Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

I carefully delineate what the hard problem of consciousness is by first distinguishing different conceptions one may have of it. According to the conception I will advocate,  the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining an arbitrarily picked token (or APT) phenomenal state in terms of that which is not phenomenally conscious. With this in place, I then argue that the hard problem hardly matters. For if one’s goal is to explain phenomenal consciousness, the hard problem need not necessarily be solved in order to do so. And if one’s goal is to defeat physicalism, virtually every theory of mind shares physicalism’s fate when it comes to the hard problem.