Consciousness: Emergent and Real
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia December 28, 2015 Reza Maleeh, Achim Stephan
This paper presents three arguments against Nannini's eliminativist view that consciousness and the Self are illusions. First, the same premises Nannini uses for eliminativism can instead support naturalistic dualism, where phenomenal consciousness irreducibly emerges from physical processes via psychophysical laws. Second, the paper challenges Nannini's claim that science's image should always override the manifest image, using a comparison between Copenhagen and Bohmian interpretations of quantum mechanics to show scientific images can conflict. Third, identifying consciousness as an illusion fails to address the hard problem, because illusions themselves are phenomenal experiences requiring explanation.