1 The Origin of Phenomenal Consciousness: On the Art of the Hard Problem Darren Hutchinson

Abstract: In this essay, I perform an aesthetic analysis of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness, redescribing this intuition as the result of a creative activity affirming of the uniqueness and value of human engagements with the world rather than the result of an activity of self-knowing through which phenomenal awareness becomes aware of itself. During this analysis, I analogize the construction of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness to the construction of religious intuitions for sophisticated believers and the construction of aesthetic intuitions for sophisticated aesthetes. I find accounts of the mistake of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness by authors such as Dennett are overly reductive and simplistic, even though I agree that phenomenal consciousness is a created illusion rather than a natural kind. The intuition of phenomenal consciousness is a sophisticated formation which testifies to the commitment of certain naturalistically inclined theorists to the inestimable value of private experience.

I. Introduction Sometimes, progress can be made in philosophy through straightforward arguments which derive conclusions from largely shared premises. In the case of phenomenal consciousness, however, there have arisen debates where such progress cannot be made. There are those who take phenomenal consciousness to contain reference to a phenomenon even clearer than the nose on ones face, if only because it would be only through phenomenal consciousness that one would gain awareness of the presence of ones nose. There are others who consider this phrase to be a grammatical superstition, a mistake, an empty vessel, preferring to replace it with discussion of a host of other recognitional faculties which make no appeal to a site of interior presence or internal awareness or any other theatrical proscenium of mental presentation. In this essay, I largely take the side of those in the second group, joining company with such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Daniel Dennett. But like these philosophers, at least in their best moments, I do not think those who take phenomenal consciousness as a self-evident phenomenon can be refuted through some type of logical demonstration of the invalidity of their positions. Rather, I think the best tack to take in the face of this impasse in to attempt a creative redescription of the problem, utilizing new metaphors,

2 analogies, and concepts to re-situate the discussion. I was inspired to take the particular approach in this essay by a discussion of solipsism undertaken by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. There, in sections 398401, Wittgenstein first attempts to convince himself that solipsism (formulated as a discussion about the visual room) is an incoherent grammatical formulation, an erroneous attempt to represent that which could not possibly be represented. But in characteristic fashion, he objects to his own conclusion: But my expression You have made a grammatical movement is not unobjectionable. Above all, you have found a new conception. As if you had invented a new way of painting; or, again, a new metre, or a new kind of song.i This implies that an implausible position such as solipsism is not merely an incoherent argumentative position but rather a sort of artwork ensconced in the text of philosophy, a vehicle for expressing deep experiences and profound commitments. In what follows, I take this tack concerning the problem of phenomenal consciousness, attempting to redescribe the expressions of its intuitive self-evidence as leaps of aesthetic imagination rather than as discoveries of weird empirical objects. In so doing, although I largely agree with the therapeutic/dissolutional tactics of Wittgenstein/Rorty/Dennett, I also object to their largely dismissive redescriptive approaches. Even though I believe the task of solving the Hard Problem of consciousness is hopeless, because there is no such problem other than one which is created through certain metaphors and tropes in the text of philosophy, I think that those who attempt to address this problem are curating a beautiful aesthetic architecture, even though they would be horrified to admit that this is all that their carefully cultivated arguments amount to. As a skeptic of attempts to represent simples in the (post-)ontological complexity of the world, I think authors such as Nagel, Jackson, and Chalmers are wasting their time, as well as the time of others through perpetuating pointless dialectical debates. As an appreciator of the human condition, however, I think that the life of the mind gives its own rewards and that one may find beauty in strangely logical places. II. Hard Problems and Hard Skeptics Many philosophers of mind who attempt to confront the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness believe that one should need no arguments to establish its existence. David Chalmers: Consciousness is startlingly intense. It is the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us.ii Ned Block: You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, 'If you got to ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.' iii Block's quip is put forward only half in jest because proponents of the hard problem do in fact offer answers to skeptics, but still they believe that Hard Skeptics, those who want to eliminate the concept of phenomenal consciousness and thereby the hard problem altogether) are defending an unreasonable position.iv Hard Theorists such as Chalmers admit that there is not a plethora of evidence for the existence of phenomenal consciousness; it is revealed only because of our own acquaintance with it. But sometimes, only one bit of evidence is enough. Our direct acquaintance with the one world that we live in is enough to make any doubters appear irrational. The arguments presented for phenomenal consciousness include the subjective argument derived from Thomas Nagel's What it is like to be a bat? (though having its genesis at least as far back as Descartes in its most general form: immediate basic self-awareness), the conceivability argument involving the logical possibility of conscious-free zombies which are

3 physically identical with us (also stemming back to Descartes' worries that his neighbors might be automatons, but developed further by Block, Chalmers,and others), the knowledge argument developed by Frank Jackson, and the argument from epistemic asymmetry (I know myself not only better but also at a different epistemic level than all materially existing things, also obviously derived from Descartes).v Although each of these arguments has its own special features, they all share a common intuition: that for the conscious person, there is a special, qualitative experience of herself which is self-evident and indefeasible (for the rational person). In what follows, I will address these arguments to a limited extent, but the major focus of this essay is to examine the intuition behind the arguments. As Chalmers admits, the arguments proceed from this intuition:
The main intuition at work here is that there is something to be explained some phenomenon associated with first-person experience that presents a problem not presented by observation of cognition from the third-person point of view. . . The intuition at work here is the very raison d'etre of the problem of consciousness. The only consistent way to get around the intuitions is to deny the problem and the phenomenon altogether. vi

What Chalmers should have said is that the only way to get around the problem and the phenomenon is to deny the intuitions altogether. Intuitions that there are problems and phenomena are not the same as those problems and phenomena themselves. Of course, by putting intuition in scare-quotes, Chalmers is indicating that he does not really think intuitions are involved but rather undeniable truths. As a politeness to Hard Skeptics, he calls the selfevidence of consciousness an intuition but he must believe (by force of logic) that such consciousness (as a foundation of awareness of any intuition) is even more basic than any intuition could be. In fact, philosophers such as Searle, Nagel, Chalmers, and Block stand with slack-jawed incredulity when Hard Skeptics such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Daniel Dennett proclaim they have reduced the concept of phenomenal consciousness to a pile of ashes (grammatical illusions, misplaced metaphors, deluded beliefs). None of these Hard Skeptics deny that the word 'consciousness' has an application in the vague dimensions of ordinary usage, but they believe that the designation should employed only in cases where one is discriminating being awake from being asleep, summarizing the reportable activity of the brain preceding an outburst such as My God, that's the blue tie I was looking for! or talking about our moral selfworth as opposed to the sticks and stones of the world. They do not think consciousness names either a natural kind or a special internal state of awareness which is purely and qualitatively subjective. Thus, they avoid the hard problem by refusing to use the word consciousness in any way which hooks it up to the intuition from which the hard problem germinates. But for Hard Theorists, this is not at all convincing. They are willing to cede that a large portion of what is called consciousness by the psychologist has nothing to do with phenomenal, qualitative, subjective, self-presence: much of it involves the brain's access to its own internal states (and states of the body) which bypasses any mode of phenomenal projection. But they specifically invent technical phrases like phenomenal consciousness as opposed to access consciousness and introspection as opposed to extrospection in order to indicate that their

4 critics circumvent their problem rather than dissolving it. These debates have the form of the ball is in your court. Phenomenal consciousness cannot be accounted for in our current naturalistic understanding of the world, and it would be easier to dissolve the problem it poses than solve it, so the Hard Skeptic hits the intuition over the net and says there's no need to be afraid of ghosts in the machine any longer. The Hard Theorist hits it back over, both with their set of arguments and with the damning claim that something as phenomenologically powerful and evident as phenomenal consciousness could not be simply the result of an error or mistaken belief. In this essay, I move into the court with the Hard Skeptics (Chalmers calls them Type A materialists, but many who deny phenomenal consciousness rely on ordinary language therapy or pragmatic redescription and are not materialists at all in Chalmers' sense of the term: they metaphilosophically refuse to play the game of metaphysical ontology) and hit the ball back.vii But before doing so, I want to acknowledge the power and impressiveness of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness more than the Hard Theorists' usual critics do. When I sit at this desk and say I am here and now conscious of sitting here and writing this, then even given my fundamental rejection of the representational accuracy of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness, I can genuinely say that my experience is not merely a grammatical joke nor is it simple sleight of hand. There is something which it is like to experience phenomenal consciousness, and more or less, I can bring myself to experience it, here and now. If phenomenal consciousness (this field of awareness, these glancing qualia-sparkles) is a sort of illusion, I will shortly show, it is not a simple illusion. Daniel Dennett does not think the neural cascades which are attributed with producing consciousness are simple, but he does think the retrospective user-illusion that this entire process has produced a self-aware moment of phenomenal insight is simply the results of errors of arithmetic, where all the small problems of brain-world and brain-brain interaction are turned into one big problem through an ignorance and oversight which he seeks to address.viii Rorty thought that the problems surrounding phenomenal consciousness arise when one mistakenly takes ocular and mirroring metaphors too seriously.ix But there are illusions which are not simply errors or grammatical mistakes: in fact, even to call them illusions hardly does them justice. I am thinking here of nothing other than works of art, and the claim I will eventually defend is that the intuition of phenomenal consciousness is a work of art which inhabits the brain of the Hard Theorist and which can also inhabit mine. But before I demonstrate this through doing a bit of linguistic analysis (though more in the tradition of Austin and Cavell than that of Russell and Ayer), I first wish to indicate why works of art such as paintings or movies or plays (all of which share analogies with the imagination of phenomenal space) are not mere illusions or errors, except to the most aberrant spectators. III. The Aesthetic/Religious Stance Suppose there is a play which involves a murder. The main character pulls out a gun and shoots another just before the first intermission. After this happens, one person in the audience screams out, My God! She just shot that man! Somebody get the police! and then runs out of the theater. In this case, we'll call it the case of the fooled spectator, this spectator was under the illusion that the play was real and had a mistaken belief about what happened. But no one else in the audience was so affected. Yet (we can suppose that it was a good play), following the

5 last act, many of the people in the audience were crying. No one went down to the stage, however, to comfort the characters. What is the difference between any given normal member of the audience and the fooled spectator? First, it must be noted that the concept of willing suspension of disbelief in the engagement with the work of dramatic art is malformed. For the normal member of the audience, disbelief was never suspended, it was there all the time; otherwise, she would have left the theater with the fooled spectator. The normal member was invested in the play, despite not believing in its reality, and this investment was not only a result of the aesthetic brilliance of the production but also of a history of being taught to be invested in works of art through emotional and intellectual involvement. The fooled spectator, it turns out, was also invested, but he was not invested in the play. He was invested in the events which were taking place, fooled into thinking they were occurrences in a normal context, as if he were a voyeur watching someone in their home ala Hitchcock's Rear Window, and although such investments are also learned, they are learned as a part of growing up in social environments with others, largely independent of what we would call an aesthetic context. (Learning to appreciate aesthetic contexts are so much a part of our normal life that we would have to come up with an extraordinary (timetravel) or sad (mental-illness) story to explain why the fooled spectator was so fooled.) Aesthetic appreciation of fictional presentations neither takes place through illusions of reality nor through cultivating belief but rather through creating a fictional world that the audience understands as such and thereby attributes a different sort of meaning than the meaning given in everyday social circumstances. A similar situation: a couple stands before a photo-realistic painting of Paris. One, the fooled spectator, says That's so beautiful! Can we go there? The other, the normal member, says Sure, I'd love to go someday. The fooled spectator: Why not now? and he takes the confused normal members hand and pulls her into a collision with the painted surface and they are immediately arrested by the guards. In this case as well, even though the normal member recognized the scene as Paris, she took it as an aesthetic depiction of Paris, she did not confuse it with the thing itself. Despite postmodern musings about the blending of fiction and reality (which only happens in fiction or theory so abstruse it doubles as fiction), no one makes such mistakes who does not have either cognitive or cultural deficits. In this case as well, the normal member did not just immediately appreciate the beauty of the painting as a painting, perhaps through allowing the free play of her imagination to take her beyond the confines of concepts. Rather, she drew upon an entire, complicated pragmatic history which extended from seeing and producing line drawings in childhood through using illustration in written books to help her visualize strange locations through the art history courses she took at Stanford up to the fateful moment in the museum (and her history allows us also to see the deficits of the fooled spectator, once again). There is a logic to both of these situations I wish to make explicit before proceeding to the main topic: explaining how the artwork of phenomenal consciousness is produced and appreciated. In both cases, the normal member goes through an implicit tripartite process: A. She stands in the space of ordinary experience. B. She goes into a state of reduction. C. She enters into a state of investment. Allow me to explain each. The space of ordinary experience is the heterogeneous cloud of perceptions, recognitions, recollections, interpretations, emotional responses, and associations through which we are pragmatically involved with the world around

