Conceptualizing Consciousness: What Must We Explain?

Abstract

Explaining consciousness seems like an incredibly daunting task. I suspect the reason for this is because of what our explanatory theories of consciousness are expected to involve and what they are expected to look like. With the hope of deflating what is apparently required from an explanation of consciousness, I show that (i) we can shed peripheral and unproductive explanatory tasks from the enterprise of explaining consciousness, and (ii) demonstrate a means of developing much simpler explanatory theories of the phenomenon. In completing the first, I argue that our explanatory theories need not serve as interpretive tools to understand what experiences are like, and that we need not expand our scientific inquiry in search of "extra ingredients". As for the second, I motivate a semantic view of theories, wherein our explanations of consciousness may be agnostic about potential answers to other persisting philosophical problems such as the mind-body problem.