Mind and Body Phil 336

ANTIMATERIALISM ABOUT THE MIND

Introduction

At the very end of his fine book Philosophy of Mind, pub- lished in 2006, the distinguished American philosopher Jaegwon Kim writes that the “limit of physicalism” is qua- lia. Physicalism can be defended, he thinks, for everything except qualia. Qualia cannot, like everything else mental, such as intention, be functionally defined, Kim thinks, and qualia cannot be reduced to anything physical; nor can they be defined at all. Yet Kim is still a proponent of a natural- istic worldview, a worldview that includes mind. How can this be? He writes in Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, that “physicalism is not the truth, but it is the truth near enough, and near enough ought to be good enough.”1 This is stylistically good stuff and a good way to end a book, but it simply will not do from a philosophical point of view.

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C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 6 . T h e M I T P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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Over here is a worldview, physicalism, which claims that everything is physical. Over there is a clear case, according to Kim himself, of something nonphysical, with a probably potentially infinite number of instances: all the colors, all the sounds, all the smells, all the tastes, all the objects of the other sensory modalities, and all the objects of sensory modalities that we do not experience, if there are any, for example the ultraviolet perception that bees have, their perception of polarization, and so on. To be fair we must also include all the nonsensory “what it is like’s,” all the shades and mixtures and degrees of anger, for example, or depression, or confusion, or elation, or delight, transport, ecstasy, joy, exhilaration, glee, bliss, and on and on. So we have a theory to which there is an infinitely extensible counterexample, and Kim says that is “near enough.” Near enough to what, one wonders? Not the truth, most cer- tainly. If we conjoin the truth of physicalism with the truth of the proposition that millions of nonphysical color qualia and all the rest can exist, then what we have, by straight logic, is a falsehood, since the second proposition contra- dicts the first. The conjunction of a truth and a falsehood is a falsehood. How is that falsehood “near enough” to the truth? It seems to amount to something like “If physical- ism were only true, though it isn’t, it would be true.”

Kim is a philosopher with no phobia about meta- physics, so it is hard to understand why he did not start fresh, saying to himself, “Here is the situation. Everything

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suggests physicalism; but it is false. For one very important class of irreducible entities stands against it.” And then he might perhaps have asked the question, “How can that be? How on earth can that be how things are? How can it be that everything points one way, but the truth lies in the opposite direction?” Kim’s blind spot about this may have to do with the fact that colors and the other qualia are ap- parently causally inactive. His own work has been devoted to the topic of causation and the application of the concept to a variety of philosophical problems; causal inactivity, I suspect, is for him “near enough” to nonexistence. But this is just prejudice against noncausal concepts.

Next I want to examine some well-known arguments, three in number, all going in roughly the same direction, that have produced what some have regarded as an antima- terialist or antiphysicalist tendency in the philosophy of mind recently. The three arguments that I will consider, in their different ways, record the fact that qualia are indeed a problem for physicalism, or worse, that the existence of qualia is a counterexample to the claim of physicalism that everything, including the mind, is physical. Proponents of these arguments have sometimes been lumped together by others as mysterians, but the label is unhelpful. None of the arguments has as its conclusion the proposition that anything is mysterious. Their only conclusion is the very unmysterious proposition that physicalism is false. Before looking at the arguments themselves, I will say something

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about a view that shares with the three arguments the con- clusion that physicalism is false, but has little or no appeal for most people, though it was the dominant philosophy in the religiously tinged philosophical atmosphere of more than a century ago.

Idealism

To be antimaterialist or antiphysicalist about the mind one does not have to accept the larger claim made by idealism. “Idealism” is a name given to a number of different phi- losophies of mind, prominent in the nineteenth century, and no single account of it has been universally accepted by philosophers. Idealism is a metaphysics that tells us some- thing about the nature of reality, as a metaphysics is sup- posed to do. Just as physicalism tells us that everything is physical, and materialism tells us that everything is mat- ter, idealism tells us that everything is spiritual, or that everything is mental. But what does this mean? A minimal way of stating the claim is that reality is nonphysical, so that idealism is the contrary of physicalism. At the least idealism is antiphysicalist.

This formulation of idealism has a big advantage. If we take reality to be everything that exists, then if the body exists, idealism asserts that the body is nonphysical. So if as we have seen the mind–body problem is the problem

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Just as physicalism tells us that everything is physical, and material- ism tells us that every- thing is matter, idealism tells us that everything is spiritual, or that everything is mental.