6 us. Within this space, we recognize what things are in their tangible existences, discerning their relevance and danger and advantages for us. The space of ordinary experience is the practical and representational and normative and narrative and affective space of what we call everyday human life. The state of reduction is a special modification of ordinary experience that happens only in certain aesthetic environments, a learned response which is triggered by certain stimuli. In a state of reduction, we hold that what we are recognizing is not real or that it is merely an illusion but still identify what it is supposed to be about, its representational content, if you like. Only cognitively complex beings can go into states of reduction. Complex culture is the precondition for our capacity to enter into such states quickly and often. Certainly, the capacity for states of reduction involves a variety of sub-capacities, including the ability to produce and interpret abstract representations (such as cave painting), the ability to mimic the activities of others, and the ability to lie and detect lies. But in fully cultured human beings, these capacities come together to allow us to see illusions as illusions. Modern Ipad carrying, movie watching humans enter into these states more and more often, as we are bombarded by an endless array of images which require us to recognize their context and respond to them appropriately (We do not reach out to grab an apple presented on the Ipad screen, despite its touch sensitive technology). Such states are also perhaps the progenitors of philosophy itself, since they allow one to see the world as an illusion the Apollonian shining of tragic space igniting the sensible fires of Plato's cave. All the reductions of the world to the sensible or to the representational or to the phenomenological are actually not primitive abilities but rather cultivated aesthetic capacities. These capacities allow for a gestalt shift where the things of the world become redescribed in terms of a representational field, their reality left to either be denied in postmodern exaltations of the endlessness of simulacra or affirmed through intellectual accounts of causal relations, giving rise to positions of realism. But such capacities are not enough for artworks to appear. Artworks are not just illusions recognized as such, but rather recognized illusions which are given special meaning. This meaning is given through a complex concatenation of emotional responses, symbolic recognitions, elicited memories, imagined circumstances, empathetic projections, and intellectual theorizations (thus it is meaning in a more classical sense, not merely meaning as propositional content). Artistic appreciation is a full brain activity, and there is no aesthetic center or specific aesthetic meaning locus in the brain. States of investment happens only when a person is in a highly sophisticated culture acquires the capacity to work along with the illusions with which one is presented and to attach to these illusions profound importance for oneself, one's community, and perhaps for human life in general. Of course, there is included in ordinary experience more or less the same responses (affective, interpretive, recollective), but in states of investment, these responses are redeployed in a modified way. I may grieve over the death of a character, but I will not check the obituaries or try to find the grave. If one of my friends died, I would find no meaning in his death, but if a character dies, I always look for meaning; even if it is the meaning there is no meaning to death. Importantly, the responses which come forth in states of investment are a positive configuration of semantically imbued feelings and syntactic structures and images. When we become invested in an artwork, we become unintentional artists ourselves, automatically producing an aesthetic response space which allows us to encounter the significance of the work. The constellation of responses including propositions, waves of feeling, recalled associations,

7 and creative questions is not a passive reflection of the content of the artwork; rather, it as a positive, real set of events in the world, every bit as real as the pigment in the painting and the celluloid of the film, even though this constellation may only emerge hidden in the secure space of a private brain. Thus, we are able to engage in public or private aesthetic discourse about what we have experienced and relate the artwork to our broader lives through transferring our produced responses to other contexts. Because of this production of a positive, real configuration, what I learn from a work of fiction can then be used (for instance) in a relationship to understand the complex conflicts which arise therein. Also importantly, states of investment are inflected by the illusion they confront, often having the air of depth or transcendence which is not found in usual life. Sophisticated religious believers, for instance, people who know that there is no possible representation of God and that there never were any miracles and there is no proof of God's existence, but yet who find profound meaning in cathedrals, religious art, and sacred texts, probably encounter the depth of meaning they do in such circumstances because they know that none of this is meaningful or has true representational content in a normal sense, yet find a sort of transfigured meaning, producing and undergoing hopes and emotions and images which are more uncanny than any in their usual life. On this interpretation sophisticated religious belief is a sort of aesthetics, or aesthetics is a special sort of sophisticated religious belief. Such beliefs can be contrasted with the unsophisticated stance often found in literalist religious fundamentalism. Like the fooled spectator in the aesthetic context, the unsophisticated religious believer fails to understand the extraordinary context of religious belief. Such a believer may be prone to make a number of errors, at least when making claims about the validity of his or her beliefs in a critical forum. These errors open such religious practitioners to easy critique from the scientifically minded, including the new atheists such as Dennett and Dawkins. From the naturalist and psychologically adept standpoint of someone such as Dennett, for instance, it can be facilely indicated that the belief in an intelligently designed universe illicitly deploys the design stance, the belief that a personal being controls nature illicitly deploys the intentional stance, the belief that there are supernatural moral laws illicitly deploys the normative stance and the belief in miracles allows dogmatic credulity to circumvent the physical stance.x To put it straightforwardly, like the fooled spectator, the unsophisticated believer mistakes the play of religion (its narrative, its images, its messages, its projected hopes, its deep feelings) for either a description of the natural world or even the natural world itself (believing the Holy Spirit to actually be present in the room, for instance) and thus uses our hard-won capacities for survival in the natural world to the end of self-endangering self-delusion. The sophisticated believer, on the other hand, does none of these things and thus avoids all of these critiques. The new atheists have practically nothing to say to such believers. The sophisticated believer is a naturalist, holding that only physical beings and historical situations occur in the world. In fact, for the sophisticated Christian, naturalism is essential to higher Christian experience. A truly faithful relation to God is possible only if the images of religious belief are reduced to illusions and seen as such through the deployment of a rational stance. If one does not do this, the sophisticated believer holds, then one is fetishistically attached to supernatural images of the divine, essentially engaging in a form of idol worship.xi The only true path to God is to experience all presentations of His Divinity as mere illusions, but then

