[NB for copyright purposes, most of this has been cut-and-pasted from my forthcoming book, please do not repost without credit].
I believe that understanding the Hard Problem (HP) is probably the single most important step towards 2R, at least for the scientific community. Both materialism and physicalism are incoherent, and this is going to lead to the biggest paradigm shift since the rise of modern science.
(1) The meaning of the word “consciousness”.
There is no satisfactory definition of the word “consciousness”, because essence of consciousness is subjectivity itself. What is subjectivity? You can only define subjective vocabulary in terms of other subjective vocabulary: consciousness = subjectivity = mind = qualia = “what it is like to be…”
The only way to break this chain is with a private ostensive definition (POD). We mentally “point” to our own subjective experiences and we call these “consciousness”. We then observe that there are other beings in the world we are experiencing which also appear to be conscious (humans and other animals), and we assume they can make a similar POD. Thus the word “consciousness” can take on a public meaning (so Wittgenstein’s private language arguments aren’t relevant).
So we have “defined” consciousness, and we have established that such a thing is real – it exists. It is in need of explanation. We must account for it in our model of reality.
(2) The term “(the) material world” refers to a three-dimensional realm full of objects that changes with the apparent passage of time. This world contains our planet Earth, ourselves and other living organisms, and the whole of the rest of our cosmos. Please note that I mean exactly what I have written and nothing more, and also that I bracketed the “the”. That is because while “material world” is itself relatively unproblematic as a concept, we usually say “the material world”, and this “the” implies that there is unproblematically only one thing this could mean. In fact the situation is not so simple, for we could talk about “the material world we directly observe” or “the hypothetical material world as it is in itself, independent of our observations of it”. These are examples of compound conceptual terms consisting of “the material world” and something else – something that makes the compound term explicitly metaphysical. When we talk about “the material world”, we generally mean it in the non-metaphysical, pre-philosophical sort of way – the concept is so familiar to us that we don’t feel any need for a more precise definition. Everybody knows what “the material world” refers to, don’t they?
(3) Materialism is a metaphysical view that “the material world is the only thing that exists” or that “reality is made entirely of matter and energy.” (Readers may already have noticed a problem here). Naive materialism is materialism that hasn’t been given sufficient philosophical consideration.
(4) Physicalism is the claim that reality consists of whatever our best theories of physics suggest or tell us that it consists of. This is more flexible than materialism, but is likely to lead to difficulties if our best theories are inconclusive in this respect. Our best physical theory is quantum mechanics – a theory that is notorious for not telling us what reality is made of. It sets up some very interesting questions, but does not provide much in the way of answers. It is therefore not clear what the general statement “physicalism is true” actually means or implies. It is a placeholder rather than a specific claim or theory, and there are multiple competing and mutually contradictory explanations of what can or should occupy the place in question.
(5) Scientific materialism is a combination of a metaphysical claim (that materialism is true) and the whole corpus of scientific knowledge. It takes the place of a cosmology, in the anthropological sense (ie a worldview or belief system, not a branch of science). Compared to other cosmologies it is rather impoverished, as it has no moral or spiritual content, and offers no meaning, purpose or wisdom. Please note that this is not intended as a value judgement – I am not suggesting that scientific materialism ought to offer any of these things. It just doesn’t, even though it occupies the conceptual and cognitive role of a cosmology.
(6) Scientism is a purely pejorative term referring to the overextension of scientific principles and methodologies into contexts where they are not appropriate or justified. Nobody self-identifies as scientistic – those described this way see themselves merely as strong advocates for science. They reject the idea that the scope of science can be overextended. To them, any claim to knowledge that necessarily lies outside the reach of science must be false, meaningless, or worthless. Scientism is the conviction that anything unsupported by science and reason fails to qualify as knowledge at all. Scientism is associated with the view that materialism/physicalism is itself justified by science and reason, or at least more aligned with science and reason than any alternatives. There is frequently a denial that it involves metaphysics at all – a claim that, to those familiar with philosophical terminology, only reinforces the conclusion that the speaker has a scientistic perspective.
(7) Scientific realism is the claim that our best scientific theories provide knowledge about a mind-external objective world – that science aims to discover truth.
(8) Naturalism (or “metaphysical naturalism”) is a metaphysical view that everything happening in reality can be reduced to (or explained in terms of) the laws of nature (including laws we are yet to discover). Naturalism is logically entailed by materialism (all materialists are naturalists) but the reverse is not true (some naturalists aren’t materialists). If the material world is the only thing that exists, then there is no theoretical or conceptual space for anything else that could affect it (an agent of free will, for example, or God) so naturalism is logically entailed. Naturalism differs from determinism in that it can accommodate objective randomness – the future does not have to be fully determined, but anything not determined must be random (really random in every case, not just apparently so or only in some cases).
(9) The incoherence of materialism
For non-materialists it can seem obvious that minds cannot be reduced to matter, equated with brain activity or denied any existence at all. For materialists, clearly, it is not. It is not that they cannot see the problem at all – anybody who is acquainted with this area of philosophy can certainly see a problem. As materialists see it, the problem is that our scientific understanding of consciousness is nowhere near good enough. However, most materialists also believe that the cumulative weight of evidence delivered by the whole of science, rationalism and the last four centuries of human progress – the undeniable and thoroughly deserved dominance of that paradigm – is ample justification for believing that this problem must have a materialistic solution. If it seems impossible then we must be thinking about it wrong, but this does not warrant taking seriously the idea that materialism should be rejected. Materialists believe theirs is the position most closely aligned with science and reason, for it is an expression of allegiance to the worldview which has been associated with those things since the scientific revolution (scientific materialism). It therefore seems thoroughly unreasonable to conclude that the dominant paradigm is itself unscientific or irrational.
For paradigm shifts to actually happen, rather than just threaten to, at least two things are required. The first is a clear idea of what the old paradigm is and what is wrong with it, and the second is an alternative capable of attracting a consensus and sustaining the shift – a new paradigm waiting to take over. In this case the first condition has been satisfied. The old paradigm is metaphysical materialism, and its most prominent defenders include Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Paul and Patricia Churchland. There is a growing recognition that materialism is conceptually incoherent: that it does not make sense and cannot be fixed. Many philosophers have explained this incoherence in various different ways, but all these accounts reduce to a single underlying problem.
The second condition has not been satisfied – even though the number of people who understand why materialism should be rejected continues to grow, no consensus has emerged in favour of an alternative.
David Chalmers is one of the best known opponents of materialism, and frames the debate in terms of what he calls the “Hard Problem”. He contrasts this with the so-called “easy problems” of consciousness. The easy problems involve the challenging work of understanding how brain processes correlate with mental states, and they are considered “easy” only because they are, in principle, solvable. The hard problem is more fundamental: how can consciousness exist at all if materialism is true? Here, “hard” suggests a problem that may be insurmountable, while “easy” means merely difficult.
Chalmers’ argument involves the conceivability of his now famous “philosophical zombies.” A p-zombie is something that looks and behaves exactly like a normal human at all times, but which isn’t conscious. Chalmers argues the mere fact that we can conceive of such a thing demonstrates that consciousness cannot be brain activity. It must be something over and above it. His conclusion is that physicalism cannot be true.
I often hear it claimed that the hard problem of consciousness is not specific to materialism/physicalism – that it is a general problem. This claim is made almost exclusively by social media materialists/physicalists, and they follow it up with something like “Since all of the ontological positions struggle to make sense of consciousness, there’s no reason to abandon materialism/physicalism.” In fact, the hard problem is very specific to materialism/physicalism. Dualists and idealists consider consciousness to be a primary constituent of reality, and neutral monism is a conceptual structure deliberately constructed so as not to leave it out, so none of those positions have to deal with the hard problem of consciousness. Just as materialists don’t feel any need to explain the existence of matter, idealists, dualists and neutral monists aren’t required to explain the existence of mind. All explanations have to end somewhere.
