Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current
discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of
reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed
to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.1 But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the
mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H2O problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine
problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak
tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.
Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these
unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But
philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms
suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and
body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a
mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less
interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. The most important and characteristic feature of
conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to
explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is
applicable to it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it
exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.
Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we
cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what
provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than
man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar
systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has
conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There
may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be
implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental
states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the
organism.
We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3 I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.
more ... (
http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf )
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