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Journal of Philosophy, Inc. The Harder Problem of Consciousness Author(s): Ned Block Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 99, No. 8 (Aug., 2002), pp. 391-425 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621 Accessed: 04-08-2015 15:41 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Tue, 04 Aug 2015 15:41:39 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME XCIX, NO. 8, AUGUST 2002 THE HARDER PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS* H. Huxley' famously said: "How it is that anything so re- T. markable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the ap- pearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp" (ibid., p. 19). We do not see how to explain a state of consciousness in terms of its neurological basis. This is the hard problemof consciousness.2 My aim here is to present another problem of consciousness. The harderproblem, as I shall call it, is more epistemological than the hard problem. A second difference: the hard problem could arise for * I would like to thank David Barnett, Paul Boghossian, Tyler Burge, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Hartry Field, Jerry Fodor, Paul Horwich, Brian Loar, Tom Nagel, Georges Rey, Stephen Schiffer, and Stephen White for comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to Alex Byrne and Jaegwon Kim for reactions when an ancestor of this paper was delivered at a Central APA meeting in 1998. My thanks to the Colloquium on Language and Mind at New York University at which an earlier version of this paper was discussed in 2000, and especially to Tom Nagel as the chief inquisitor. I am also grateful to the audience at the 2001 meeting of Sociedad Filosofica Ibero Americana (SOFIA) and especially to my respondents, Brian McLaughlin and Martine Nida-Rfimelin. And I would also like to thank my graduate class at NYU for their comments, especially Declan Smithies. In addition, I am grateful for discussion at a number of venues where earlier versions of this article were delivered, beginning with the Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting, June 1997. 1 Lessons in ElementaryPhysiology (New York: Macmillan, 1866); see Gfiven Gfizel- dere, "The Many Faces of Consciousness: A Field Guide," in Block, Owen Flanagan and Gfizeldere, eds., The Nature of Consciousness:Philosophical Debates (Cambridge: MIT, 1997), pp. 1-67, footnote 6. 2 See Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" The Philosophical Review, LXXXIII(1974): 435-50. Joseph Levine introduced the "explanatory gap" terminol- ogy (to be used later)--"Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,LxIv (1983): 354-61. David Chalmers and Galen Strawson distinguished between the hard problem and various "easy problems" of how consciousness functions-Chalmers, The ConsciousMind (New York: Oxford, 1996), pp. xxii-xxiii; Strawson, Mental Reality (Cambridge: MIT, 1994), pp. 93-96. 0022-362X/02/9908/391-425 ? 2002 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc. 391 This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Tue, 04 Aug 2015 15:41:39 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 392 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY someone who has no conception of another person, whereas the harder problem is tied closely to the problem of other minds. Finally, the harder problem reveals an epistemic tension or at least discom- fort in our ordinary conception of consciousness which is not sug- gested by the hard problem, and so in one respect is harder. Perhaps the harder problem includes the hard problem and is best thought of as an epistemic add-on to it. Or perhaps they are in some other way facets of a single problem. Then my point is that this single problem breaks into two parts, one of which is more epistemic, involves other minds, and involves an epistemic tension. I. PRELIMINARIES I believe that the major ontological disputes about the nature of consciousness rest on an opposition between two perspectives: (1) Deflationismabout consciousness,in which a priori or at least armchair analyses of consciousness (or at least armchair sufficient conditions) are given in nonphenomenal terms, most prominently in terms of representation, thought, or function. (2) Phenomenalrealism, which consists in the denial of deflationism plus the claim that consciousness is something real. Phenomenal realism is metaphysical realism about consciousness and thus allows the possibility that there may be facts about the distribution of con- sciousness which are not accessible to us even though the relevant functional, cognitive, and representational facts are accessible. Phe- nomenal realism is based on one's first-person grasp of conscious- ness. An opponent might prefer to call phenomenal