Though I agree with Chalmers’ conclusion, I have an objection to his argument. I can’t conceive of a p-zombie because by definition they behave like ordinary humans at all times, which means that if you asked one whether it is conscious it would presumably reply “Of course I am! Why are you even asking me that?” I can’t imagine a zombie that tells us it is conscious. It might be convincingly human in many ways, but it would not be capable of understanding consciousness or anything that depends upon it, or at least not like a conscious being understands those things. I think it would actually say something like “Consciousness? I have never been able to understand what that word is supposed to mean”, which means it wouldn’t be a p-zombie, because that is not how humans normally talk.
Similar reasoning lies behind the near-universal rejection of the most extreme version of materialism: eliminativism. Eliminative materialists (such as the Churchlands) evade the hard problem by denying that subjective vocabulary like “consciousness” refers to anything that actually exists. Eliminativists reject the possibility of a private ostensive definition of consciousness: “Consciousness? That kind of talk is folk psychology!” A p-zombie would be a naturally perfect eliminative materialist. Unlike the real ones, it would have no trouble at all in actually abstaining from the use of unscientific subjective vocabulary.
These arguments all revolve around the same basic problem – that the materialistic model of reality necessarily leaves something out. And the reason why this matters is that the thing it leaves out could scarcely be more important to us, because it is what it is like to be a human .
Which brings us to what I consider to be the clearest refutation of materialism: Thomas Nagel’s argument in What is it like to be a bat? (1974). It goes like this:
1: Consciousness exists – and not just human consciousness but completely unimaginable versions of it, such as bat consciousness. Bat consciousness is essentially “alien” to us, and if there really are any aliens out there, perhaps their consciousness could be even more alien than that of the bat.
2: It is impossible to imagine how humans could reduce all of the facts about consciousness to purely physical descriptions. There are facts that are completely impossible to state in any human language, even though we have no problem understanding why they can and must exist. These are facts about the subjective point of view. Only a Martian could understand facts about what it is like to be a Martian.
3: We need to think about objectivity and subjectivity as directions the understanding can travel. We can understand things like lightning or rainbows from a purely physical point of view – the objective facts that even an alien scientist could understand. Or we can understand them from our own subjective point of view, but not that of a bat or a Martian. But what we absolutely cannot do is travel in both directions at the same time – we cannot reach an understanding of something as essentially subjective as what it is like to be a bat by reducing it to something objective. What would be left of what it is like to be a bat if one removes the viewpoint of the bat? We might as well try to find the top of a mountain by burrowing into the ground.
QUOTE: “[I]f experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes that were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes that were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?”
If we are trying to understand lightning, rainbows or any other obviously physical phenomena, then the scientific method of doing so is to systematically remove the subjective aspects in order to reveal the underlying objective, physical facts. However, in this case the thing we are trying to understand is the subjective aspect itself, so the idea of moving from appearance to reality makes no sense.
QUOTE: “In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction; for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced…The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced.”
Nagel concludes that psycho-physical reduction is therefore impossible, so we must rule out the reductive form of materialism. But there are other forms – identity theory claims something different. Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to brain activity, identity theory claims that consciousness is brain activity. It then runs into major problems trying to explain what the word “is” is supposed to mean in such a statement. What does it mean to say “consciousness is brain activity”? The identity theorist might reply “What could be clearer than the word ‘is’? What exactly is the problem?”
QUOTE: “But I believe it is precisely this apparent clarity of the word ‘is’ that is deceptive. Usually, when we are told that X is r we know how it is supposed to be true, but that depends on a conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the ‘is’ alone. We know how both ‘X’ and ‘r’ refer, and the kinds of things to which they refer, and we have a rough idea how the two referential paths might converge on a single thing, be it an object, a person, a process, an event, or whatever. But when the two terms of the identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how it could be true. We may not have even a rough idea of how the two referential paths could converge, or what kind of things they might converge on, and a theoretical framework may have to be supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework, an air of mysticism surrounds the identification.”
People without the theoretical background can’t understand how matter can “be” energy, but they are justified in believing that people who do have the theoretical background do understand it. This is not the case with the identity theory of consciousness – in this case the people who say “consciousness is brain activity” do not have the faintest idea how the statement could possibly be true. If psycho-physical reductionism is impossible and identity theory depends on a currently incomprehensible usage of the word “is”, then “…[a]t the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true.”