8 believing in Him anyway, through affirming a meaning within the physical world which transcends it, encountering the fullness of a higher power in the midst of one's immanent finitude. After having been in the universal, subjecting all religious images and symbols and icons to critique, one then revalues these images, symbols, and icons through immediate investments in their value, finding within them a relation to an object of ultimate concern. Like the investments of the aesthetic appreciator, these religious investments cannot be diagnosed as errors or explained away Imagine if someone were standing in front of a beautiful painting admiring the beauty of the painted leaves, and a skeptic approached and said you do know that's not real, don't you? You're misusing the pattern detectors evolution designed for you. Where would the error lie in such an engagement? When the sophisticated believer holds that she feels a higher calling to help her fellow human beings, the skeptic would be just as misguided to point out our brains were not really designed to implement the myth of divine altruism, since what the sophisticated believer is doing is participating the creation of a new possibility for human beings, not denying the biological creatures we are and not grounding her practice through positing metaphysical ghosts. IV. What it is like to be a philosopher? My position regarding the intuition of phenomenal consciousness can now be put in a very succinct form given the stage setting presented so far. The Hard theorist intuits phenomenal consciousness in a very special way. This intuition does not come from understanding consciousness in a normal way (from ordinary experience). Rather, it involves the Hard Theorist's recognition that consciousness falls outside the scope of naturalism as we currently understand that term, treating it as a weird aesthetic artifact, retrieving images associated with first person experience as aesthetic icons in the presentation of its illusion, and then affirming its reality as illusion in a higher level of investment. My main contention in this essay is that Hard Theorists are not really tough minded but rather tender minded, and that they thus cultivate an appreciative aesthetic stance analogous to sophisticated, cultured aesthetes and intellectual, devout religious believers. Thus, the intuition of phenomenal consciousness is not an error. Rather, it is an artwork of analytic philosophy, a piece of devout scripture dedicated to the uniqueness of the human condition, and perhaps even the condition of our fellow complex bestial inhabitants of the world. For instance, Thomas Nagel's famous essay What it is like to be a bat? displays an odd characteristic for an essay in analytic philosophy, especially one published in the prestigious Philosophical Review: (not differently from the present essay) it contains no real arguments, only imaginative explorations, suggestions, and appeals to empathy. The essay makes a number of suggestions, which I will trace here to display their aesthetic logic: 1. The proclamation that the mind-body problem, when it includes the problem of consciousness, has neither been solved nor adequately addressed in the history of philosophy, particularly by reductive, physicalist analyses. 2. The definition of conscious in terms of what it is like to be something, which includes phrases such as the Sartrean (tre)-pour soi, the subjective character of experience, and the unimaginability of alien points of view. 3. The proclamation that sophisticated physicalist theories involving functional and causal

9 roles of psychological states do not touch the phenomenon of consciousness. 4. The connection of the problem of consciousness with the problem of phenomenological properties (qualia), one which holds that physical theory does not explain the phenomenal projections of physical objects. 5. The attempted imagination of a bat perspective, which has two main components, first the suggestion that there is a subjective space for bats that we cannot understand because of their alien structure, senses and way of being, and second a continued re-emphasis that we understand our own case intimately. We are invited to infer that the bat experiences its own case intimately as well, even if it can understand neither itself nor us in conceptual terms. 6. The suggestion that there are facts beyond the reach of current human concepts, just as we possess concepts beyond the reach of earlier human beings. 7. The expression of sympathy with reductionism, only not in this case, since the phenomenon in question exceeds reduction, because of the difference between the third-person and the first-person. 8. The insinuation that since the appearance of consciousness cannot be reduced to a physical reality, then it is a mystery: the appearance of consciousness is real as appearance, nonidentifiable with any higher reality which we can discern. 9. The acknowledgment that this does not mean that physicalism is false (that there are metaphysical substances), but only that physicalism as we currently understand it is not up to the task of the mystery, and may never be: there may be things forever beyond human comprehension: consciousness is like a black box which we have no access to beyond its surface. 10. The phenomenological suggestion that we should develop an objective language of consciousness which preserves its irreducibility, yet which allows us to communicate and understand alien experiences. Though there are a hundred more subtle suggestions in every paragraph of Nagel's deft essay, all of them share the form of the above. In no case is there ever an argument for consciousness or evidence presented beyond that which the reader is supposed to produce for herself, in characteristic Cartesian style, through reanimating the syntax which Nagel provides, entering into a state of investment for herself. Through the above list, the general structure of the rhetorical strategy becomes evident: a) The frame of physicalism/naturalism is presented as a lens through which all phenomena are viewed. b) Phrases such as pour-soi and what it is to be like and subjective character of experience are presented and shown to have no meaning within the language of current physicalism. c) These phrases are then merely asserted to have a higher meaning than the statements of physicalism, since they provide the point of view through which any physicalism could be stated or understood as a human practice. d) The phrases are then adorned with imaginations of the alien, appeals to mystery and incomprehensibility, admissions of finitude, and avowals of deep realities beyond our knowledge. e) One is then warned that these phrases (and the experiences they gesture towards) have relevance in human life and should not be extinguished.

10 I am here going to engage in my own imagined scenario: what it is like to be a nonphilosopher. Even though I cannot fully understand this perspective (Pre-disciplinary naivet cannot be reclaimed), I can attempt to imagine what happens when such a person would encounter Nagel's essay. First, as a non-philosopher, I would not use the word consciousness very often, and would not use it to indicate a type or natural kind, as Nagel does. (The ordinary experience of the non-philosopher would involve using a mentalistic vocabulary without having theoretical commitments tied to that vocabulary.) But Nagel's essay would introduce me to the idea that, from the perspective of the natural sciences as we know them, consciousness is something unreal: I would thereby be initiated into philosophy, brought to be able to operate with the appearance/reality distinction inflected into the phenomenological/physical distinction. While so structuring my discriminatory language, Nagel's essay would surround the term consciousness with a unique frame of demarcating terms such as quality, pour-soi, and subjectivity which indicate its illusory character in relation to the physical sciences, while associating with the intimate reality of the personal. In the language provided in the last section, I would be moved from ordinary experience to a state of reduction, brought to understand consciousness as a special aesthetically appearing object and also taught to attend to it as itself rather than focusing on the representational directionality contained therein. Next, the essay, through a variety of appeals to empathy and profundity and through imaginative scenes and illustration and through declarations of its essential role in human life, would work to bring me into a state of investment, profoundly involved with the significance and deeper reality of the real illusion to which I have been introduced. Thereby I as a new-philosopher would come to affirm the significance of this entire constellation of associations and values and imaginative engagements as consciousness, a uniquely given, precious interiority which stands at the basis of our intelligent lives. After going through these steps as an initiate (or repeating them as an appreciator), I here maintain, that the invested individual really has an experience of phenomenal consciousness. What it means to experience phenomenal consciousness is to be invested in the affects, recollections, imagination, empathy, etc. involved in its presentation. After one is so invested, then phenomenal consciousness is real in human life (thus one can drop the scare quotes), as real as the artwork is to the aesthete and as real as God is to the sophisticated Christian. All it means to intuit phenomenal consciousness as something real is to regard the imagined cathedral of its presentation as an uncircumventable and irreducible part of human life. After acquiring an understanding of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness, our initiate Hard Theorist is then able to enter into profound states of conscious self-awareness as easily as the aesthete can regard the sky as a beautiful painting or the sophisticated believer can see the force of the sea as the upsurge of the power of God. In order to advance my redescription further, I will here address the most obvious objection: Your entire essay thus far does not refute the reality of phenomenal consciousness. In fact, it confirms it, since exactly what it means to have ordinary experience is to be an aware being in the natural world, what it means to enter into a state of reduction is to be (phenomenally) conscious of illusion as illusion (whether the illusion of art, God, or consciousness), and of course what it means to be in a state of investment is to consciously affirm the reality of consciousness, proving its reality in a statement of epistemological self-

