A story and a challenge for the philosophically minded.
A Thesis Challenging the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers "Consciousness" Paradigm
Presented to the Fort Lewis College Philosophy Club in Durango
If you’ve plunged into the philosophical arena of human consciousness, I think we’d agree—if on nothing else—that the expert dialogue is a great big ball of confusion. After all, in a 2024 survey by Robert Kuhn, there are 325 competing philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. That’s not theories closing in on understanding; that’s 325 opinions that don’t convince any peers.
At the head of this ball of confusion is the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers paradigm, summed up in Chalmers’ Hard Problem of Consciousness: Why and how do physical processes in the brain (neural activity) give rise to subjective experience? What is it like to be something? How does matter become thought?
Writer Marvin Von Renchler excellently summarizes the flaw in the Hard Problem: “Rather than demonstrate a separation between physical processes and subjective experience, it is assumed.”
Biologically, everything we observe points to continuity: increasingly complex systems of memory, integration and self-referential processing emerging stepwise under selection pressures. There is no clear place for something non-physical to be introduced.
Von Renchler concludes that, “The ‘hard problem’ is less an unsolved mystery and more a framing issue, a mismatch between philosophical categories and how evolved systems actually work.”
There’s another objection I’ve yet to receive a serious response to: Why search for our mind wholly within our brain in the first place?
