Is subjectivity really so mysterious?

Contemporary debates are often framed by philosopher David Chalmers’ distinction between the ‘easy problem’ and ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.

The easy problem

The easy problem involves discovering the neural correlates or computational mechanisms that perform certain behavioural and cognitive functions.

The hard problem

The hard problem concerns why any of these correlates, functions or mechanisms should be associated with subjective experience at all. Why, and how, does it arise from a material, physical basis? 

Non-materialist approaches

One answer is to claim that consciousness is immaterial and not a material substance. 

According to dualism, reality is made out of material and immaterial substances that exist independently of each other. According to idealism, reality is only made out of immaterial substances and the material world exists only in virtue of being perceived by a (human or cosmic) mind. However, both dualism and idealism then need to explain how exactly immaterial substances interact with the material brain.

Materialist approaches 

Another answer is to claim that consciousness is material. 

According to materialism, all reality ultimately consists of the stuff posited by the physical sciences and their fundamental properties, such as mass, energy and charge. For materialists, consciousness is a property of brain states and consists of these fundamental properties.

According to monism, all matter is made out of the same fundamental stuff. Panpsychism is one version where consciousness cannot be reduced to the fundamental properties of the physical science because it is a fundamental property in its own right in addition to the likes of mass, energy and charge. But this raises a new ‘combinatorial problem’- how do the ‘atoms of consciousness’ add up to create our unified conscious experiences?

The real problem 

Nonetheless, materialism and monism do not explain our strong intuitions behind the hard problem.

Confusion may arise from the different phenomenology of our third person perceptions of the external world and our first person perceptions of our inner worlds.They serve different kinds of predictions- representations of the external world and representations of the physiological regulation of our bodies, respectively.

Confusion may also arise because the easy problem may be poorly framed. It focuses on neural correlates that explain the behavioural and functional properties of consciousness rather than its phenomenological properties. Yet phenomenology is the essence of conscious experience. Neuroscientist Anil Seth stresses that ‘wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is experience’. Brain regions may be correlated with certain conscious perceptions but this does not explain why activity in that region should cause the associated phenomenology. 

For Anil Seth, the ‘real problem of consciousness’ is how to explain the phenomenological properties of consciousness with ‘a general theory of perception that explains what brains do, not just where they do it’. Rather than solving the hard problem, this approach could dissolve it so that it no longer feels problematic- just like other natural processes where science has explained what seemed initially mysterious by discovering mechanisms that predict and control those processes.

The meta-problem

Another approach is to focus on the behavioural, psychological and sociological reasons for these intuitions, such as our attitudes towards the value and meaning that we associate with subjective experience. This ‘meta-problem of consciousness’ is an easy problem of consciousness, involving functional explanations about our behaviour, psychology and sociology (responsible for our intuitions) that could be tested empirically. 

Intuitions about free will

Intuitions about free will might lurk behind the power of the hard problem. We feel like we have an agency that can transcend the causal laws of the material world because of the counterfactual feeling that we could have acted otherwise- one evening we drank tea but we could have drunk coffee.

But this experience of a ‘spooky free will’ does not mean that there is free will. We feel that we could have acted differently because next time we might do differently. Our brains are always learning from past experiences to identify alternative actions- perhaps we learnt to avoid caffeine late at night so next time we will drink decaf- and we project this future orientated experience back onto our past actions. If identical events were to repeat themselves, then the causal laws of nature mean that the same outcome would arise. But by definition future events can only be similar- and not identical- to past ones so different outcomes could arise. 

Free will is the perceptual experience of our brain’s predictions about the causes of our actions. Free will is as real as any other perceptual experience. Red does not exist in the world but is our projection onto it; but knowing this does not stop us seeing red. So, too, for the experience of free will that we project onto our actions. But just as there is no ‘real red’ out there (in those objects), there is’ no spooky free will’ in here.