IDEALISM AND THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree ■pU'L- Master of Arts In Philosophy by John Ishmael Odito San Francisco, California May 2015 Copyright by John Ishmael Odito 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Idealism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness by John Ishmael Odito and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Philosophy at San Francisco State University. Carlos Montemayor, Ph.D Associate Professor Alice Sowaal Ph.D Associate Professor David Landy, Ph.D Associate Professor Idealism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness John Ishmael Odito San Francisco, California 2015 In this paper I argue that consciousness is both epistemically and metaphysically primitive, and I offer reasons why, given David Chalmers’ commitment to a certain view of fundamentalism, he should reject both reductive and nonreductive explanations of consciousness. I then offer reasons why I think idealism is a better resource for understanding consciousness, and I explain how I can advocate idealism on the basis of the epistemic and metaphysical primitiveness of consciousness. Finally, I give a reason for why idealism is a better alternative to dualist views. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this Thesis Chair, Thesis Committee Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my father, Chris Odito, and my mother, Doris Odito for instilling in me the curiosity and adventurousness that has led to my formal study of philosophy. I would also like to thank professors Carlos Montemayor, David Landy and Alice Sowaal for their support and guidance in developing this thesis. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction................................................................................................................................ 1 Section 1.....................................................................................................................................7 A. Consciousness is epistemically primitive..............................................................9 B. Consciousness is metaphysically primitive..........................................................12 Section 2................................................................................................................................... 17 A. Why I believe that idealism is true given the preceding reflections .................17 B. How I can have an idealist view that is based on the epistemic and metaphysical primitiveness of consciousness........................................................ 19 C. Why idealism is better than other dualist view s.................................................20 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................21 Bibliography........................................................................................................................... 22 1 Introduction David Chalmers has a specific formulation of the hard problem of consciousness in his paper “Consciousness and its Place in Nature”: There is no question that experience is closely associated with physical processes in systems such as brains. It seems that physical processes give rise to experience, at least in the sense that producing a physical system (such as a brain) with the right physical properties inevitably yields corresponding states of experience. But how and why do physical processes give rise to experience? Why do not these processes take place “in the dark, ” without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness.1 I agree with Chalmers’ claim that this is the central mystery of consciousness. Chalmers also thinks that, true to its title, the “hard problem” is so hard that reductive explanations of this problem all fail.21 also agree with him about this claim as well. A reductive explanation of consciousness, as Chalmers defines it, explains how and why it is that physical processes are associated with experience wholly on the basis of physical principles that do not themselves make any appeal to consciousness.3 A nonreductive explanation is one in which consciousness (or principles involving consciousness) is 1 David Chalmers, “Consciousness and its Place in Nature, ” in Blackwell Guide to 2 Ibid., 2 3 Ibid., 3 2 admitted as a basic part of the explanation.4 He gives an example of a reductive explanation. He says: “To explain the gene, for instance, we needed to specify the mechanism that stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next. It turns out that DNA performs this function; once we explain how this function is performed, we have explained the gene.”5 But he does not think that this type of explanation will work for consciousness, because consciousness, unlike the gene, is not a matter of the performance of a function. Rather, consciousness is a matter of experience, a matter of there being something it is like to be conscious. And this fact of experience cannot be explained in terms of functions.6 It is important to note here that there is a difference between the reductivist and the identity theorist. The identity theorist is the most reductive of the reductivists, but there are reductivists who are not identity theorists. The identity theorist holds that mental states are identical to brain states, but there are other types of reductivists who do not hold this. For instance, there are reductivists who hold that mental states supervene on brain states; other reductivists hold that brain states necessitate mental states. This is important to note because the identity theorist is but one version of the reductivist, and 4 Ibid., 3 5 D. Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3):200-19, 1995, 5 6 Ibid., 5 3 though Chalmers does not make the distinction himself, there are other alternative ways of being a reductivist. While there are at least two areas of convergence between Chalmers and myself, there is a further claim on which we diverge. Chalmers claims that where reductive explanations of consciousness have failed, nonreductive explanation will succeed7.1 disagree with this claim: I will argue that nonreductive explanation will fail as well. The reason I disagree with this claim has to do with a further claim that Chalmers makes in order to support his claim that nonreductive explanation will succeed. This claim is the following: experience is fundamental, that is, it cannot be explained in terms of something else: I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence o f consciousness. We might add some entirely new non-physical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge and space-time. If we take 7 Ibid., 13 4 experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.8 He articulates this idea even further in terms of the concept of ontological novelty in the “Interlude” in his paper “Consciousness and its Place in Nature”: If consciousness is not necessitated by physical truths, then it must involve something ontologically novel in the world: to use Kripke’s metaphor, after fixing all the physical truths, God had to do more work to fix all the truths about consciousness. That is, there must be ontologically fundamental features of the world over and above the features characterized by physical theory. We are used to the idea that some features of the world are fundamental: in physics, features such as spacetime, mass, and charge, are taken as fundamental and not further explained. If the arguments against materialism are correct, these features from physics do not exhaust the fundamental features of the world: we need to expand our catalog of the world’s basic features.9 My objection is that once Chalmers admits that experience is fundamental and novel, he is thereby also committed to the claim that we cannot have a theory of conscious experience at all, let alone a nonreductive theory of consciousness. This is 8 Ibid., 14 9 Chalmers, Consciousness, 28 5 problematic for Chalmers because he claims that we can have a theory of consciousness once we accept that experience is fundamental. Fundamentalism, as Chalmers depicts it, is the idea that if a feature of the world is taken as fundamental, then no successful attempt can be made to explain this feature in terms of anything simpler: Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms o f anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. For example, in the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic processes could not be explained in terms of the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories