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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts Two Problems for Neuroscience: the Topic and the Subject
of Consciousness Much attention has been devoted recently to the so-called "Hard Problem" of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995), but it can be seen to be the conflation of two different problems, each solvable (with some hard work). One is the topic problem: how can neurons, even organized collections of billions of neurons, which individually know nothing about such topics as cities, mountains, and paintings, nevertheless combine their activities to produce thoughts (and other mental states) that are about such distal topics? The solution to this problem must lie in the domain of computational neuroscience, broadly conceived. The subject problem is a problem of imagination management: it seems to many thinkers that a theory of consciousness that "leaves out" the Subject of consciousness (the Ego, the I, the Self, the "first-person point of view") evades the issue, is simply not about consciousness at all. It seems to other thinkers that any theory that doesn't "leave out" the Subject has not yet begun to explain consciousness, because it has postponed the decomposition of that Subject into proper parts that are not, themselves, Subjects. How can well-informed, intelligent people be of such opposite convictions? The solution requires us to diagnose some ways in which theories can misdirect our imagination, creating phantom leftovers where none exist. >>Dr. Dennett will continue his discussion informally on Friday, 12-15, at a brown bag lunch meeting entitled "Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?". Please join us again at 12:30pm in Room 106 of the Krasnow Institute building.
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