Abstract

We may be tempted to compare physicalist attempts to understand consciousness with 18th century attempts to understand electricity. This may make us think that the former too though initially mysterious will ultimately be brought within the physicalist fold. But there’s a crucial disanalogy between the two: ‘What is consciousness?’ can be interpreted as two distinct questions: ‘What causes consciousness?’ And ‘what is it to be conscious?’ ‘What is electricity?’ can only be interpreted as ‘What causes electricity?’, ‘What is it to be electricity?’ being meaningless. Maybe physicalists have gotten so used to explaining phenomena where only the one question is applicable that they, I think erroneously dismiss those who entertain the other question. But the blame is not all one way. Those who entertain the ‘what is it to be conscious?’ question, think that because there is no physicalist answer to that question, therefore there must be a gap in the physicalist answer to the ‘what causes consciousness?’ question, a gap they try, like our friend here, to fill by postulating non-spatial things. Needless to say, these things don’t answer either question.