brilliant in the way it uses deconstruction as a tool to accomodate consciousness. In sharp contrast, Chalmers - after exhaustively searching for a way for scientific materialism to be true - comes to the conclusion that consciousness cannot be explained in the current scientific framework.
Second, Chalmers in the course of showing that consciousness cannot be accomodated in the natural order, also comes to the conclusion that almost all varieties of emergence cannot be sustained either except for a radical emergentist view wherein consciousness 'pops out' at a level of complexity. (All other forms of emergence are shown to be fundamentally inadequate.) Radical emergence becomes rapidly unpalatable when you carefully examine it in this light. For a former emergentist such as myself, it took a very long time to finally accept that Chalmers is right and that one must look elsewhere for a fundamental theory.
The two possible fundamental approaches that survive this treatment are i) panpsychism and ii) dual aspect theories. [Idealism in most forms is not really on the table.] Since dual-aspect theories have to assume that nature has an interior aspect, these two (can and) are often clubbed together. Before you start asking if panpsychism implies that 'rocks have feelings', the kind of panpsychism envisaged these days is one wherein the interior aspect of nature informs the categorical (as opposed to dispositional) bases and that full blown qualia only exist in 'complex' beings such as ourselves.
First, he overpowered Daniel Dennett in a knockdown, take no prisoners metaphorical battle. (This battle was also a generational conflict in that it pitted a boomer against a Gen-X). Two of the very best books on consciousness in the 90s were Daniel Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_ and David Chalmers' _The Conscious Mind_. Dennett's book is about the best you can do if you wanted to fit consciousness into the existing scientific framework. In retrospect, Dennett's deconstruction of the self - as a "center of narrative gravity" wherein the one and the many are simply two focal endpoints in perspective - is brilliant in the way it uses deconstruction as a tool to accomodate consciousness. In sharp contrast, Chalmers - after exhaustively searching for a way for scientific materialism to be true - comes to the conclusion that consciousness cannot be explained in the current scientific framework.
Second, Chalmers in the course of showing that consciousness cannot be accomodated in the natural order, also comes to the conclusion that almost all varieties of emergence cannot be sustained either except for a radical emergentist view wherein consciousness 'pops out' at a level of complexity. (All other forms of emergence are shown to be fundamentally inadequate.) Radical emergence becomes rapidly unpalatable when you carefully examine it in this light. For a former emergentist such as myself, it took a very long time to finally accept that Chalmers is right and that one must look elsewhere for a fundamental theory.
The two possible fundamental approaches that survive this treatment are i) panpsychism and ii) dual aspect theories. [Idealism in most forms is not really on the table.] Since dual-aspect theories have to assume that nature has an interior aspect, these two (can and) are often clubbed together. Before you start asking if panpsychism implies that 'rocks have feelings', the kind of panpsychism envisaged these days is one wherein the interior aspect of nature informs the categorical (as opposed to dispositional) bases and that full blown qualia only exist in 'complex' beings such as ourselves.
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