Budapest Mind Society lecture series

Dear All, Hopefully this time we will be able to hear Kati's talk about consciousness :) Time: 2 May, 2006 (Thursday), 5 PM. Location: CEU Department of Philosophy, 1051 Budapest, Zrínyi u. 14, 4th floor, rm. 412. Title and abstract: "Hard, Harder, Hardest" In this paper I discuss three problems concerning consciousness. The first two problems have been dubbed "The Hard Problem" and "The Harder Problem". The third problem has received less attention and I will call it "The Hardest Problem". The Hard Problem is a metaphysical, and explanatory problem concerning the nature of conscious states. The Harder Problem is epistemological. The problem is that if physicalism is true then all facts supervene on physical facts including facts about consciousness and so it is natural to expect that, given enough physical information, I can know whether another being is conscious. But it seems that I cannot know this. The Hardest Problem is a problem about reference. Both the Hard and the Harder Problems presuppose the common sense view that our subjective concepts refer determinately - modulo vagueness - to real, objective properties that can be instantiated in minds other than my own. It follows that there will be a matter of fact - even if I can never find it out - about whether a phenomenal concept of mine applies to another creature. The Hardest Problem is the problem of explaining how, given physicalism, this could be so. Together the three problems present, I suggest, a particularly difficult challenge to those philosophers who are, like me, both physicalists and phenomenal realists, and agree with dualists that there is an explanatory gap involving phenomenal consciousness. My aim is to spell out the relations among them and then to explore how they appear from the perspective of an approach that strikes me as quite promising in so far as the first two problems are concerned. The approach I have in mind attempts to explain the various special and puzzling features of phenomenal consciousness in terms of what Stoljar has recently called 'the phenomenal concept strategy'. This approach can go quite far in handling the first two problems but, as we will see, runs into serious difficulties with the Hardest Problem. Best wishes, Zoltán Jakab