THE PROBLEM OF PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Abstract

The concepts of phenomenal consciousness (Ned Block) and qualia (C.A. Lewis) appeared in the philosophy of mind as a result of the need to distinguish the subjective, experiential („how it is“) aspect of consciousness from the objectivistic treatment of consciousness as a computational or neural process, that had been developed in the frame of objective mind sciences and new materialism from the 60ties and 70ties on. Qualitative properties of consciousness turn the traditional mind-body problem into a really hard and intricate one. The article presents epistemological problems of phenomenal consciousness - the problem of epistemic asymmetry and the problem of explanatory gap, as well as the problem of integration of phenomenal, qualitative properties of consciousness into the physicalistic ontology. Reviewing the spectrum of contemporary ontological positions shows that there are so far no unproblematic formulations. Reductionist and eliminativist strategies however do not seem to be heuristically fruitful in the present state of our knowledge about mind. A more promising path lies in the development of the methods of the first person and in the explicit inclusion of phenomenology in the future research programs of mind sciences.