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Theories of
Subjectivity
Bill Meacham, Ph.D.
Austin Philosophy Discussion Group
8 October 2014
www.bmeacham.com

Introduction
How is mind related to body? How is consciousness, or

awareness, or experience related to the physical world?

First, what do we mean by these words?
Exercise: Say something to yourself silently.

Definitions (1)
Subjective:
Detectable or observable in principle by only one person. First-person.
Not directly observable by anybody else.
Private, hidden, interior.
Mental.
Examples: Thoughts and feelings, particular shades of colors,
particular qualities of sounds.
Objective:
Detectable or observable by more than one person. Third-person.
Public, exposed, exterior.
Physical.
Examples: Trees, chairs, other people, chemical elements, subatomic
particles.

Definitions (2)
Experience:
The subjective, first-person aspect of a persons taking into account
his or her environment.
Includes the entire spectrum from alert and focused attention down to
dim and vague apprehension.
Being Conscious:
Experience in which the objects of which one is conscious are present
vividly and intensely.
Being Aware:
The entire spectrum of experience, particularly the less vivid and acute
end. In my terminology one can be aware of a great many things
without being conscious of them.

The Hard Problem

(From Chalmers, Consciousness and its Place in

Nature.)
How and why does experience arise from physical
processes? (A restatement of the mind-body problem,
how mind is related to body.)
Easy problems: Explaining functions in terms of
mechanisms: how physical processes discriminate stimuli,
report information, monitor internal states and control
behavior.
Hard problem: Why is the performance of these functions
accompanied by experience?

Types of Explanation
Reductive
High-level phenomena are explained in terms of low-level
phenomena.
Experience is explained wholly in physical terms.
Non-reductive
Experience is a basic part of the explanation.
Materialist
Experience is seen as a physical process (reductive).
Non-materialist
Experience is seen as non-physical, even if closely associated with
the physical (non-reductive).

Arguments Against Materialism

Explanatory
Physical accounts explain at most structure and function, or
structure and dynamics.
But experience is more than just structure and function.
Conceivability
Thought experiment: Zombie, a being physically and behaviorally
just like a human, but lacking subjectivity. If this idea is
conceivable, then experience is more than the physical.
Knowledge (Epistemology)
There are facts about experience that are not deducible from
physical facts.
Thought experiment: Mary is a neuroscientist who sees only in
black and white. If she sees red, she learns something new.

Various Theories of Consciousness

Types A, B and C: various forms of materialism
Reductive; physical is primary. Requires no expansion of physical
ontology.
Types D and E: Dualism
Non-reductive. Requires expansion of ontology.
Type F: Dual-aspect monism, or panpsychism
Non-reductive.
Type O: Dualism
Non-reductive.
Type I: Idealism
Reductive; mental is primary.

Type A Materialism
There are no facts over and above physical function and

structure that need explaining. There is no ontological gap.

Explaining function and structure explains everything.
Two flavors
Eliminativist experience does not exist.
Analytical Functionalist the concept consciousness is defined in

wholly functional or behavioral terms (Dennetts Intentional Stance).

There is no epistemic gap between physical and experiential

truths.
When Mary leaves her black-and-white room she gains an ability, but

no further knowledge.

Problem: Type A does not actually explain experience. It

denies what is to be explained.

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Type B Materialism
There is an epistemic gap, but no ontological gap.
When Mary leaves her black-and-white room she learns old facts in
a new way.
Phenomenal states can be identified with certain physical

or functional states, analogous in certain respects to the

identity between water and H2O, or between genes and
DNA. Experience just is states of the brain.
The concept of consciousness is distinct from any
physical or functional concepts, but we may discover
empirically that these refer to the same thing in nature.
Problem: Type B is at best ad hoc and mysterious, and at
worst it is incoherent. It just asserts primitive identity.

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Type C Materialism
There is an epistemic gap, and it is closeable in principle.
The apparent gap is due to our own limitations.
Physical explanation has to do with
Structure: Particles, fields and waves described in space and time.
Dynamics: How states of affairs change over time.
When we learn enough about the brain, we will have

explained experience.
Problem: Type C collapses into Type A or B materialism or
into Type D Dualism or Type F Monisim.

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Type D Dualism
There is an ontological gap.
Substance dualism: There are two kinds of stuff in the

world, physical and mental (Descartes).

Property dualism: There is only one kind of stuff in the
world, and it has both physical and mental properties.
Interactionism: The mental exerts causality on the
physical and vice versa.
Objection: The physical world is causally closed. There is
no room for mental influence.
But quantum mechanics seems to have a place for the
conscious observer in the collapse of the wave function.

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Type E Dualism
Epiphenomenalism: Experiential properties are distinct

from physical properties, but have no effect on them.

Physical states cause phenomenal states, but not vice
versa.
Compatible with
Substance dualism
Property dualism.
Emergentism, that experience emerges when physical matter gets

organized in a complicated enough manner.

Advantage: Retains physical causal closure.

Problem: Inelegant. Counter-intuitive. Our mental states

do seem to affect our physical states.

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Type F Monism
Phenomenal or proto-phenomenal properties are inherent

in the fundamental level of physical reality.

Entities with intrinsic phenomenal qualities stand in causal
relations to each other within space and time.
Physics emerges from the relations between these entities.
Consciousness emerges from their intrinsic nature.

Everything has an inside and an outside, a subjective

aspect and an objective aspect.

Known as Panpsychism, Neutral Monism and Dual-aspect
Monism.
Problem: How do experiential properties of tiny elements
combine into full-blown human consciousness?

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Type O Over-determined Dualism

Phenomenal properties are ontologically distinct from

physical properties, but phenomenal properties play a

causal role with respect to the physical nevertheless.
One way this might happen is by a sort of causal
overdetermination: physical states causally determine
behavior, but phenomenal states cause behavior at the
same time.
The mind enters the physical causal nexus without
altering the structure of the network.
Problems:
Fragmented view of nature
Lucky psychophysical laws

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Type I Idealism
The physical world is itself constituted by the conscious

states of an observing agent. (Berkeley)

Physical states are constituted holistically by a
"macroscopic" mind.
Problems:
Non-natural
Does not explain physical regularities (laws of nature)

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Which one makes the most sense?

Empirical studies cant decide.
Assess how well each theory meets the following criteria:
The theory is congruent with our experience. It fits the facts. No
fact is left unexplained by the theory.
The theory is internally consistent. It has no contradictions within
itself, and it all hangs together elegantly.
The theory is coherent with everything else we consider true.
The theory is useful. It has predictive power. It gives us mastery
both over physical reality and in the realm of the intellect.

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Sources
Consciousness and its Place in Nature, by David

Chalmers. http://consc.net/papers/nature.html.
In Defense of Panpsychism, by Bill Meacham.
http://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=568.

Bill Meacham, Ph.D. http://www.bmeacham.com/