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of squaring the four propositions in our inconsistent tet- rad, idealism easily solves the problem by denying the first proposition, that the body is physical. For according to ide- alism, nothing is physical. So there is no difficulty about nonphysical and physical things interacting, since there are no nonphysical things.

Two big questions remain. The first one is how any- one could believe such a view. How could one believe that the body is nonphysical? In one extremely common Eng- lish language usage “the body” is taken to be the physi- cal part of the human being or the organism, whether or not there exists any part other than the physical part. In this usage it would actually be contradictory to say that the body is nonphysical, since that would be to say that the physical part of the human being, whether or not there exists any part other than the physical part, is nonphysical.

There is also a view called phenomenalism, however, descended from the work of George Berkeley and David Hume, which analyzes statements about bodies, including human bodies, into statements about actual and possible experiences or “ideas,” in the terminology of John Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and the other British empiricists. If it were successful, this program of translation would preserve the truth of every statement about physical bodies, while understanding them at bottom as statements about pos- sible or actual experiences or sense data. To say that there

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is a sandwich in front of me is to say that there is a whitish- brown trapezoid in my visual field, with yellowish fringes (that’s the cheese hanging out of the edges of the sand- wich), and so on, and also to say that the whitish-brown trapezoid will disappear between two pink strips (that’s my mouth, phenomenalistically interpreted) in the next ten minutes, and so on.

A number of objections to phenomenalism have car- ried a lot of weight, such a lot of weight that there are few phenomenalists (or idealists) left. To my mind the biggest objection is that there is no explanation as to why the experiences appear in the sequences they do. Nonphe- nomenalists will explain this by a very natural reference to physical objects and their behavior. The reason the perceptual trapezoid disappeared between the two pink strips in my field of vision, says the nonphenomenalist, is that the sandwich went into my mouth. But this expla- nation is not available to the phenomenalists. They will have to start by saying that the trapezoid disappeared be- tween the pink strips because the sandwich went into my mouth, but then for them this second statement comes down to the statement that the trapezoid disappeared between the pink strips. However, a phenomenalist who takes the phenomena to be both sensed and unsensed objects of experience, or what Bertrand Russell called sen- sibilia, can deal with this worry. The forthcoming explana- tions are just the regular explanations of physics and the

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other sciences, and of the common sense that goes along with them.

So there are ways to defend phenomenalism at this point, but to my mind a deeper question for idealism is how mind and body interact, given that neither is physi- cal. If we are idealists, bodies do not have linear dimen- sions or a position in space. One still wants to know how minds and bodies interact. There is something very un- clear about what idealism asserts, both about mind–body and body–mind causation or interaction. Physical things interact with physical things because physical particles push physical particles along. Does one thought interact with another by mind-particles pushing mind-particles along? But there are no mind-particles. Is it just a mat- ter of magic, then? Behind these difficulties is a mystery about mind–mind interaction. How do mental things, such as feelings, interact with other mental things, such as thoughts, since neither of them possesses physical mass and energy to fuel the causing? This last question is of course a question not just for idealism, and so I shall set it aside as we look at the three arguments for antiphysi- calism. Though the interaction of the mental with the mental is a fascinating problem, it is not really a part of the mind–body problem. The mind–body problem is not the mind–mind problem, whatever light it may shed on the mind–mind problem.

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Three Important Antiphysicalist Arguments

At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next, physicalism seems largely to have run its theo- retical course as a solution to the mind–body problem. Al- though most philosophers are probably physicalists today in spite of this, when toward the end of the last century a number of significant antimaterialist arguments appeared (I discuss one from Thomas Nagel, one from David Chalm- ers, and one from Frank Jackson), there was no unanimity of response from the physicalists.2 It would be worthwhile to have a study just of what the physicalist responses to the arguments were and how they worked, what in Ger- man is called a Rezeptionsgeschichte, a history of the recep- tion of the arguments. The truth is that for physicalists the Rezeption seems to have been all over the map. Most of the critical responses were physicalist, of course, because typically the antiphysicalists like me were happy to see the arguments prospering philosophically, if generating con- troversy is what philosophical prospering is.

It is also important to know something about these arguments because they may tell us something about what it is that has eluded physicalism, and, just as importantly, they may tell us why it has eluded physicalism. The argu- ments themselves do not offer a solution to the mind–body problem, and they have been combined with a number of different solutions. For example, some have taken Nagel’s

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argument, inaccurately in my view, as a support for simple psychophysical dualism, whereas in reality it is an argu- ment for skepticism about our grip on the mind–body problem, combined with some intriguing hints about how this skepticism can be overcome; Chalmers’s argument has been offered in support of both functionalism (though not about qualia) and dualism of all sorts, not just his own “naturalistic dualism”; and so on.

Nagel’s argument is perhaps the most dramatic of the three arguments, but it has the logically weakest conclu- sion of the three. His conclusion is not that physicalism is false, but that though it is true, we do not see how it could be true. We do not understand how it could be true that our experience is physical, much as someone leaving a chrysa- lis in a box might not understand how it could turn into a butterfly by morning. A physical explanation is objective, but “the phenomenological features of experience”—qua- lia—are subjective. They belong to a particular point of view, which is ours, and they cannot be detached from that point of view. The physical line of thought, however, will “gradually abandon” that point of view, leaving us with no understanding at all of the subjective.

Nagel asks us to imagine trying to understand what it is like to be a bat. The subjective experience of a bat, he claims, is one that is closed to us, with our entirely external knowledge of it. Objective phenomena, such as lightning and thunder, can be understood completely and

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objectively. The subjective experience of the alien charac- ter of the bat’s consciousness can be understood neither completely nor objectively.

It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high- frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in the attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.3

It seems to me one could have a vivid hallucinogenic experience, one that turned out to be exactly like the expe- rience of a bat, though one might never know that it was accurate. The hallucination might even include the experi- ence of living in a cave with other bats, an experience that one subsequently discovered to be completely accurate, perhaps by visiting the cave. It is doubtful whether there is any particular limit on what is imaginable, and that includes what is logically impossible. Philosophers are more or less agreed on the imaginability of the logically impossible. Seen from this point of view, Nagel’s point really expresses

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the dependence of imagination on sense experience. His problem is not the so-called other minds problem. That is the problem, like the mind–body problem going back in its most unregenerate form to Descartes, of how we can know the mind of another, in addition to knowing the external condition and behavior of that person’s body, presented to us in experience. Nagel’s problem is rather the problem of a systematic gap in our knowledge due to a particular biolog- ical limitation, a limitation we have as a group or species. We cannot know what it is like for bees to see ultraviolet light, for example, without to some extent—exactly to the extent that we come somehow to possess the ultraviolet perceptual systems of the bee and cease to be ourselves— becoming the bee.

However, one cannot argue that I cannot imagine what it is like to be you on the ground that then I would have to be you. With those we know well, perhaps especially when they are in trouble, we can imagine without difficulty what it is like to be them. We have a greater empathy than Nagel allows. Indeed, if his argument works, it establishes that we can never have any empathy at all, and that we are all psychopaths. If empathy is what it is commonsensically taken to be, which is to be able to feel the feelings that another has, then empathy is logically impossible.

I do agree with Nagel, however, that our experience cannot be reduced to the physical, though not for the rea- son he gives. The phenomena of sound cannot be reduced

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to waves, color to electromagnetic radiation, and so on. But this is not because the phenomena express a particu- lar point of view or subjectivity. It is instead a result of the simple fact that colors and sounds are not waves and they possess properties that are incompatible with the proper- ties of waves. Sounds do not have amplitude, for example, though they do have volume, so it makes no sense to ask for the amplitude of a particular sound, rather than the volume. Colors do not have amplitude, though they do have brightness, so it makes no sense to ask for the ampli- tude of a particular color.

It may help to try to locate Nagel’s view on the map of the mind–body problem given to us by the inconsistent tetrad with which we started. Nagel certainly accepts that the body is physical, and that the mind and the body in- teract. He also sees that physical and nonphysical things cannot interact. He accepts the gulf between the physical and the phenomenological. So he is stuck with the ques- tion how it can possibly be true that the mind is physi- cal, which is what he wants to believe anyway. We cannot understand, he thinks, how it could be true that the mind is physical, though it is, despite the fact that we can un- derstand and even have evidence that it is true. What is left is just that there is a difficulty for physicalism, and Nagel suggests that the path toward what he rather mys- teriously calls an “objective phenomenology” is the right one to take.

