Consciousness and Its Consequences

Abstract

Mind-body dualism involves the radical difference between the first-person and third-person points of view—a distinction reflected directly in many languages. The mental must be physically embodied somehow; yet the physical is a concept in someone&s;s mind. This mutuality makes for a certain amount of tail-chasing confusion, rendering any definitive understanding of the mind-body relationship elusive. In other words, the so-called mind-body problem is a classic philosophical dilemma. The narrow slice that philosophy has sectioned for itself, however, tends to regard only the technical dilemma, which philosopher David Chalmers has famously called "the hard problem of consciousness."The very existence of consciousness, or subjective experience, poses a problem for first-order science, which in general deals in objectivist accounts. The problem of consciousness is not new, of course, yet seems to remain off limits to a mechanist approach. The very nature of reflexive mind divides thought about itself, making the problem of consciousness doubly hard.