Consciousness, subjective facts and physicalism – 50 years since Nagel’s bat.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The existence of subjective facts in the epistemic sense defined by Thomas Nagel’s famous article, “What is like to be a bat?”, might be taken to support an anti-physicalist conclusion. I argue that it does not. The combination of nonreductive physicalism and teleo-pragmatic functionalism is not only consistent with such subjective facts but predicts their existence. The notion that conscious minds are self-understanding autopoietic systems plays a key role in the argument. Global Neuronal Workspace theory is assessed in terms of its potential to answer David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of consciousness. A suggestion is made for augmenting the theory that involves another sense in which facts about conscious experience are subjective. The idea of conscious minds as self-understanding systems again plays an important role.