Thought and Consciousness

Conscious experience presents the theory of mind with a seemingly intractable problem. We know with some degree of certainty that brain activity of one kind or another is responsible for it, yet we don’t know how to explain how this is even possible. If you think about what’s going on in your brain (electrochemical activity in neural tissue) and then about what is going on in your conscious experience, there is an apparent abyss of difference. How could that (neural activity X) produce that (the feeling of grief, for example)? This is the infamous “mind-body problem,” and it stubbornly resists solution by empirical science.

The standard approach to the study of the mind in analytic philosophy in the twentieth century assumed that the mind-body problem besets only one aspect of mentality – sensory experience (perceptions, proprioceptions, imagery), and that the study of the cognitive mind (thinking, believing, reasoning) could safely proceed in the absence of a solution to it. This outlook is now facing a serious challenge from philosophers (such as myself) who argue that conscious thinking is as much experiential as conscious seeing, hearing and smelling – though the experience of thinking is as different from seeing, hearing, etc. as they are from each other. We must, therefore, seek other ways of understanding the nature of the mind than reducing it to brain states and processes.

Background Reading: Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 435-450); Colin McGinn, “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” (Mind, New Series, Vol. 98, No. 391 (Jul., 1989), pp. 349-366)

David Pitt is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles.  He works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and metaphysics.  He is currently working on a book on the experience of thinking, entitled The Quality of Thought. His major publications include “Indexical Thought,” in U Kriegel, ed., Phenomenal Intentionality: New Essays, Oxford University Press, 2013; “Introspection, Phenomenality and the Availability of Intentional Content,” in T Bayne and M Montague, eds., Cognitive Phenomenology, Oxford University Press, 2011; “Intentional Psychologism,”Philosophical Studies 146, October 2009: 117-138; “The Phenomenology of Cognition, or, What Is It Like to Think That P?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXIX, July 2004: 1-36.