El problema de la conciencia en la filosofía de la mente y las ciencias cognitivas

The problem of consciousness is at the very core of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. It is quite complicated to take three consecutive steps in any given subarea of cognitive sciences without coming across this problem in one way or another. Nevertheless, what is the problem of consciousness? We could say it is the problem of explaining how the overall organized activity of something like a nervous system can give rise to something like a pain or joy experience. Of course, this is just a caricature: there are countless open debates in many specialized topics that fall under the so-called “problem of consciousness”, so much so that some pundits have been speaking for two decades of an interdisciplinary project called Consciousness Studies that would bring together specialists in philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, artificial intelligence and related disciplines. The following pages are aimed, on the one hand, at providing an overall perspective of this interdisciplinary field of research and, on the other, at refuting those who have been proclaiming the impossibility of solving the problem of consciousness –suggesting, furthermore, feasible pathways towards a solu-tion.The thesis is divided into three main parts: the first one is eminently expositive, the second argumentative and, the third, critical. We have entitled the first part “Histori-cal and conceptual approach to the problem of consciousness in contemporary philoso-phy and science”. Arguably, the heading does not seem to require clarification or justi-fication: we will start at the beginning, namely identifying the problem and briefly pre-senting the state of the art in the relevant disciplines. In order to achieve this goal, Chapter 1 introduces the problem from a historical point of view to provide the perti-nent context. In Chapter 2 we shed some light on the plural nature of the problem: as we shall see, there is not one single problem of consciousness, nor a single form of con-sciousness. Chapter 3 addresses one of the most controversial issues on Consciousness Studies: the phenomenal/intentional duality of the mental. In the first part of the thesis, this topic will be raised on a purely expository basis: we will define the intentional and the phenomenal, thus laying the foundations for the argument to be developed in the second part about the relations between these supposedly exhaustive, specific, homoge-neous and precisely delimitated aspects of the mental. Meanwhile, Chapter 4 outlines a schema of the ontological conceptions of consciousness, whereas Chapter 5 does the same for the different explanatory proposals. Finally, in Chapter 6 we will deal with the arguments intended to demonstrate that consciousness is an unapproachable object of study for the natural sciences. Such arguments seek to bolster the inexplicability of con-sciousness intuition, a customary hunch according to which any given theory of con-sciousness will collide with an insurmountable impasse. Once we reveal the low strength of these arguments, we will reformulate, in the second part, the terms the prob-lem of consciousness is currently examined under.After defending in the first part that there is no motive for discouragement and that there are no reasons of principle for supposing the inexplicability of consciousness, we turn to a “rethinking of the contemporary debate on the problem of consciousness” –the heading of the second part. To this end, in Chapter 7 we put forward a succinct defence of the naturalistic base from which we delve into our rethinking. Then, in Chapter 8, we argue that the problem of consciousness is the one the explanatory theories face and, hence, the ontological debate can not contribute to its solution. Having explicitly de-fined the problem and the different means to approach it, we take into consideration how it is usually treated, arguing that the endemic philosophical speculation about the relationship between the abstractions “intentional mind” and “phenomenal mind” can hardly help explain consciousness, and rejecting the oversimplification of the interpara-digmatic struggle between advocates of representationalism, inseparatism, enactivism or any other attempt to convince the scientific community that consciousness is a singular phenomena to be explained from a single theoretical framework or by a single discipline. In Chapter 9 we outline a rough sketch of a theoretical groundwork for the biology of consciousness, stressing the need to transcend the intellectualist tradition –which con-siders the mental as cognitive, the cognitive as calculation, and consciousness as the pinnacle of the cognitive pyramid– and taking seriously into account theoretical and experimental tools from affective neurosciences and comparative psychobiology. Final-ly, in the third part we comment the theoretical frameworks of Searle, Dennett and the neurophenomenologists.