[catlist name=”consciousness”]
“We don’t see that the hard problem
is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is — what the physical is.”
…So the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general). If physics made any claim that couldn’t be squared with the fact that our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim would be false. But physics doesn’t do any such thing. It’s not the physics picture of matter that’s the problem; it’s the ordinary everyday picture of matter. It’s ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the ground that everything is physical, and that consciousness can’t possibly be physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us — except insofar as it is consciousness.
Galen Strawson is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author, most recently, of “Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment.”
Based on NYTimes article
