The Mind/Brain Problem

Abstract

The “hard problem” of consciousness is addressed: How do we account for conscious experience in an objective physical world? Of the solutions essayed since antiquity, only “aspect dualism,” where “mental” and “physical” refer to subjective and objective perspectives on reality, is compatible with post-Newtonian science. The goal is to identify the physical substrate of experience, the “neural correlate of consciousness” (NCC). The received view, that conscious experience “emerges” from widely dispersed brain regions, is problematic. Therefore, an alternative is proposed: that multiple conscious experiences are present in the brain, each associated with its own individual neuron, and each comprising the entire experience usually assigned to the whole brain. How this proposal might mitigate the hard problem is the theme of this book.