Naturalism and the Problem of Consciousness

Todd Moody, Philosophy Department, St. Joseph's University

The problem of consciousness has received a great deal of attention from philosophers in recent years, while previously it received very little. This fact is striking enough to suggest a kind of metaphilosophical problem of consciousness, namely: Why did consciousness not figure more prominently in the (analytic) philosophy of mind before, say, 1990?1 I do not know any simple answer to that question, but suffice it to say that philosophers were very caught up with trying to explain the cognitive and intentional aspects of the mental, mostly setting aside the subjective or experiential aspects. Notable exceptions to this were the disputes about qualia and, of course, Thomas Nagel’s seminal “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” My own view is that this emphasis on the functional and representational aspects of mind was fueled by the strides being made on the empirical side in cognitive science. One of the lessons seeming to emerge from cognitive science is that the boundary between conscious and unconscious mental activity is not all that important, and, indeed, most of the really interesting cognitive work is unconscious.