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I suspect that the concepts of imagination or concep- tion and possibility may play very much the same role in the Australian philosopher David Chalmers’s famous zombie argument against physicalism as they do in Na- gel’s argument. In Chalmers’s article of 1995, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind, he argues that our world contains con- sciousness, but that we can conceive of a world exactly like it physically—physically identical—in which the creature corresponding to Chalmers, say, and identical to him phys- ically, does not have consciousness.4 This creature would be a Chalmers zombie. From the possible existence of this entirely physical creature, it follows that consciousness is not physical—for if it were, the zombie Chalmers would have consciousness in virtue of its physical characteristics, in particular the neurophysiological ones. Just by exist- ing it would be conscious. The zombie argument, by the way, has a history before Chalmers that goes back earlier in twentieth-century philosophy, and can ultimately be traced to Descartes’s considerations concerning the pos- sibility that the mind should exist without the body.

There are interesting arguments against the possi- bility of zombies, but none of them are particularly con- vincing, to my mind. For example, suppose that Chalmers smells his morning coffee and says, “I smell coffee.” What he says is true. But what about the zombie Chalmers? He (or it) does not smell coffee, in the sense that he has the

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appropriate qualia, so when he says “I smell coffee,” in this sense, his statement is false. So, the objection goes, the two beings are not physically identical. But of course there is no real difficulty here, since truth and falsity have never been supposed to be physical concepts, or not by many, rather than semantical ones, or if they have they should not have been. The difference between the truth of what Chalmers says and the falsity of what zombie Chalmers says does not constitute a legitimate physical difference. It consists of two logical relationships between what Chalm- ers says and what his zombie twin says, and the facts.

Much of the argument directed against Chalmers’s zombies has been about the possibility of zombies, and has deployed sophisticated considerations concerning ab- stract possibility. Are zombies possible? Could they exist? If we say that they can, we seem to be begging the question against physicalism, for we are assuming that the physical zombie is not conscious, and that the physical part of the zombie is not responsible for the zombie’s consciousness, since there is no such thing. If on the other hand we say that nonconscious zombies cannot exist, we seem to be begging the question against antiphysicalism, by just as- suming physicalism.

A simpler though inconclusive argument against the zombie argument is that saying that the zombie is not conscious begs the question against physicalism. A central-state materialist, for example, will say that the

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physical part of Chalmers, which includes his brain, is conscious, and that to say otherwise in a premise merely states but does not argue for the denial of physicalism. The trouble is that it will not do to assume that the zom- bie is conscious, for by the same token that would assume without argument that physicalism is true. It is not clear where the victory lies here, but what Chalmers has to say in later papers about a positive solution to the mind–body problem for qualia seems to be a form of property dual- ism. Mind and body interact, because they are not distinct, so Chalmers’s position is not dualism. But the mind does have nonphysical properties, as shown by the zombie ar- gument. For Chalmers the mental does not reduce to the physical. Chalmers is a property dualist, but with a differ- ence. The difference is his treatment of the proposition that the mind is nonphysical. In one sense Chalmers de- nies this proposition. The mind is perfectly physical. But in another sense, he accepts the proposition: the mind is also nonphysical, in that claims about the mind do not re- duce to claims about anything physical. We cannot take a proposition about what I am thinking, say, and reduce it to a proposition about the neural circuitry in the brain. Nev- ertheless, my thinking is the neural circuitry in my brain. This position is reminiscent of the earlier central-state ma- terialist’s view that though “gene” does not mean “DNA,” nevertheless the gene is DNA, and that though “mind” does not mean “the relevant part of the central nervous

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system” (CNS), nevertheless the mind is the relevant part of the CNS. Both the central-state materialists and Chalm- ers detect an ambiguity in the first proposition that the mind is nonphysical, and are able to have their cake and eat it, both affirming and denying the proposition, in the two different senses. In one sense, the property sense, the proposition is true, and in another, the substance or thing sense, the proposition is false.

It is still a troubling question, though, in what way mental states could be physical states. This is not a mat- ter of what we say or think, but of the way we are to con- ceive of my thinking of my grandmother in Italy as a set of neurons firing, or for that matter anything “emerging” out of a set of neurons firing or “supervening” on them. That is Nagel’s worry. We cannot imagine following a sequence of events in which the sequence of the events of the neu- rons firing followed far enough will continuously lead to the event of my thinking of my grandmother in Italy. For this reason, Nagel and those who followed him in a similar line of thought (Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Joseph Levine, and Colin McGinn are the most prominent) have been lumped together as “mysterians,” who proclaim the mys- tery of consciousness. But the word is not really a good fit for Chalmers and Jackson, who would be better described simply as antiphysicalist.

