Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The problem of phenomenal consciousness
- 2 Consciousness and supervenience
- 3 The explanatory gap
- 4 Consciousness and higher-order experience
- 5 Consciousness and higher-order thoughts
- 6 The structure of consciousness
- 7 What it is like
- 8 Against objectualism II: mistakes about the way things seem
- 9 Consciousness and representation
- 10 Consciousness and the natural order
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The explanatory gap
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The problem of phenomenal consciousness
- 2 Consciousness and supervenience
- 3 The explanatory gap
- 4 Consciousness and higher-order experience
- 5 Consciousness and higher-order thoughts
- 6 The structure of consciousness
- 7 What it is like
- 8 Against objectualism II: mistakes about the way things seem
- 9 Consciousness and representation
- 10 Consciousness and the natural order
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It was Colin McGinn's important paper ‘Can we solve the mind–body problem?’ (McGinn 1989, 1991) which was, more than any single work, responsible for pitching consciousness back into the spotlight of philosophical preoccupation:
How is it possible for conscious states to depend on brain states? How can Technicolor phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter? What makes the bodily organ we call the brain so radically different from other bodily organs, say the kidneys – the body parts without a trace of consciousness? How could the aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurones generate subjective awareness? We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so. It strikes us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic. Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this conversion.
(1991: 1)Similar sentiments are echoed by Joseph Levine, David Chalmers, and others. The problem, here, is one of providing a physical explanation of phenomenal consciousness. The ‘gap’ between consciousness and the brain is essentially an explanatory gap rather than an ontological one. No matter how much we know about the brain, no matter how intricate, detailed and sophisticated our knowledge of the brain becomes, no matter how much headway we make in understanding the biology, chemistry, and even physics, of the brain, we shall still be at a loss to see how the brain produces consciousness.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Nature of Consciousness , pp. 51 - 74Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001