Hylomorphism and the Construct of Consciousness
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Hylomorphism and the Construct of Consciousness William Jaworski1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract The hard problem of consciousness has held center stage in the philosophy of mind for the past two decades. It claims that the phenomenal character of conscious experiences—what it’s like to be in them—cannot be explained by appeal to the operation of physiological subsystems. The hard problem arises, however, only given the assumption that hylomorphism is false. Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. A human is not a random collection of physical materials, but an individual composed of physical materials with a structure that accounts for what it is and what it can do—the powers it has. What is true of humans is true of their activities as well. The latter are not random physiological changes, but structured ones: we engage in them by coordinating the ways our parts manifest their powers. Structured activities include perceptual experiences. Consequently, everything about a perceptual experience, including its phenomenal character, can be explained by describing the perceiver’s perceptual subsystems, the powers of those subsystems, and the coordination that unifies their activities into the activity of the perceiver as a whole. Conscious experiences thus fit unproblematically into the natural world—just as unproblematically as the phenomenon of life. Even exponents of the hard problem of consciousness agree that there is no hard problem of life. Consequently, if hylomorphism is true, there can be no hard problem of consciousness. To insist that there is such a problem, then, is implicitly to reject hylomorphism. The concept of consciousness that motivates the hard problem is as much a theoretical construct, therefore, as the concept of life that motivates an obstinate vitalist. Keywords Consciousness · Hard problem · Hylomorphism · Perception · Reduction · Qualia
1 The Hard Problem of Consciousness The problem of explaining how consciousness fits into the natural world—the so-called hard problem of consciousness—has held center stage in the philosophy of mind for the past two decades (Chalmers 1996, 2002). Conscious states have a phenomenal character—there is something it’s like to be in them. If we assume that consciousness is a natural phenomenon, the difficult task is explaining how and why physical processes give rise to phenomenal character—how and why they don’t occur “in the dark,” so to speak, without any accompanying experiences. Chalmers contrasts the hard problem with what he calls the easy problems of consciousness—problems such as explaining, “the ability to discriminate stimuli, or to report * William Jaworski [email protected] 1
Philosophy Department, Fordham University, 113 W. 60th Street, New York, NY 10023‑7484, USA
information, or to monitor internal states, or to control behavior…” (2002, pp. 247–248). Explaining these operations poses no special philosophical problems, according to Chalmers, for in the case of each, there is no diffi
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