Chalmers has also discussed a form of panpsychism that he calls “panprotopsychism.” Panpsychism is the view

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that fundamental physical objects have mental or conscious states, so that the mental is built into the world alongside the physical from the beginning. It is as though God could not help creating parallel mental states whenever he cre- ated the fundamental physical states. “Panprotopsychism” looks like a load of typographical errors, but it is not. It is the view that the fundamental physical objects have “pro- toconscious” states. These are the precursors of conscious states that, though they are not themselves conscious states, can together cause conscious states to emerge from their combination or collection. Collectively they are con- scious states, but only collectively. Here it seems to me that Chalmers’s view looks like a form of emergentism, or per- haps epiphenomenalism. It has some of the difficulties of those views, and perhaps the extra one of seeming to sug- gest that somehow the protoconscious states are thought to be in some more primitive sense already conscious. For if they lack consciousness individually it really is difficult to see how a collection of them could have it. (This sort of difficulty is known as “the combination problem.”) And Chalmers’s view seems to inflate the mind–body problem to cosmic proportions. The relation between mind and body will emerge for every part of the universe (this is the “pan” bit) that has a psychic part.

Chalmers himself does write that he is not sure that the arguments for panpsychism are sound, but he also is not sure that they are not sound. His remarks, read in context,

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suggest at the least a tremendous sympathy with the argu- ments for panpsychism, to the extent that he seems to be giving his own view, whereas I do not feel the same rush of excitement in his arguments going in the other direction. His own project seems to be one of working out ways in which physical and nonphysical things can interact, or do something that plays the role of interaction. He offers, for example, the hypothesis that information might play the role of the fundamental something that has both physical states and states that carry qualia. So information could manifest itself in one way or the other, and this might be regarded as interaction of a sort. It is an interesting specu- lation, but no more, I think, because it is very hard to see how a sequence of bits in a bitstream—traveling optical in- formation, for example in a telecommunications network, made up of a flicker of successive light and dark states at a point in the fiber, or 0s and 1s—could turn itself into a stream of qualia or consciousness. It would be an event of biblical proportions.

Chalmers is prepared to concede, however, that his is a very speculative theory, though it may just do work to mitigate the epiphenomenal implications of the zombie argument. The zombies behave physically like their con- scious counterparts, but in that case there appears to be a problem in understanding how consciousness has any effect on the physical. Chalmers thinks as a result that we must work toward seeing how consciousness and the

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physical can work together, or in what way it can be false that physical and nonphysical things cannot interact or do something as good as interact. I am not even a little bit con- vinced by all this, because I just cannot see how something digital like “information” (1s and 0s) could turn itself into the color red. This really is just nonsense. The information whizzing around in a CPU does not out of itself produce red. The color arises on the computer monitor, not from information as such, but from codes yielding coordinated physical and optical effects in the phosphor dots, plus the contribution of the eye, for example in the optical fusion of red and green to produce yellow. (Yellow is not physically present on a TV screen, as can be verified by examining it with a good magnifying glass.) Which effects occur is de- pendent on the information presented to the monitor, but the color that appears does so for the usual physical and psychological reasons detailed in the science of color, prin- cipally from the explanation of how the electron beams striking the phosphor dots produce different colors, not from pure information theory.

An argument related to the zombie argument was pro- posed by Frank Jackson, another Australian philosopher. (Why, I wonder, have two-thirds of the best arguments against physicalism come from Australians? Perhaps it is because the previous generation of philosophers in Austra- lia had more leading physicalists than anywhere else, apart perhaps from the United States, so that the antiphysicalist

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arguments were a reaction to the prevailing view. Or per- haps it is something in the beer.)

Of course, there are more than three arguments against physicalism, but the three I discuss here have been among the more influential and the most discussed. Jackson’s ar- gument in “Epiphenomenal Qualia” is simplicity itself. He asks us to imagine a brilliant color scientist, whom he calls Mary. Mary is brought up and lives in a black-and-white environment. She is “brilliant” in the sense that she pos- sesses all the information given by a completed physical science of color, including neuroscience. She has all of this information at her fingertips. Now comes the day when she opens the door and leaves her achromatic environ- ment. She steps into the fully colored world. It seems that she will acquire some new information, assuming that her color vision system starts to work fairly quickly; she learns something new. Perhaps we might wish to say, though Jackson does not, that she finally learns what red is, what blue is, and so on. In any case, she learns what these colors look like. But if she has learned something new, and gained information in addition to the totality of physical informa- tion, then not all information is physical information.

