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

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 onl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPizhūhishʹhā-yi falsafī-kalāmī : faṣlnāmah-ʼi Dānishgāh-i Qum Vol. 26; no. 1; pp. 20 - 5
Main Author Robert Van Gulick
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published University of Qom 01.04.2024
Subjects
consciousness
physicalism
self-understanding
self-understanding.consciousness
subjective facts
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1735-9791
2538-2500
DOI:10.22091/jptr.2024.10424.3021