Intuitions based on the first-person perspective can easily mislead us about what is and is
not conceivable.1 This point is usually made in support of familiar reductionist positions on the mind-body problem, but I believe it can be detached from that approach. It seems to me that the powerful appearance of contingency in the relation between the functioning of the physical organism and the conscious mind -- an appearance that depends directly or indirectly on the firs person perspective -- must be an illusion. But the denial of this contingency should not take the form of a reductionist account of consciousness of the usual type, whereby the logical gap between the mental and the physical is closed by conceptual analysis -- in effect, by analyzing the mental in terms of the physical (however elaborately this is done -- and I count functionalism as such a theory, along with the topic-neutral causal role analyses of mental concepts from which
it descends).
In other words, I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between
the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori.
So I want to propose an alternative. In our present situation, when no one has a plausible
answer to the mind-body problem, all we can really do is to try to develop various alternatives one of which may prove in the long run to be an ancestor of a credible solution.
This is a new ballgame.
The analogy with the case of mental phenomena should be clear. They too occupy causal
roles, and it has been one of the strongest arguments for some kind of physicalism that those roles may prove upon investigation to be occupied by organic processes. Yet the problem here is much more serious, for an obvious reason: Identifying sounds with waves in the air does not require that we ascribe phenomenological qualities and subjectivity to anything physical, because those are features of the perception of sound, not of sound itself. By contrast, the identification of mental events with physical events requires the unification of these two types of properties in a single thing, and that remains resistant to understanding. The causal argument for identification may make us believe that it is true, but it doesn’t help us to understand it, and in my view, we really shouldn’t believe it unless we can understand it.
I believe that as a matter of fact you can’t have one without the other, and furthermore that the powerful intuition that it is conceivable that an intact and normally functioning physical human organism could be a completely unconscious zombie is an illusion -- due to the limitations of our understanding. Nevertheless those limitations are real. We do not at present possess the conceptual equipment to understand how subjective and
physical features could both be essential aspects of a single entity or process.
If they are the same state, it must be impossible for the one to exist without the other. And while we may have good empirical reasons to believe that that is true, the understanding of such an impossibility requires that the necessity of the connection between the two become intellectually transparent to us. In the case of conscious states and physiological states, it isn’t just that we don’t see such a
necessary connection: it seems in advance that a necessary connection between two such
different things is unimaginable. They seem logically unrelated.
It is very different from trying to imagine the possibility of a physico-chemical analysis
of embryonic development, before one has the slightest inkling of what the analysis might be.
This does seem to call for some revision in our way of conceiving of mind, or matter, or
both. The difficulty is to do this without denying what is in front of your nose. What we need is not a reductionist or eliminative revision but an expansionist one. By this I mean a conception that will permit subjective points of view to have an objective physical character in themselves.
[query > maybe wrong to call it physical.]
Without such an expanded conception of the mental there is no prospect of overcoming
the explanatory gap.
[query> matter also may need an expanded conception]
The big step is the first one, of expanding the concept of experience by the recognition that what it contains explicitly -- including its behavioral or functional implications -- gives an incomplete account of the nature of experience.
Obviously we cannot will a new conceptual framework into existence. It has to result
from trying to think, in light of the evidence, about the subject we want to understand, and devising concepts that do better justice to it than the ones we have. Considered as a form of revisionism rather than analysis, the physicalist-functionalist movement in philosophy of mind might be thought to have had a similar aim, but I believe it has failed because it is too conservative: It has tried to reinterpret mental concepts so as to make them tractable parts of the framework of physical science. What is needed instead is a search for something more unfamiliar, something which starts from the conceptual unintelligibility, in its present form, of the subjective-objective link.
