Abstract
In this paper, I discuss three problems of consciousness. The first two have been dubbed the “Hard Problem” and the “Harder Problem”. The third problem has received less attention and I will call it the “Hardest Problem”. The Hard Problem is a metaphysical and explanatory problem concerning the nature of conscious states. The Harder Problem is epistemological, and it concerns whether we can know, given physicalism, whether some creature physically different from us is conscious. The Hardest Problem is a problem about reference. Recently some philosophers—among them David Papineau—who advocate a physicalist approach to both the Hard and the Harder problem have called into question the commonsense assumption that phenomenal concepts—subjective concepts that we apply directly to experience—refer determinately (modulo vagueness) to real properties that can be instantiated in minds other than my own. The Hardest Problem is the problem of explaining how, given physicalism, this assumption could be true. In this paper, I explore how these three problems appear from the perspective of a physicalist approach to consciousness – the “phenomenal concept strategy” – based on Brian Loar’s account of phenomenal concepts. My contention is that this approach can go quite far in handling not just the first two problems but the Hardest Problem as well.
This chapter discusses several problems concerning phenomenality. Phenomenal concepts are widely thought to be special and unique among concepts in that they refer—in some further specifiable way—directly yet substantially to phenomenal experience. Both the Hard and the Harder Problems presuppose that one’s subjective phenomenal concepts refer determinately—modulo vagueness—to real, objective states that can be instantiated in minds other than one’s own. The Hardest Problem, exactly like the Hard and Harder Problem, turns out to be another artifact of an irreducible conceptual dualism with regard to phenomenal experience. This account of referential determinacy in the face of the Hardest Problem invokes the spirit of Brian Loar’s attempt to account for referential determinacy in the face of Quinean considerations to the contrary. Loar sometimes describes phenomenal concepts as in some way “tracking” their referents. Canonical evidence for the neural correlates of phenomenality comes from the human case.