Modality, semantics, and consciousness

Abstract

The Character of Consciousness brings together most of the important papers that Chalmers has written on the topic of consciousness since (and a couple before) the publication of his book, The Conscious Mind. He covers such topics as the identification of neural correlates of consciousness, the modal argument against materialism, the ‘‘phenomenal concepts’’ strategy, representationalism and the nature of color experience, and the unity of consciousness. As I am in agreement with, or at least sympathetic to, a lot of what he has to say on these topics, and since this is supposed to be a critical response to the book, I will limit my remarks to the principal area where we still differ: the modal argument against materialism. Let me begin with a general characterization of how I see the disagreement between us, and then move to the details. Both Chalmers and I see a deep epistemic gap between physical (including functional, or computational) accounts of the mind/ brain and ordinary descriptions of our phenomenally conscious experience. We both maintain that the ‘‘hard problem’’, or ‘‘the explanatory gap’’ constitutes a serious challenge to materialism in the philosophy of mind. But we differ significantly on the nature of that challenge. I have in fact of late come closer to Chalmers in seeing the explanatory gap as a positive argument for non-materialism about consciousness, but where I see the argument as essentially abductive he sees it as demonstrative. I view the inference from the explanatory gap to non-materialism as basically an instance of inference to the best explanation; the best explanation of the epistemic gap is that there is a metaphysical gap (the nature of which I find obscure,