The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World * By OWEN FLANAGAN

Abstract

We are all familiar with the alleged ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – explaining how the subjective world of conscious awareness could arise out of neuronal activity. Owen Flanagan, an out-and-out naturalist, is committed to dissolving this much discussed problem without any appeal to ‘spooky’ immaterial entities or properties. Instead, he proposes that the solution depends on accepting what he calls ‘subjective realism’: ‘it is simply a unique but nonmysterious fact about conscious mental states that they essentially possess a phenomenal side’ (29). Having, to his satisfaction, disposed of the puzzle of consciousness, Flanagan now turns to the arguably much harder problem that is the focus of the book’s title. The really hard problem is to explain ‘why and how, in the greater scheme of things, any human life matters’ (xii). There seems to be no immediate connection between the consciousness problem and the meaning problem, except that both provide test cases for the scientific–naturalistic worldview that Flanagan espouses. He wants an account of human life and its meaning that is wholly compatible with ‘the picture of persons that emerges from neo-Darwinian theory and from the best current mind science’, according to which ‘we are fully embodied thinking-feeling animals who live and achieve meaning – if we do – in a world that is fully natural’ (61).