Consciousness, Subjective Facts, and Physicalism – Fifty Years since Nagel’s Bat

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسنده

Professor, Philosophy Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, US.

چکیده

The existence of subjective facts in the epistemic sense defined by Thomas Nagel’s famous article, “What is it like to be a bat?” might be taken to support an anti-physicalist conclusion. I argue that it does not. The combination of nonreductive physicalism and teleo-pragmatic functionalism is not only consistent with such subjective facts but predicts their existence. The notion that conscious minds are self-understanding autopoietic systems plays a key role in the argument. Global Neuronal Workspace Theory is assessed in terms of its potential to answer David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of consciousness. A suggestion is made for augmenting the theory that involves another sense in which facts about conscious experience are subjective. The idea of conscious minds as self-understanding systems again plays an important role.

کلیدواژه‌ها

موضوعات

عنوان مقاله [English]

Consciousness, subjective facts and physicalism – 50 years since Nagel’s bat.

نویسنده [English]

  • Robert Van Gulick
Professor, Philosophy Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, US.
چکیده [English]

The existence of subjective facts in the epistemic sense defined by Thomas Nagel’s famous article, “What is like to be a bat?”, might be taken to support an anti-physicalist conclusion. I argue that it does not. The combination of nonreductive physicalism and teleo-pragmatic functionalism is not only consistent with such subjective facts but predicts their existence. The notion that conscious minds are self-understanding autopoietic systems plays a key role in the argument. Global Neuronal Workspace theory is assessed in terms of its potential to answer David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of consciousness. A suggestion is made for augmenting the theory that involves another sense in which facts about conscious experience are subjective. The idea of conscious minds as self-understanding systems again plays an important role.A suggestion is made for augmenting the theory that involves another sense in which facts about conscious experience are subjective. The idea of conscious minds as self-understanding systems again plays an important role.

کلیدواژه‌ها [English]

  • consciousness
  • self-understanding.consciousness
  • subjective facts
  • physicalism
  • self-understanding

مراجع

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Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press.
Dehaene, S. & Naccache, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition 79, 1-37.
Dehaene, S. (2014). Consciousness in the Brain. Penguin.
Dennett, D. (1992). The self as the center of narrative gravity. In F. Kessel, P. Cole, & D. Johnson (Eds.), Self and consciousness: multiple perspectives (pp. 103-115). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Fodor, J. (1974). Special sciences, or disunity of science as a working hypothesis. Synthese, 28(2), 97-115.
Fodor, J. (1997). Special sciences: still autonomous after all these years. Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 149-163.
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly, 32, 127–136.
Lorenz, K. (1973). Die rückseite des spiegels, versuch einer naturgeschichte menschlichen erkennens. Pieper. English edition (1977). Behind the mirror: a search for a natural history of human knowledge. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Ludlow, P., Nagasawa, Y., & Stoljar, D. (Eds.). (2004). There's something about Mary: essays on the Knowledge Argument. MIT Press.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1972). De maquinas y seres vivo autopoiesis: la organizacion de lo vivo. Editorial Universitaria. English edition (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living. D. Reidel.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435–456.
Nagel, T. (1979). Panpsychism. In T. Nagel, Mortal questions (pp. 181-195). Cambridge University Press.
Strawson, G. (2003). What is the relation between an experience, the subject of
the experience, and the content of the experience? Philosophical Issues, 13, 279-315.
Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. Biological Bulletin, 215, 216–42.
Van Gulick, R. (2003). Maps, gaps, and traps. In Q. Smith & A. Jokic (Eds.), Consciousness: new philosophical perspectives (pp. 323-352). Oxford University Press.
Van Gulick, R. (2005). So many ways of saying 'no' to Mary. In P. Ludlow, D. Stoljar & Y. Nagasawa (Eds.), There's something about Mary: essays on the knowledge argument (pp. 365-405). MIT Press.
Van Gulick, R. (2008). Jackson’s change of mind: representationalism, a priorism and the knowledge argument. In I. Ravenscroft (Ed.), Minds, worlds and conditionals: themes from the philosophy of Frank Jackson (pp. 189-218). Oxford University Press.
Van Gulick, R. (2011). Non-reductive physicalism and the teleo-pragmatic theory of mind. Philosophia Naturalis, 47/48(1-2), 103-23.
Van Gulick, R. (2022). Consciousness and self-awareness – an alternative perspective. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 13(2), 329-340.
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پژوهش‌های فلسفی -کلامی
دوره 26، شماره 1
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