11 sovereignty. Before responding to this seemingly profound objection (that I prove what I seek to disprove), first I will note that this form of objection resembles one where the skeptic is told that she actually confirms the existence of God through doubting Him, since the meaning of His Name confirms the reality of his power, or at least because the divine reason which one uses in such an argument attests to a spiritual infinity, even when that infinity is illicitly denied through the use of reason. But unlike the theological skeptic in such a case, I am not denying the existence of the phenomenon I am analyzing. Ordinary experience, states of reduction, and states of investment are ontologically neutral in regard to the existence or non-existence of consciousness as a natural ontological kind. For all I know, the above three conditions may involve only affects, recollections, images, and the rest as activated neural states which cause the report My God! The darkness appearing in the painting shows the reality of suffering in human life! and which involve no other special ontological events outside of the physical realm. Or, perhaps such states really carry with them a ghostly aura of subjectivity which is ineliminable (even though I can make no present sense of that phrase). But the important part of the above argument is that nothing epistemological happens in the movement from state to state: no new knowledge is gained about the nature of reality; the states involve a transformation of the spectator rather than an access to unknown truth. When, for instance, the sophisticated believer affirms the reality of God despite accepting naturalism fully, she does not thereby know that God exists. Rather, she accepts his existence as nothing other than all the images and deeds and narrative and hopes which are instantiated in her life: the infinite God becomes finite, sent to earth as the Son of God who is also a son of man. When asked if all her investments represent some truly transcendent being, the truly sophisticated Christian would say that the questioner does not understand the sophisticated in sophisticated Christian. Such a Christian bypasses supernaturalist critiques by making a paradoxical movement of self-transformation whereby she withdraws herself from making knowledge claims. (and notice here that even if God really exists and even if He presents Himself to the believer immediately in a moment of psychological fullness, she a) does not use her words to indicate His presence but rather His value in her life; b) cannot communicate to others the reality of His presence but rather only report on the associative constellation associated with her experience; and c) has no way of even telling herself that God is real other than through the production of such a constellation, which would at that point become indistinguishable from her experience of the intuition of His reality. Likewise, what the Hard Theorist is really doing under the above description is affirming the reality of phenomenal consciousness through being invested in the significance of that word, along with the significance of words such subjectivity, pour-soi, interior access, and all the rest, and along with the deep feelings, the narratives, and the imagined scenarios of the specialness of perspective. The oft-used quote from Wittgenstein: You're using language so I have to talk about language is especially relevant here. On the one hand, linguistic idealism (where language only refers to itself and not to items in the external world) is an implausible position. It only needs be pointed out that the language one is using to make such a claim is something real, already outside of its internal designations. When philosophers investigate language as it is used in the real world, they perform a sort of linguistic doubling where they use a mixture of

12 ordinary and theoretical language to describe language as a sort of natural object and relate it to other natural objects. (How and why these relations take place is the subject matter of the philosophy of language). So it is as easy in philosophy of language to talk about a word as a natural object as a tiger and vice versa. A tiger is not just a collection of tiger descriptions but rather something in the external world that I refer to through using the meta-language which is also used to refer to orange, striped, animal, and ferocious. But as any Hard Theorist will tell you, this doubling strategy (where one uses an unanalyzed theoretical language in order to indicate articles of natural language beside a realworld ontology) does not work with consciousness, since consciousness is exactly that sort of thing which would not appear from a third-person perspective within such a real-world ontology. When I as a theorist attempt to analyze the statements of a Hard Theorist, the only thing I can associate them with is recollections, images, etc. which I can understand as (either reducible to or at least non-reductively identical to) the inner states of a private brain (or as functional icons in a set of social relations), following the normal strategy. But the Hard Theorist wants to use them to indicate something essentially beyond this doubled stance, something I am supposed to gain through empathy and self-evidence rather than through acts of correlation. Such a situation is not entirely unlike the distinction between the ethical/religious and the aesthetic which might be deployed by a sophisticated believer in relation to my analyses. Such a believer might say When you discuss religious belief as the affirmation of a set of images, feelings, etc. you only talk about religion from the outside, intellectually, as it were. You do not really feel the meaning of the terms; God cannot be reduced to an associative constellation. But the only thing this means is that the believer refuses, as an act of devotion, to enter into the meta-language. As a naturalist, she knows she can give no other meaning to her words in a public context and can only hope that I share similar affirmations and will be able to re-animate her syntax in my own affirmations, knowing what she means. In order to understand her evidence, I will have to change my life. Similarly, attestations of the direct evidence of phenomenal consciousness get drawn into the whirlpool of the movement in states of investment, so when asked if consciousness really exists, then the Hard Theorist will of course profess that she doesn't really know what consciousness is (whether it is some unknown physical state or even possibly a metaphysical sort of being or something which we as yet have no words forprecisely acknowledging that it is unanalyzable and practically if not totally meaningless in the physical vocabulary of today) but yet it is real as consciousness, as the interior perspective, as quality instead of quantity, as what it feels like to be me, etc, and all of the previous phrases and gestures and invocations and appeals will be called all the evidence one needs. But these phrases are appeals to empathy, invitations to join a ritualistic practice, and if I refuse, then they will only appear as an aesthetic litany. Like expressions of religious or aesthetic significance, expressions of the reality and value of phenomenal consciousness are trivially irreducible. No paraphrase into physicalistic language will disclose the devotion to God which is in the saint's heart: even if there were a molecular mapping of the brain and a correlation of all its processes with the semantic vocabulary of everyday life, the neuropsychologist looking at the data would be clueless about the role of God in the individual's life. She would be clueless, that is, unless she also had a

