CONSCIOUSNESS

62 1. Philosophy
*is* the subject in whom phenomenal states are unified. All interactions in the mind have two
sides: they entail both phenomenal experience *and* a physical causal role. Physical causal
closure is maintained because the mind is a non-material entity with physical attributes, whose
structures can act causally on neural processes. The domain of what constitutes “the physical”
must necessarily be expanded. P7
46 Identifying the Most Likely Explanation of Consciousness (Part 1): IBM and The
SCALP Method Colin Morrison (Philosophy, Independent Researcher,
Fife, Scotland, UK, Cupar, Fife United Kingdom)
In this paper I propose that the proliferation of diverse and often incompatible views
on consciousness in the philosophical literature is due largely to the fact that philosophers
tend to be influenced by their intuitions when deciding which position to subscribe to, and
I argue that this situation is extremely unsatisfactory. There are three main reasons for this:
Firstly, it is clear from the history of science that human intuitions are not a reliable guide to
a successful scientific explanation. Popular hypotheses have all too frequently been shown
by experiment to be inadequate, and our explanations for things seem to have become ‘more
and more unreasonable and more and more intuitively far from obvious’ (Richard Feynman
1965). Secondly, our best explanation for the origin of our intuitions, Darwinian evolution,
gives us no reason to think they would make the most likely position on consciousness seem
most likely to us. And thirdly, the private nature of subjective experience makes it unlikely
that the results of experiments will ever be sufficient to rule out all wrong intuitions on this
subject. For those reasons it is argued that whether a particular position on consciousness feels
likely or not ought to be regarded as COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT when assessing whether
or not that position is the most reasonable one. Instead, it is proposed that this assessment be
based purely on fully justifiable estimates of the probability of that position (and of each alternative
hypothesis) being true. Although our inability to justify inductive inference appears
to prevent us from calculating the probability that a hypothesis is absolutely true, I believe I
have successfully developed a method of approximating the probability that a hypothesis is
true given that certain well-supported scientific theories are correct. My proposal (dubbed
‘inference from the best methodology’) requires that for each hypothesis on consciousness a
general method of generating explanations for things be constructed that will not only yield
the hypothesis in question when applied to the facts about consciousness, but will also (when
applied to other facts) provide explanations for many phenomena for which well-supported
scientific explanations are available. The probability that the hypothesis on consciousness
is correct can then be approximated as the relative frequency at which that method, when
applied to phenomena that have a reasonable number of features in common with consciousness,
provides explanations that agree with the scientific explanations of those phenomena.
Consequently, it is argued that the only way to construct a theory of consciousness that could
be justifiably called “its most likely explanation” is by insisting that every aspect of that
theory be determined by (or determinable from) a method of generating explanations that can
be shown to provide ‘scientifically correct’ explanations for sufficiently relevant phenomena
more often than can be achieved by any suitable alternative method. A proposal (dubbed ‘the
SCALP method’ or ‘SCALPEL’) for that most successful method of generating explanations
is developed and justified in this paper, and in a follow-up paper a theory of consciousness
generated by that proposal is obtained. P1
47 The Hard Problem of Concepts IS the Problem of Experience Joel Parthemore
(School of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex
United Kingdom)
In theories of concepts, many attempts have been made to treat concepts as first, abilities,
and only second, representations; as first basic (first-order) and only second, higher-order; as
first private, and only second, public (or vice versa). The reason why none of these strategies
works is, at heart, the same, and the same as the one Chalmer addresses in his ‘95 paper: the
problem of experience and its enduring habit of mixing the seemingly objective (e.g., when
we both measure the length of a certain stick, we get the same result, and we assume that,