The Elimination of Experience
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research June 1, 1993 DOI: 10.2307/2107772 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Qualitative Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 2 |
| Key points | Argues that consciousness resists physicalist explanation because current theories cannot rule out its absence, and that qualia—the immediately apprehensible ways the world is presented—pose a deep problem. Proposes that our confusion about qualia may reflect either genuine ignorance or an intellectual illusion embedded in philosophical and ordinary ways of speaking about consciousness. |
Abstract
Like a leaky roof, the phenomena of consciousness continue to drip cold water on otherwise virtually watertight physicalist pretensions. There are no current prospects for any sort of scientific theory of consciousness and the various speculative attempts to point in the direction of such a theory of consciousness all appear to suffer from the rather basic problem of being, in the words of Thomas Nagel, compatible with its absence (Nagel (1974), p. 166). It seems to many that the main worry about consciousness is what philosophers have come to call the problem of qualia. Roughly speaking, qualia are the immediately apprehensible ways in which the world, including ourselves, is presented to us. The central feature of qualitative consciousness is that our awareness of the world appears to have graspable properties of its own by which information about the world is delivered. The fact that a clear sky looks blue seems like only one of many possible ways that information about the characteristics of atmospheric light could be presented to, or in, consciousness. Moving inward, this apparently contingent relation between information and the way it is conveyed appears to hold no less for the precise physical nature of the presumed neural underpinnings of consciousness itself. It seems that achieving an awareness of these second order properties of information channels is necessary to be fully conscious and perhaps a being who could not attain this level of awareness should not be said to be truly conscious at all. Part of the problem of qualia is that we don't have a very good idea of exactly what we are talking about when we talk about them. In a sense, of course, we could not know anything better, but the nature of qualia and their relation to our physical being are deeply problematic. One possible explanation for this difficulty has already been alluded to: we simply don't understand consciousness, and our ideas and models of it, the primary one being based on perception, reflect our ignorance. But another potential explanation for our difficulty is that we are the victims of an intellectual illusion. Perhaps our ways of speaking about consciousness, some of them almost exclusively philosophical but others common parlance, have mistakenly led us to the