13 similar relation to God. In that case, she would then interpret the neural correlations just as one Christian would interpret another's words through empathetic identification. Similarly, the person running the FMRI would in no way be able to discern the specialness of the internal perspective of subjectivity from the outputted brain-readings, unless she interpreted those readings the same way she would interpret the words of an individual in pain and asking for help, perhaps through knowing what it is like through having been there. (But even then she would not utilize phrases such as the specialness of the internal perspective of subjectivity unless she had already been initiated into the Hard Theorist's vocabulary.) These responsive capacities in the respective cases do not prove that God is real because the other understands Him too or prove that consciousness is real because I can empathize with you on the basis of my own experience but rather that (in both cases) the investigator and the investigated share a common language and a common set of practices. Let me suppose here that phenomenal consciousness really does exist. Suppose that when I stare at my hand, an immediate, introspective natural kind comes into being which irreducibly exudes from the physical states of my body. Even if this is the case, it doesn't matter, since the only thing I will be able to communicate to the other will be my investment in the expression of phenomenal consciousness and hope they will share an investment too. Even if the sophisticated brain-scanner is hooked up to me, how will the reader be able to tell the difference between a) the occurrence of activity correlated with phenomenal consciousness when I report on it; and b) the occurrence of the activation states of reduction and investment which my brain produces while I do what I am told, attending to my consciousness?xii In a normal case, if I say I am hurting, the other will (hopefully) respond to my being in pain and will not respond to my consciousness of pain. In this exceptional case, where both I and my respondent stand within states of reduction, when I say you know what this really is, don't you, I hope that my respondent will show sympathy with my investments, and that is all I can hope. I of course cannot hope that my respondent will know my consciousness as it is from an external standpoint. So when I utter my words, they will never have the function of a self-representation. They can only have the function of a special, intellectual appeal for community in a language of subjective self-expression. V. The Argumentative Poetry of Phenomenal Consciousness Another Objection, also an obvious one: There is a strong disanalogy between Romantic aesthetes/sophisticated believers and Hard Theorists. The former do not attempt to prove that beauty/aesthetic significance or the love and grace of God exists; rather, they witness to the presence of these things in their lives without arguments, producing poetic criticism and good deeds rather than arguments. Hard Theorists, in stark contrast, even if all they end up doing is producing expressions of investment, are not intending only to do that. They really believe that there is an actual phenomenon which is in danger of being neglected or explained away by the reductive enterprise and they attempt to persuade the Hard skeptics of their position rationally, through sound argumentation. Answer: I am not sure if the affirmation of phenomenal consciousness counts as a good deed or if the proponents of phenomenal consciousness are actually any more caring and empathetic in relation to their fellow creatures than others, but the arguments which the Hard Theorists attempt are really logically adorned pieces of poetic criticism, if by argument one

14 means a structure whose premises and conclusions can be checked for their truth. The poetic criticism of theologians, after all, is itself (if it is good) logically structured and follows within the inner inferential world of attributed divine meaning, so there are as many arguments in Kierkegaard and Tillich as there are in Quine if inferential consistency is all that is required for an argument. In terms of what most scientifically-minded persons consider as arguments these days, however, there is indeed something essential to their inclusion of the third-person perspective in order for them to be attributed such a laudable designation (and it is precisely these persons the Hard Theorists hope to convince). Chalmers admits that the intuitions contained in the arguments concerning phenomenal consciousness are just thatintuitionsnot empirically validated conclusions, but he goes on to say that these intuition are plain and natural and that it is forced to deny them.xiii But plainness and naturalness and undeniability are words which indicate investment in an associative constellation; they do not help to buttress this constellation against skeptical attack. Chalmers also attempts to defend his own arguments by saying that if the intuitions are accepted, then his arguments follow logically, but this could be said for any self-consistent internal elaboration of an ontology, whether it involves God, or unicorns, or alien dimensions. Internal consistency is usually a criterion of rationality (depending on what one is consistent about) but it is definitely not a criterion of reality. In fact, it can be fairly easily shown that the main arguments for the existence of phenomenal consciousness are nothing other than elaborate poetic elucidations of the associative constellations which are affirmed in its behalf. Allow me to show this in three important cases: 1. The logical conceivability of zombies. Conceivability is a very dubious phrase, since if it is linked to an imagined situation or world, then it is never clear whether the particular alternate scenario has been clearly envisioned (One might claim that it imaginable that pigs could fly and everything else remain the same, but the physiological and environmental conditions of flying pigs are hardly given along with the phrases or the image of a pig with wings soaring above a landscape.) In fact, talking about logical conceivability in anything other than a vague, practical sense of what might have happened or happen in the future would involve an infinite task which would outstrip the capacities of any fantasy writer. And the more different the situation from the actual state of affairs, the more vagueness and imprecision looms. (Compare: it is imaginable that I had a beer instead of wine at dinner (but how? I would have had to go and get it, but my car is broken, and . . .) and it is imaginable that there are living beings composed entirely of mercury. In order to be used as premises in arguments, logically conceivable situations are required to have at least moderate clarity and imaginability. A world with zombies physically identical to us except lacking consciousness is logically possible. is obviously an example which, because of its lack of clear imaginability, renders it almost impotent from the outset. One can always interrupt such a thought experiment with what would that really be like questions, such as how could there possibly be physical identity without consciousness-identity, please specify what would make this difference possible. And the answer could not be: I don't know, but I can imagine it so it's imaginable. Conceivability has to be given pragmatic constraints; otherwise it amounts to vacuous abstraction. But the imagination of a world of unconscious zombies faces an even graver difficulty: it