The article ends with a reminder of where it began: our confusion about the relationship between subjective and objective.
“…it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it.”
Materialism vs Physicalism
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? describes a logical-conceptual problem that emerges from the essential nature of the attempt to explain consciousness in terms of the material world, although Nagel uses the term “physicalism” rather than “materialism”. Many people use them interchangeably, but their origins and meanings are not the same.
“Materialism” unambiguously refers to a worldview associated with classical Newtonian physics, and arguably also to Einstein’s theories of relativity. “Physicalism” refers to whatever our best physical theories currently are, and at the present time that means quantum theory. “Physicalism”, in a general sense, should therefore currently refer to whatever quantum theory tells us about what reality is made of, and we have already established that this could be any of several very different things. At least according to one of the available metaphysical interpretations (von Neumann / Stapp), a complete description of what quantum mechanics is telling us about includes “the consciousness of the observer” (von Neumann) or “the Participating Observer” (Stapp). Does this mean that such things have a place in physicalism? Most physicalists would say no. Physicalism, therefore, either suffers from the same conceptual problems as materialism, or it refers to something that the majority of physicalists don’t believe in. British philosopher Galen Strawson takes this reasoning to its natural conclusion: that physicalism entails panpsychism. REF:** Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism Strawson target.vp (sjsu.edu) **. As things stand, this term functions as an obstacle to a proper understanding of the conceptual problem we are dealing with, because it provides a hiding place for precisely the logical problem that needs to be fully exposed. “I’m not a materialist”, the physicalist can say. “That’s old Newtonian stuff. Physicalism is a much more modern thing.” Unfortunately, it is not clear what this more modern thing actually is.
Why “emergentism” can't be materialism
There is a metaphysical claim that is sometimes mistaken for materialism which Nagel doesn’t address in What Is It Like to Be a Bat? This is the claim that consciousness “emerges” from material entities.
Emergentism suggests that consciousness arises from complex systems, such as the brain, but is not reducible to the properties of the system’s individual components. This view is incompatible with materialism for a simple reason: if consciousness emerges from brain activity then something new and distinct has become part of reality. If one argues that whatever emerges is still "material” then we end up with two very different types of materiality. This results in epiphenomenalism – a dualistic view where consciousness “emerges” from brain activity but has no causal influence on it. Epiphenomenalism suffers from two major problems. Firstly it renders consciousness an extension of the material world which is both inexplicable and meaningless, and secondly it makes it theoretically impossible that the brain could know about consciousness. And if you try to fix these problems by making consciousness causally efficacious then you’ve got full-blown interactive dualism, even though consciousness is claimed to originally have emerged from matter. Something is very wrong here too.
Necessity and sufficiency
There is one particular objection to the conclusion that materialism is false which I encounter so frequently that it is worth mentioning here. This objection is not a serious philosophical objection – it is not made by professional philosophers – but it is ubiquitous among people who discuss these things on social media. The objection is that we have a vast amount of relevant scientific evidence: we know a great deal about the effects on consciousness of a wide variety of mind-altering drugs and different ways that brains can be damaged. This is scientific evidence; why isn’t it relevant? Why isn’t this scientific justification for the belief that minds are nothing but brain processes?
The answer is that this evidence only establishes that brains are (or appear to be) necessary for consciousness. It does not follow that they are sufficient. The impossibility of psycho-physical reduction suggests that something else is also necessary. An analogy makes this easier to understand. It involves an old-fashioned reel of film and the movie that is projected when the film is played. The correlation between the film and the movie resembles that between brain and mind: if you damage the film, then corresponding damage appears when you play the movie. However, it does not follow that the movie can be reduced to the film, or that the movie is the film. Neither does it follow that the movie “emerges” from the film, although that is arguably closer to the truth than the other two proposals. The proper description of the situation is that the film is necessary for the movie (without the film there can be no movie) but it is not sufficient (something else is needed, in this case a projector).
This kind of scientific knowledge does not provide a defence for materialism – it is relevant to the easy problems, but the hard problem remains untouched. It brings us no closer to an explanation of the missing internal viewpoint. If we can account for that internal viewpoint then we can start to imagine how the contents of consciousness might be derived from the brain, or maybe from the brain and other parts of the physical world to which it is connected. But this missing thing cannot “be” anything material. The subjective viewpoint is missing from the materialistic conception of reality and there’s no way to introduce it without the resulting system ceasing to be a coherent version of materialism.
Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena
There is some relevant terminology that can be traced back to ancient Greece but is now associated with Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) Kant divided reality into phenomena (things as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves, independent of appearances). Kant claimed that although we can infer the existence of a noumenal world, we can’t know anything about it – indeed we can’t even imagine it, because our cognitive equipment limits our capacity for understanding experience to spatio-temporality. He argued that space and time are the cognitive frame in which the phenomenal world exists. As a result, according to Kant, science is restricted to an investigation of phenomena, while noumena are forever out of its reach. He was not a scientific realist in the modern sense, although for Kant the phenomenal world was real enough.
This terminology might help us to understand why materialism is such a mind-trap. The concept “material world” is pre-philosophical, but we can add some metaphysical concepts to make two new concepts. The material world we directly experience can be called the “phenomenal material world” and the material world that (allegedly) self-existed for 12 billion years before conscious life appeared on Earth can be called the “noumenal material world”. This diverges from Kantian usage, because Kant’s noumena is neither material nor knowable, but the meaning is clear enough. Materialists don’t generally acknowledge this Kant-like distinction, and yet their own word usage suggests they ought to. Consider the rival metaphysical position of idealism. For idealists, the material world is only known to us within consciousness (this is a stage in the reasoning that led them to idealism in the first place). So for idealists the material world is the phenomenal material world. Contrastingly, the material world of materialism can only be the noumenal material world – an objective material world that exists independently of consciousness. Therefore, if materialism is the claim that only the material world exists, then it equates to the claim that only the noumenal material world exists. And if that is what materialism is, then how could it possibly account for the phenomenal world? If things as they are in themselves are all that exists, how do we account for things appearing to us? If there is only the view from nowhere, what are our views from somewhere? Who is us? If we closely examine what the word “materialism” actually means then it implies that consciousness should not and cannot exist. This is the reason why eliminative materialists say that it cannot be real. Why else would people who consider themselves hard rationalists make such a wildly counter-intuitive claim if not compelled by reason? Eliminativism is the only form of materialism that is actually coherent, precisely because it makes no attempt to accommodate consciousness. However, since we have already established that abolishing subjective vocabulary is not acceptable, we must reject eliminative materialism too.
Conclusion
Both materialism and physicalism should be rejected. This has major implications for several areas of science, notably evolutionary theory, cosmology and neuroscience. Of particular importance is Nagel’s 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist neo-Darwinian conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Nagel is showing the scientific community their path to 2R, and it is not remotely like any of the paths being offered by people with a postmodern background. I believe it is very important now to show how Nagel’s arguments fit together with the rest of 2R. M&C ends with the following comment:
“I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in the light of how little we really understand about the world. It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates could wean itself of [sic] the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps – to adapt one of its own pejorative tags. I have tried to show that this approach is incapable of providing an adequate account, either constitutive or historical, of our universe.
However, I am certain that my own attempt to explore alternatives is far too unimaginative. An understanding of the universe as basically prone to generate life and mind will probably require a much more radical departure from the familiar forms of naturalistic explanation than I am at present able to conceive. Specifically, in attempting to understand consciousness as a biological phenomenon, it is easy to forget how radical is the difference between the subjective and the objective, and fall into the error of thinking about the mental in terms taken from our ideas of physical events and processes. Wittgenstein was sensitive to this error, though his way of avoiding it through an exploration of the grammar of mental language seems to me plainly insufficient.”
Part 2 of my forthcoming book is a direct response to Nagel’s challenge. It provides that radical departure. Nagel’s problem is that he has only got hold of half of the paradigm shift. The other half is provided by physicist Henry Stapp in a book called Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. Nagel’s book is all about evolution and hardly mentions QM. Stapp’s is about QM and does not mention evolution at all. What nobody seems to have noticed is that if you put these two theories together then wonderful things happen. What emerges is the completed foundation of a fully-fledged cosmology for 2R.