realism "inflationism," but I reject the suggestion of something bloated. In its most straightforward version, deflationism is a thesis of a priori conceptual analysis, most prominently analysis of mental terms in functional terms. As David Lewis,3 a well-known deflationist noted, this view is the heir of logical behaviorism. Phenomenal realism rejects these armchair, philosophical-reductive analyses. But phe- nomenal realists have no brief against scientific reduction of con- sciousness. Of course, there is no sharp line here, and since the distinction is epistemic, one and the same metaphysical thesis could be held both as a philosophical-reductionist and as a scientific-reduc- tionist thesis.4 3 "An Argument for the Identity Theory," this JOURNAL, LXIII, 1 (January 6, 1966): 17-25. Deflationism with to truth is the view of 4 respect that the utility the concept of truth can be explained disquotationally and that there can be no scientific reduc- tion of truth-Paul Horwich, Truth (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990; second edition, New York: Oxford, 1998); Hartry Field, "Deflationist Views of Meaning and Con- This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Tue, 04 Aug 2015 15:41:39 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE HARDER PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 393 I apologize for all the "isms" (deflationism, phenomenal realism, and one more to come), but they are unavoidable since my point here is that there is some tension between two of them. The tension is between phenomenal realism ("inflationism") and (scientific) nat- uralism, the epistemological perspective according to which the de- fault view is that consciousness has a scientific nature-where this is taken to include the idea that conscious similarities have scientific natures. (A view on a given subject is the default if it is the only one for which background considerations give rational ground for tenta- tive belief.) I argue for a conditional in which specifications of phenomenal realism and scientific naturalism (and a few other rela- tively uncontroversial items-including, notably, a rejection of a skep- tical perspective) appear on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, we have a specification of the epistemic tension which I men- tioned. Deflationists who accept the argument may opt for modus tollens, giving them a reason to reject phenomenal realism. Phenom- enal-realist naturalists may want to weaken their commitment to naturalism or to phenomenal realism. To put the point without explicit "isms":many of us are committed to the idea that conscious- ness is both real and can be assumed to have a scientific nature, but it turns out that these commitments do not fit together comfortably. Modern phenomenal realism has often been strongly naturalistic (for example,Joseph Levine, Brian Loar, Colin McGinn, Christopher Peacocke, John Perry, Sydney Shoemaker, John Searle, and myself5). Daniel Dennett6 has often accused phenomenal realists of closet dualism. Georges Rey7 has argued that the concept of consciousness tent," Mind, CIII (1994): 249-85. Deflationism with respect to consciousness in its most influential form is, confusingly, a kind of reductionism-albeit armchair reductionism rather than substantive scientific reductionism-and thus the termi- nology I am following can be misleading. I may have introduced this confusing terminology in my review of Daniel Dennett's ConsciousnessExplained in this JOUR- NAL,XC, 4 (April 1993): 181-93. 5 Levine; Loar, "Phenomenal States," in Block, Flanagan, and Gfizeldere, eds., pp. 597-616; McGinn, The Problemof Consciousness(Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991); Pea- cocke, Sense and Content (New York: Oxford, 1983); Perry, Knowledge,Possibility and Consciousness(Cambridge: MIT, 2001); Shoemaker, "The Inverted Spectrum," this JOURNAL, LXXIX, 7 (July 1982): 357-81; Searle, The Rediscoveryof the Mind (Cam- bridge: MIT, 1992). 6 ConsciousnessExplained (Boston: Little Brown, 1991). 7 "A Reason for Doubting the Existence of Consciousness," in R. Davidson, G. Schwartz, D. Shapiro, eds., Consciousnessand Self-Regulation, Volume 3 (New York: Plenum, 1983), pp. 1-39. In previous publications-"On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, xviII, 2 (1995): 227-47-I have argued that Rey's alleged incoherence derives from his failure to distinguish between phenomenal consciousness and other forms of consciousness This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Tue, 04 Aug 2015 15:41:39 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 394 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY is incoherent. The upshot here is that there is a grain of truth in these accusations.
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