Carl said:
I don't know how it came up, but recently I stumbled across what's known as
"The Hard Question" about consciousness. Specifically, that question is how
consciousness arises from inorganic material. Our brains and bodies are made
up of chemicals, etc. and yet from those inert chemicals we get consciousness,
until we die, then we become inorangic material again as we break down through
the process of decay. What would the MOQ have to say about that? Anybody know?
dmb says:
Anthony's explanation was excellent, as usual, and I recommend taking a close
look at that.
The "hard problem of consciousness" is basically our contemporary version of
the mind-body problem. There are two main options, but both of them fail to
solve the problem of explaining how the mental is related to the physical.
(Notice the SOM here?) One option is to take the reductionist approach and
equate consciousness with brain states so that the mental is not explained so
much as it's explained AWAY. This view is called "eliminative materialism".
Sounds like fancy jargon but if you know the meaning of the word "eliminate"
then you know how they treat consciousness. The other main option is emergence.
This view also operates from a physicalist point of view but instead of
reducing everything to physical realities, emergence theories say that
consciousness came into existence at some point in evolutionary history. The
problem here is that it only restates the hard problem in temporal terms.
Emergence doesn't answer the question of how the mental and physical are
related s
o that the mental is still presumed to magically appear out of the non-mental.
And so, since neither option works, we have this so-called "explanatory gap" or
"the hard problem".
There is a third option. It is simple, elegant and it solves some of the oldest
problems in philosophy, including the hard problem of consciousness, but it's
also considered to be way too weird and so have only a handful of advocates.
This third option is some kind of panpsychism or pan-experientialism. Instead
of eliminating the mental through reductionism or saying that the mental
magically appeared out of the physical, the panpsychist says that the mental
and physical are "co-eternal aspects of the same reality", as William James
puts it. In other words, "mind" was never completely absent from "matter" and
they have both evolved together. We can see this in the MOQ, for example, in
the way Pirsig says that even subatomic particles behave according to
preferences, in his reconceptualization of natural selection, in his answer to
the problem of free will and determinism, and we can see how he folds a
corrected version of emergence into his assertion that mind and matter have
a matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship.
There is a small contingent of panpsychists fighting an uphill battle, led
apparently by Galen Strawson, but he makes a case that panpsychism follows from
a physicalist view. I don't think this approach is quite as good as James's or
Pirsig's but it's a start. It's an opening. And this sort of view has quite a
long history, going all the way back to the preSocratic philosophers, and it
was not an uncommon view back in James's day (among Idealists and such) but was
almost completely ignored after 1930 or so and it has only recently reappeared
on the philosophical scene - specifically as an answer to the "hard problem of
consciousness".
The hard problem is mostly a result of the metaphysical assumptions
(physicalism) held by most contemporary philosophers. It's a result of
scientific objectivity. This approach is, in a nutshell, goes wrong by
insisting that subjectivity can only be studied objectively. They want to
examine the first person perspective but only insofar as it can be examined
from a third-person point of view. It is willing to eliminate or ignore the
very thing it's supposed to studying, namely consciousness as such. They want
the mental to be explainable in terms of the physical sciences. The MOQ is
meant to avoid this kind of scientism and these attitudes of objectivity
because it causes so many problems "hard" problems.
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