15 presupposes that one already understands consciousness as a natural kind which could be present or absent, thereby begging the question concerning what it would prove. One does not need to pull out the modal handbook to show that such a configuration is what Daniel Dennett calls an intuition pump which is designed to extract and emphasize already pregiven commitments: if I can't even imagine consciousness as a natural kind in this world, then what use is it to imagine a world of zombies without it?xiv This argument refutes functionalism through presupposing it is not true, even through its illicit importation of a conscious-perspective into the world of zombies to watch them march blindly about. But this intuition pump is actually quite more effective than it seems. It invites the participant to imagine (transferring her perspective into it, almost like a god) a world of utter darkness, with no qualities, no presence, no meaning, no subjectivity, a purely mechanized hell of utter darkness, blacker than the quality of black. This world is associated with the living dead, which brings with it the reduction of the living human to an animated corpse: a horrible simulacrum of a person. The zombie world is nothing other than the state of reduction with no illusions allowed, nothing but pure reduction, everything shining and valuable pressed into the rubble of brute materiality. Such a thought experiment does not require clarity and distinctness to succeed. It succeeds precisely because it engages the central associations of the state of investment of phenomenal consciousness (through one's recoil in horror from the darkness of non-presence) and calls for their affirmation in comparison to their imagined opposite, increasing the original intuition's affective powers. For the sophisticated Christian, hell is not a place in the bowels of the earth but rather the experience of God departed, an image of the ashes rising from the smokestacks of Auschwitz. In a similar way, for the Hard Theorist, the disenchantment of the world through reduction brings about the threatened denial of that which is central to human being. In an internal reverberation, positive and negative images and associations play off of one another and bring about a sense of needing to defend the undeniable in the wake of its destruction. Of course when confronted with the problem of evil, the sophisticated Christian may attempt to wax theoretical, speaking of the withdrawal of God from the destiny of the world and likewise when confronted with the inability to functionally discriminate zombies from people, the Hard Theorist may wax ontological, speaking of the logical non-supervenience of the phenomenal on the physical, but in both cases, only those already committed to the founding intuitions understand the meaning of these relations. 2. The knowledge argument involving Mary's room. In this particular version of hell, the poor Mary is placed in a world without color, even though she is given the godlike ability of possessing all the information about her possible interactions with the physical world. Similarly to the zombie world, Mary's world is deprived, detached, and imprisoned, hooking directly onto the ingrained image of Plato's cave, holding its shackled prisoners. Like the zombie argument, the knowledge argument presupposes what it tries to show, since Mary is assumed to be phenomenally conscious of her black and white world. It is assumed that she already has some phenomenal information, just not all of it.xv If one denies she has any phenomenal information at the outset because one makes no sense of this term, then the argument dies immediately. Its trick is to associate the coming of color with the coming of her new knowledge, which makes even critical readers miss the fact that the possibility of phenomenal knowledge has

16 already been imposed within the argument. If there is no phenomenal information, then all that can be said is that Mary learns what it is like for her retinas to be directly stimulated by a red object, which apparently was excluded from all the physical information she had in place. The actual imaginability of any of this does not need to be commented on, as the reader will understand the position from the prior discussion. But once again, the argument is not really about Mary's new information. It is about our commitment to a world of color, about our fear of color-blindness, about the removal of direct contact with the world of nature, about the poverty of our enclosed experience and the richness we can open ourselves onto, all framed within the language of the having of phenomenal consciousness. Frank Jackson, self-affirmed qualia-freak, is no different than a sophisticated Jesus freak who finds that the entry of Christ into one's life involves a new sort of knowledge about what it is like to be a human being.xvi As such a person can truly be born again, their psychological life transformed through the advent of a newly affirmed meaning of the world, a Hard Theorist like Jackson is reborn into the phenomenal world, carefully attending to colors as colors, marveling at their shining magnificence, feeling as if we humans have been bestowed a precious gift of awareness through our cognitive configuration. 3. The argument for epistemic priority. By this point, it is clear that the only priority that phenomenal consciousness has comes from affective immediacy, not from representational proximity. The fact that the Hard Theorist immediately produces the associative constellation involved in the presentation of phenomenal consciousness makes it prior to any externally justified true belief, but this is not because it is internally justified but rather because it is immanently expressed as essential and basic The assumed position of the state of reduction would deprive all such internal statements of empirical meaning, since such meaning would be dependent on external correlations or connections, but then the Hard Theorist gives these statements meaning anyway through affirming them through the production of surrounding associational networks. I am here, I know this color before me, this quale is immediately evident before my mind's eye, and so forth are valued through being surrounded by images of an internal field, namings through privately voiced articulations, and feelings of closeness and vividness (making phenomenal consciousness seem plain and natural). Once again, it makes no difference if there really is such an internal phenomenal field, since ones internal means of expression would serve to obscure it rather than bringing it into evidential view; either one would have to utter Wittgensteins inarticulate sounds to indicate it as a subjective phenomenon or else one would reduce to the publicity of an associative constellation when one uses plain and natural language derived from everyday communication to indicate it. This, I take it, is the basis of Wittgenstein's critique of private language: in order to designate internal epistemological objects, one would have to construct a private language, but then no one would understand this language, not even the inventor, since there would be no external criterion for the correctness of the application of its terms. This means that actual attempts at designation of such objects do not use a private language of naming but rather a public language of expression, which is directly hooked to physiological and social circumstances which are available to everyone, but they are thereby turned into objects of third-person consideration. But such expressions are private in another sense than that of epistemological privacy. They are private because in order to give them value for myself, I must make the movement

17 whereby I give them meaning as icons of self-expression, and once I give them such meaning, no one can take that away from me. This capacity is not, as Rorty once referred to it as, one of conferred incorrigibility but rather one of self-assumed sovereignty.xvii These words, these images, these feelings become designated as who I am and what it is like to be me and any denial of their priority seems to be at best clinically detached and at worst barbarically oppressive. Compare: when the sophisticated Christian is asked, How do you really know God exists?, she will respond that there is no proof for God in the physical world and his being is unintelligible in a physical vocabulary, but yet (if she has strong faith) she may proclaim that she knows He exists in her heart and she feels His presence in her daily life. But of course knows and feels here have been given a special meaning, one of a private expression of personal involvement rather than a public expression of justified true belief. VI. On the Value of the Intuition of Consciousness This essay is written with full awareness that those invested in the intuition of phenomenal consciousness will regard it, at best, as damning with faint praise. If phenomenal consciousness is an aesthetic effect rather than a natural kind, then it loses its ontological irreducibility (although retaining interpretive irreducibility in the same way that physics will never help us understand the poems of Yeats), its epistemic priority (although retaining its affective and personal priority as the affirmed internal cathedral of experience), and its scientific importance as an object of study (although increasing its significance as a religious and artistic object). Philosophers, after all, do not want to be told that their elegant arguments are beautiful like Aristotle's heavenly spheres rather than correct like Pythagoras' geometry. But when confronted with the intuition of phenomenal consciousness, then one is forced to think from the vantage of the future. Either one day, far from now, it will somehow be discovered that there are special quasi-physical states with inner dimensionalities which wander around the universe like roving singularities and which can be described objectively in some unheard of future scientific ontology, an ontology which will show us that there were beings every bit as mysterious as the gods always dwelling among us, holy perpetual infants that were in danger of being thrown out along with the bathwater of religion by the materialist enthusiasm of the Late Enlightenment, or else such an ontology will never arise, and we will be faced with a clash of intuitions regarding the phenomenal for as long as the tenacity to orchestrate and cultivate such intuitions holds out. Obviously, I take the second horn of this futural dilemma. But even if the first horn proves the wiser choice, I still bet that from the vantage of that future ontology, the epistemic and logical insights into phenomenal consciousness (and even the designation of phenomenal consciousness itself) would look like mythological first clues into a phenomenon (like theories about humors played in the theory of disease) rather than theoretical building blocks towards a progressing science of consciousness. If this is the case, then those holding onto the intuition are still mostly entertaining and arguing within the enclosure of a mythology. It has been the purpose of this essay to show why and how the intuition of phenomenal consciousness founds such an effective and engaging mythology for the present, regardless of its truth. As a Hard Skeptic, of course, I think that this mythology is all that the intuition of phenomenal consciousness has going for it. Once the temples are built and the rituals are performed and the sacred scrolls are written, then the gods have lived on earth, because they were always identical, not with micro-physical components, but with the practices and associations through which they

