Consciousness, subjective facts and physicalism – 50 years since Nagel’s bat.
Pizhūhish/hā-yi Falsafī- Kalāmī August 6, 2024 DOI: 10.22091/jptr.2024.10424.3021 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Self-understanding.consciousness Subjective facts Physicalism |
| Key points | Argues that subjective facts do not support anti-physicalism and that nonreductive physicalism combined with teleo-pragmatic functionalism predicts their existence. |
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.