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Subjective Qualia from a Materialist Point of View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Paul M Churchland
Paul M Churchland*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Extract

It is frequently argued that the phenomenological or qualitative features of our sensations will never be satisfactorily reduced by a purely materialistic neuroscience. They constitute, it is often said, a permanent barrier to the reductive aspirations of physlcalism. In what follows I provide a critical examination of several of the most popular of these arguments. I also explore the transformation and expansion of human subjective consciousness that a successful psycho-physical reduction could sustain. The conclusion is that, far from being Immune to neurophysiological explanation and reduction, the subjective qualities of our inner lives will enjoy a dramatic unfolding as the representational and computational strategies of the brain are revealed.

Type
Part XIX. Qualitative Experience
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1984 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1984 , 1984 , pp. 772 - 790
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This is an abridged version, with various additions, of a larger paper (Churchland 1985). My thanks to the editors of the Journal of Philosophy for permission to reprint much of that paper here as a target for the commentaries of Shoemaker and Cummins. Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Institute for Advanced Study, by a research/study leave from the University of Manitoba, by SSHRC grant no. 451-83-3050, and by the University of California, San Diego. Thanks to Ernest Nagel, Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson, Daniel Dennett, Philip Hanson, Charles Marks, and Brian Loar for critical discussions of earlier versions of this paper.

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