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Conceiving The Impossible And The Mind-Body Problem

Intuitions based on the first-person perspective can easily mislead us about what is and is
not conceivable.1 This point is usually made in support of familiar reductionist positions on the
mind-body problem, but I believe it can be detached from that approach. It seems to me that the
powerful appearance of contingency in the relation between the functioning of the physical
organism and the conscious mind -- an appearance that depends directly or indirectly on the first-
person perspective -- must be an illusion. But the denial of this contingency should not take the
form of a reductionist account of consciousness of the usual type, whereby the logical gap
between the mental and the physical is closed by conceptual analysis -- in effect, by analyzing
the mental in terms of the physical (however elaborately this is done -- and I count functionalism
as such a theory, along with the topic-neutral causal role analyses of mental concepts from which
it descends).
In other words, I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between
the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided
on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I wont go through my reasons
for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significannot
attempts by a number of
philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to
believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails -- simply in virtue of our
mental concepts -- that the system is conscious.
So I want to propose an alternative. In our present situation, when no one has a plausible
answer to the mind-body problem, all we can really do is to try to develop various alternatives
one of which may prove in the long run to be an ancestor of a credible solution. This is a plea
for the project of searching for a solution that takes...