ABSTRACT
The problems of providing physicalist explanations of the nature and generation of states of consciousness seem so perplexing that some radical speculation might be in order. The views of David Chalmers provide a springboard into deep and dark speculative currents. Chalmers espouses a kind of dualism, in which consciousness figures as an absolutely fundamental feature of the world, essentially linked to information as well as to the functional architecture of the brain (or other possible physical realizations of consciousness). All of these ideas lead to riddles. How can a brute or fundamental feature of the world appear only when associated with exceptionally complex physical structures, such as the brain? No other fundamental feature of the world (mass, energy, charge, etc.) has such a peculiar property. Also, how can a fundamental feature link to physical structure as functionally described? To speak in metaphysical metaphor, surely the world doesn’t know anything about functional architecture or ‘levels’ of functional descriptions. Perhaps it would be better to accept that a fundamental feature of the world should appear at the simplest structural levels. This leads one to consider the old view that everything has a mental aspect – panpsychism. Many objections can be raised against this strange and implausible view. Responses to these objections seem possible, if we increase the speculative content of the view by drawing on certain ideas from quantum physics, especially ideas about the nature of information and ideas about how quantum systems can form distinctive ‘wholes’, irreducible to the parts which appear to constitute them. Strangely, there are a variety of possible links between the quantum and the mind, and a kind of panpsychism that connects to them in interesting ways. But if such speculative exercises are ultimately unsatisfactory, we must again consider the generation problem, and what it is trying to tell us about the place of consciousness in the natural world.
