Consciousness: An Outside Story

Abstract

causes me three worries. First, and most important, I just do not believe it. In the great consciousness debates now raging, I side with Searle (1997), who accepts consciousness as a high-level brain feature but denies property dualism; in the end, I inch toward Churchland (1997), Dennett (1997), and other materialists who have spoken out against extra properties because they require special intuitions of thatje ne sais quoi of experience that, in the end, only the true believers seem to have (see the papers in Shear, 1997, for the technical critiques of Chalmers and his responses). Second, it reminds me of a cartoon I once saw in the New York Times over a review of the autobiography of A. J. Ayer, that unapologetic and unrelenting logical empiricist who, by his early twenties, had dismissed all the great metaphysical questions of philosophy as gibberish because they lacked data. He was portrayed as a hunching old man, looking down at his feet for his entire life while the sky exploded with comets, angels, spaceships, and other phenomena bracketed out, in principle, as non-sense. I worry that Chalmers is telling a similarly exclusionary tale--experience is information from the (p. 305). Where are all those other people and things? Where are the bugs, churches, and baseballs? His inside