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How Can We Solve the Meta-Problem of Consciousness?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Chalmers, David J. |
| Copyright Year | 2020 |
| Abstract | I am grateful to the authors of the 39 commentaries on my article “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness”. I learned a great deal from reading them and from thinking about how to reply.1 The commentaries divide fairly nearly into about three groups. About half of them discuss potential solutions to the meta-problem. About a quarter of them discuss the question of whether intuitions about consciousness are universal, widespred, or culturally local. About a quarter discuss illusionism about consciousness and especially debunking arguments that move from a solution to the meta-problem to illusionism. Some commentaries fit into more than one group and some do not fit perfectly into any, but with some stretching this provides a natural way to divide them. As a result, I have divided my reply into three parts, each of which can stand alone. This first part is “How can We Solve the Meta-Problem of Conscousness?”. The other two parts are “Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Universal?” and “Debunking Arguments for Illusionism about Consciousness”. How can we solve the meta-problem? As a reminder, the meta-problem is the problem of explaining our problem intuitions about consciousness, including the intuition that consciousness poses a hard problem and related explanatory and metaphysical intuitions, among others. One constraint is to explain the intuitions in topic-neutral terms (for example, physical, computational, structural, or evolutionary term) that do not make explicit appeal to consciousness in the explanation. In the target article, I canvassed about 15 potential solutions to the meta-problem. I expressed sympathy with about seven of them as elements of a solutions: introspective models, phenomenal concepts, independent roles, introspective opacity, immediate knowldge, primitive quality attribution, and primitive relation attribution. I summed up my own preferred path to a solution as follows: |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://consc.net/papers/solving.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
