PHIL 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Patricia Churchland, David Chalmers, Mental Property
4 May 2018
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Philosophy of Mind
10.24 Lecture Notes – Problem of Consciousness
- David Chalmers and Patricia Churchland
The Easy and the Hard Problems:
- Problems related to consciousness can be divided into the easy problems and the hard
problem
- Easy problem: how the brain performs certain functions
o Ex: how is information integrated in the brain?
o Binding problem – how the information binds together in a single coherent
experience
o We do’t reall hae the asers to these eas proles
o Just requires us to figure out how the brain performs certain functions – finding
neural mechanism that performs certain functions
- The Hard Problem: Why are these brain activities accompanied by experience?
o Hard because it is not a problem about the performance of functions, it’s a
question of why the normal functioning of the brain also comes with experience
The Explanatory Gap/The Left-Out Hypothesis
- Chalmers believes that the hard problem is immune to any kind of physicalist
explanation
- No amount of physical knowledge about how the brain works will suffice to explain why
the activity of the brain is accompanied by conscious experience
Formal argument:
1. If physicalism is true, then we should in principle be able to provide an explanation of
consciousness in wholly physical terms.
2. Explanatory Gap (which Churchland denies)
3. Therefore, physicalism is false.
- Can you challenge Premise #1
- It may be out of our epistemic reach that we will never grasp the answer of the hard
problem – ut that’s a fat aout us and our state of affairs
- You can still accept Premise #2 and state that physicalism is true
Chalers’s Positie Vie
- I light of the aoe, Chalers thiks e eed to adopt a oredutie eplaatio of
consciousness: this involves treating consciousness as a fundamental part of the
uierse hih is’t eplaiale i ters of athig else
- View is a form of dualism – ut he does’t edorse full-blown Cartesian dualism
- No extra mental substances
- Just irreducible mental properties that exist alongside physical properties (property
dualism)
- There are only physical substances – but these substances can be physical and mental
properties (but how can a physical thing instantiate non-mental properties)
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