(All references are to Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.)
Pat says we don’t know that the “hard problem” is really any more hard than many others (p50-52), and “we don’t know how consciousness is produced in brains” (p51). I know that it’s a pseudo-problem, and that consciousness is not produced.
Paul says the brain working at a low level and psychology at a high level are “not two things embracing one another, they’re actually just one thing, looked at from two different points of view.” (p59)
So near and yet so far. . . If he’d just put this together with the fact that the brain is objective while consciousness is subjective, he’d have it. He might even be right that work on the “easy problems” will lead to this understanding, though I’d say it needn’t necessarily do so.
Pat: “. . . there really are these qualitative experiences. . . ” (p60)
But it depends what you mean by “really.” For years I insisted that consciousness was real, despite being subjective, and I’m still tempted sometimes to use that kind of language. But “really” really needs to be qualified. Naive realism just doesn’t cut it in such a subtle and complex context.
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