18 were celebrated. But this is quite a bit to have going for it. A philosophy cannot expect to do much more than make explicit the cultural infrastructure in which it was germinated. The arguments of the scholastics concerning the nature of angels and God are not best approached through testing them for validity but rather through interpreting them as indicators of the development of the synthesis of Judeo-Christian and Arabic and Classical heritages, finding within them signs of a nascent Modern sensibility. Although we lack the future vantage from which the structures of today's philosophy can be hieroglyphically assessed, it can be ventured that the investigation of phenomenal consciousness and the arguments surrounding it may be taken by our future interpreters as expressions of resistance to the reduction of the personal to the mechanical by those very same individuals who are most proficient at understanding the functioning and relevance of the mechanical in human life. In order to resist the technologization of the self, the artist can paint a painting and the novelist can write a book, but what is the physicist or the neuropsychologist (or scientifically-trained philosopher) who forms her existence through the articulation of a scientific ontology to do? One answer to this question is for the physicist or neuropsychologist to take up painting and creative writing, safely compartmentalizing the personal and the reductive, just as some devout scientists do through keeping their personal faith outside of laboratory space. But some individual are too devoted to self-consistency for this strategy to work. Thus, there develop theoretical articulations of personal sovereignty which structure themselves through defenses against naturalistic reduction which are still framed within naturalistic language, availing themselves only to the basic infrastructure of the sciences, yet holding a place in their midst for the ineliminably human. In this essay, I hope to have shown that their travails are more Kierkegaardian than Newtonian and that they are aesthetically deeper than even they give themselves credit for. As a Hard Skeptic, I would usually opt for a good reading of Proust over a detailed essay on supervenience and zombies, not fearing the specter of reduction since I avoid all ontological commitments, analyzing phenomena such as mental states and neutrinos in relation to the practical normative spaces in which they are relevant rather than in relation to being itself. But I am also of the Hard Theorists' culture, feeling something to be neglected, slipping away into the void of electrochemical images. I can understand what the defenders of phenomenal consciousness are fighting for. It is all too easy for me to feel surrounded in doubled space, the outside world enclosed by my interior, yet holding me within its palms, in an impossible Escher doubling. It is all too natural for me to look at my love and say yes, she has this, this thing which I have too, she is not a concatenation of associations and not a ghostless machine but rather the center of a qualitative maelstrom. It is all too tempting for me to watch the sunset out the window and believe that there are darkened worlds with no sunrises, not because of the absence of suns but rather because of the absence of ethereal spaces into which they can shine. Although I fall from the heights of these investments when they occur, mediating them, aestheticizing, understanding them anthropologically as rituals of self-creation rather than evidence of self-discovery, I find the power and profundity of these intuitions of presence to exceed the errors with which they may be associated. Just as humans created great structures to the gods which existed only as manifestations of those very structures, so human beings may construct scanning devices which are supposed to detect phenomenal energy which yield

19 nothing other than the technological advances required to build them; and as in the first case, the second may provide benefits which far outweigh the truths which are directly revealed through their undertaking. In any event, whatever may occur in phenomenal research, the benefits of cultivating leaps into the interior in the midst of reduced space and of holding this interior open through the application of imagination and intellect outweigh the costs of wasting time on a non-entity. Perhaps, even, from the vantage of the mechanized world of the future, the conservative theoretical defenses of subjectivity will be numbered among our greatest works, providing images and hopes of private space in a world of anonymous objectivity, forever subject to surveillance.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009) David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 3. Ned Block, "The Troubles with Functionalism" in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Chalmers, TCM 102. See Thomas Nagel's What it is like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 1974, 435-50; Chalmers, TCM 94-99; Frank Jackson's Epiphenomenal Qualia, Philosophical Quarterly, 1982, 127-136; and Chalmers, TCM 101-103. Chalmers, TCM 110. See Chalmers' Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1997 for his discussion of types of materialism and deflationary strategies (of which this paper is one, although not included in his typology). Daniel Dennett, Sweet Dreams (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2005) 74-75. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), especially the first two chapters. See Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (New York, NY: Penguin, 2006) and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006). Paul Tillich presents this form of argument in The Dynamics of Faith (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1957). By sophisticated Christian I understand those who stand in various traditions stemming from theoretical approaches such as those presented by Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Tillich, Jean-Luc Marion, Mark Taylor and many others. Though these traditions are wildly disparate, none of them worries itself with the epistemology of God's existence. Thus, studies such as those detailed by Block in Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2007, 481-548 (where neurophysiologists attempt to neuro-locate phenomenal consciousness and distinguish it from access consciousness) will inevitably beg the question for those skeptical of the existence of phenomenal consciousness to begin with. Chalmers, TCM 110. See Dennett's Intuition Pumps in John Brockman's The Third Culture: Beyond The Scientific Revolution (New York, NY: 1996) 180-197. This argument in Jackson's Qualia directly invokes the idea that Mary is in a black and white room and has access to a black and white television which directly insinuates the idea of projected phenomenality in the very room, not to mention Mary's head. In Qualia, Jackson begins the essay with the confession, I am what is sometimes known as a "qualia freak." I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes. Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain, the kind of states, their functional role, their relation to what goes on at other times and in other brains, and so on and so forth, and be I as clever as can be in fitting it all together, you won't have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy, or about the characteristic experience of tasting a lemon, smelling a rose, hearing a loud noise or seeing the sky. Rorty argues this in the second chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.