Groucho Marxism

Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one’s external environment. In the philosophy of mind, the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ involves explaining why and how humans and other organisms are conscious. It is contrasted with the ‘easy problems’ of explaining why and how physical systems organisms the ability to integrate information and perform behavioural functions. The term ‘hard problem of consciousness’ was coined by the philosopher David Chalmers in 1994, but it has been known about and debated by philosophers for centuries. The existence of the hard problem poses a challenge to the materialist worldview. In this blog post, I will attempt to sketch out a materialist solution.

One approach to solving the hard problem is to deny that it exists. This was the approach taken by the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained. According to Dennett, qualia – that is, instances of subjective, conscious experience – do not (and cannot) exist as they are described. Dennett’s argues that the various properties attributed to qualia by philosophers – that they are incorrigible, ineffable, private, directly accessible and so on – are incompatible, so the notion of qualia is incoherent. Dennett is a very eminent philosopher and as a materialist it is tempting to take his argument at face value; but I think that would be cop-out. There clearly is something that needs to be explained here, and in my view Dennett is dodging the question.

Another approach to the hard problem is to take consciousness as primary. This is the approach taken by Chalmers, who argues that the hard problem is not reducible to the easy problems, and that solving the easy problems will not lead to a solution to the hard problem. Chalmers’s idea clearly contradicts the view that everything that exists is a physical or material thing. In fact, in his book Why Materialism Is Baloney, the philosopher and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup argues that the existence of consciousness means we must reject materialism altogether, as materialism can never account for it. Instead, Kastrup advocates for something he calls ‘analytic idealism’, where reality is fundamentally mental.

This seems rather hasty to me though. Just because we haven’t found a materialist explanation for consciousness yet doesn’t necessarily mean that such an explanation does not exist. In order to find such an explanation, I think we need to view the problem from an evolutionary perspective, and ask why consciousness might have evolved. The only reason it could have evolved was that it provides an evolutionary advantage. But what could that advantage be? The answer, I believe, is that consciousness creates empathy. As conscious organisms, the reason we have empathy for other organisms is that we understand that those other organisms are also conscious. This empathy then leads to greater cooperation, which in turn provides an evolutionary advantage.

This explanation addresses the ‘why’ part of the hard problem, but it doesn’t address the ‘how’. That is to say, it is an explanation of why consciousness might have evolved, and therefore why consciousness exists, but it doesn’t explain how consciousness arises from physical processes. However, I think the ‘how’ part of the hard problem actually belongs with the easy problems. It should be noted here that these problems are actually far from easy, and Chalmers was being tongue-in-cheek when he referred to them as such. In reality, solving the easy problems will take many years of painstaking research by lots of very clever people. But they are easy in the sense that they are solvable in principle, even if solving them in practice is very difficult.

The idea that consciousness exists because it provides an evolutionary advantage seems so obvious, I can’t believe nobody has thought of it before. Strangely, though, I can’t find any evidence of anyone putting this forward as an explanation, which makes we wonder whether there might be some motivated reasoning going on. Could it be that people actually want the hard problem of consciousness to be insoluble? I can see why this might be so. The idea that consciousness is somehow independent of physical processes may be comforting for some as it implies that perhaps our consciousness lives on after we die (and presumably also that it existed before we were born, although for whatever reason we can’t remember this).

This suggests to me that those who advocate for the hard problem of consciousness being fundamentally insoluble might be guilty of the confusing what they would like to be true with what is actually true. I don’t mean to sound condescending here; we are all guilty of this at times. But we obviously shouldn’t reject rational explanations for phenomena just because they make us feel uncomfortable. I would love to believe that consciousness exists independently of physical processes, as it opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, but my rational brain tells me that this is wishful thinking. The truth is, there is a straightforward materialist solution for the hard problem of consciousness, and we should consider that before we start looking for more esoteric explanations.