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

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

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

Abstract

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.

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References

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Journal of Philosophical Theological Research
Volume 26, Issue 1
March 2024
Pages 20-5

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