Consciousness, subjective facts and physicalism – 50 years since Nagel’s bat.
Pizhūhish/hā-yi Falsafī- Kalāmī August 6, 2024 Robert van Gulick
Subjective facts about conscious experience—the 'what it is like' aspect—do not refute physicalism. A combination of nonreductive physicalism and teleo-pragmatic functionalism not only accommodates such facts but predicts them. Conscious minds are self-understanding autopoietic systems, a view that helps explain subjective experience. Global Neuronal Workspace theory is evaluated for its ability to address the Hard Problem of consciousness, and an augmentation involving another sense of subjective facts is proposed, again drawing on the idea of conscious minds as self-understanding systems.