In a separate argument in the same paper Jackson also describes a character called Fred, who sees a color that “standard human observers” do not see. All the physical information in the world will not help an observer (I shall call him F-red) who does not see this new color—perhaps

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it is a shade of red—to know what it is that Fred is seeing. F-red is like Mary before she leaves her room. F-red has all the physical information that there is or could be, but he still does not know what Fred sees. (Jackson is of course assuming that there could be a novel color, which is natu- rally something that has been argued about.)

Both of Jackson’s arguments look valid, and if they are, they establish that the mind is nonphysical, or at least that we have nonphysical information about the mind. Some- time after publishing his argument, however, however, Jackson took it back. He had decided that it led to dualism and that the dualism it led to is epiphenomenalist. This meant that the qualitative states whose nonphysical char- acter he had championed, though they exist, are without effect on human behavior. There they are, but they have no effects. Epiphenomenalism is hard to believe, however, not least because, as we saw earlier, it has all the problems of dualism, and more of its own. (Two-way epiphenome- nalism might be better, but that is just dualist interaction- ism.) As part of his self-apostasy Jackson came to believe that sensory experience in general is representation, so that what is important about it is the information it gives, not its qualitative character. Or rather, its qualitative character is representation.

Is this a good line to take? Suppose that there existed a solipsistic two-entity universe, a world with only two things in it: a perceiver, and the perceiver’s qualitative

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  antimaterialism about the mind    105

experience, a single quale. There is ex hypothesi nothing for the quale to represent, but it seems undeniable that the perceiver experiences it. We might think that he could come to enjoy it.

One is bound to feel that the three antiphysicalist ar- guments have something in common. Their conclusions are not exactly the same, of course. Nagel’s argument has the conclusion that we cannot see how our first proposi- tion (“The mind is nonphysical”) can be false. Yet it is, be- cause physicalism is true.

The zombie argument starts with the fact that the Chalmers zombie is possible. If the zombie exists, he or perhaps “it” is not conscious. It is physically identical with the whole of Chalmers’s physicality. But there is more to Chalmers; Chalmers is conscious. So consciousness is not physical. Like Jackson’s argument, Chalmers’s argument has as its conclusion the proposition that the mind is non- physical and that physicalism is false. Jackson realized quickly the epiphenomenalist implications of his argument for the mind–body problem, and abandoned it. Chalmers took the heroic line of trying to see ways in which dualism could be true, and that is what has led him to consider pan- psychism. His views come from someone who is no matter what prepared to take the mind–body very seriously, and panpsychism, though it may seem bizarre, is a reflection of this seriousness.

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The mind–body problem is not going to be made to go away easily, and neither is consciousness. Consciousness may be less important in the general economy of the mind than the more enthusiastic of the “qualia freaks” suppose, but the three antimaterialist arguments attest to its real- ity and importance. For Nagel, the mind is physical, but we cannot see how that is possible, and that is the power of the mind–body problem. If we cannot see how something is possible, we are bound to respect the view of those who believe that it is possible. But this is not a solution to the mind–body problem. It is a declaration that physicalism is true, but incomprehensible. The second half of this claim is true, though, even if the first is false.

For Jackson and Chalmers, the qualitative part of the mind is nonphysical, and so they are dualists. Jackson’s du- alism is epiphenomenalist, and he found that in the end it was not a position he could live with.

Chalmers has stuck to his guns, and he has toyed with exotic theories such as panpsychism that build dualism into the fabric of things. The difficulty here is that he is not giving us an account of the very thing of which Des- cartes could not give us an account. Even the panpsychist ought to be able to give a coherent account of the relation between the mental and the physical, and he does not. His position is sound enough, to the extent that it does recog- nize the “data” (the inconsistent tetrad) that fuel the origi- nal problem. The trouble is that the mind–body problem

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The mind–body problem is not going to be made to go away easily, and neither is consciousness.

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metastasizes into the same problem across the entire uni- verse. Why give us infinitely many more instances of the mind–body problem than we already have? It is of course open to the panpsychist to retort that if one instance of the problem is solved, they all are, so the numbers do not mat- ter. Either way, though, it is better to look for a solution where one is to be found.

Let us look next at the scientific solutions that have been offered to the problem.

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