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Actual Consciousness: Database, Physicalities, Theory, Criteria, No Unique Mystery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2015

Ted Honderich
Ted Honderich*
Affiliation:
University College, London
*
t.honderich@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

(i) Is disagreement about consciousness largely owed to no adequate initial clarification of the subject, to people in fact answering different questions – despite five leading ideas of consciousness? (ii) Your being conscious in the primary ordinary sense, to sum up a wide figurative database, is initially clarified as something's being actual – clarified as actual consciousness. (iii) Philosophical method like the scientific method includes transition from the figurative to literal theory or analysis. (iv) A new theory will also satisfy various criteria not satisfied by many existing theories. (v) The objective physical world has specifiable general characteristics including spatiality, lawfulness, being in science, connections with perception, and so on. (vi) Actualism, the literal theory or analysis of actual consciousness, deriving mainly from the figurative database, is that actual consciousness has counterpart but partly different general characteristics. Actual consciousness is thus subjectively physical. So physicality in general consists in objective and also subjective physicality. (vii) Consciousness in the case of perception is only the dependent existence of a subjective external physical world out there, often a room. (viii) But cognitive and affective consciousness, various kinds of thinking and wanting, differently subjectively physical, is internal – subjectively physical representations-with-attitude, representations that also are actual. They differ from the representations that are lines of type, sounds etc. by being actual. (ix) Thus they involve a subjectivity or individuality that is a lawful unity. (x) Actualism, both an externalism and an internalism, does not impose on consciousness a flat uniformuity, and it uniquely satisfies the various criteria for an adequate theory, including naturalism. (xi) Actual consciousness is a right subject and is a necessary part of any inquiry whatever into consciousness. (xii) All of it is a subject for more science, a workplace. (xiii) There is no unique barrier or impediment whatever to science, as often said, no want of understanding of the mind-consciousness connection (Nagel), no known unique hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers), no insuperable difficulty having to do with physicality and the history of science (Chomsky), no arguable ground at all of mysterianism (McGinn).

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 76: Mind, Self and Person , May 2015 , pp. 271 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2015 

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