Consciousness: Emergent and Real

Summary

This paper argues against an eliminativist view that consciousness and the self are illusions. It presents three counterarguments: first, the same premises used for eliminativism can support naturalistic dualism, where consciousness irreducibly emerges from physical processes. Second, it challenges the claim that science always overrides everyday experience by comparing rival interpretations of quantum mechanics. Third, it contends that calling consciousness an illusion fails to address the hard problem of consciousness, because illusions themselves are phenomenal experiences requiring explanation.

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose three lines of argumentation against Nannini’s eliminativist approach towards consciousness and the Self. First, we argue that the premises he uses to argue for eliminativism can equally well be used to draw a completely different conclusion in favor of naturalistic dualism according to which phenomenal consciousness irreducibly emerges from a physical substrate by virtue of certain psychophysical laws of nature. Nannini proposes that in contrast to dualistic theses which represent the manifest image of the world, eliminativism represents the world’s scientific image just as classical physics and theories of relativity respectively represent the world’s manifest image and scientific image. And if developments in a scientific field reveal a conflict between these two images we should always vote for the scientific image. In our second line of argument, we challenge this claim by comparing two rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, i.e. the Copenhagen and Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics. Finally, we argue that Nannini’s identification of consciousness and the Self as illusions does not shed any light on the hard problem of consciousness since illusions themselves are instances of phenomenal experiences and need to be explained.

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