Neurophilosophy and the Problem of Consciousness: An Equiphenomenal Perspective

Abstract

With recent advancements in the neurosciences, it is evident that formerly held presuppositions about consciousness and mental properties may have been hurriedly put forward. Neurophilosophy draws the attention of philosophers to the relevance of neuroscientific data to tackling some of the trickiest topics in philosophy of mind such as self, mind-body, intentionality and the likes. There however remains an important frontier to be adequately addressed—consciousness. Aspects of consciousness such as objective—subjective experiences cannot be thoroughly captured under existing explanatory models. This explanatory gap creates what Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness. In this work, I articulate the theory of equiphenomenalism as a proposal to addressing the explanatory gap of consciousness. Equiphenomenalism is an explanatory theory of consciousness that advocates a systematisation of private account or first-person account of conscious mental experiences. It asserts that a strictly materialist/physicalist explanation of consciousness that jettisons subjective conscious experience is incapable of addressing the problem of consciousness. With this model, I justify the reliability of first-person data in explaining conscious mental experiences, if and only if it correlates with objective accounts. To do this, I employ the method of conversational thinking to engage with previous positions in the field as well as the new theories in the other two essays in this book.