2025 Theses Doctoral

Rescuing Experience from the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Burns, Ellen Nora

How do we explain consciousness (defined, as it standardly is, in terms of phenomenal experience) in scientific terms? This problem is one central strand in what is known as the mind-body problem, a problem generated routinely by the dichotomy of the physical and the mental, viewing these as fundamental and exhaustive metaphysical categories with which to understand the world. Conceiving of the world in these terms leaves two core approaches to explaining consciousness. One is monist, according to which the world is either fundamentally physical or fundamentally mental.

On this view, consciousness is either something that infuses all of nature, everything in the world being in some sense ‘mental’, or consciousness is entirely reducible to the physical, everything in the world (including consciousness) being in some sense ‘physical’. By contrast, the dualist approach views the world as containing two sets of properties, the mental and the physical. On this view, consciousness is explained as fundamentally mental, but also as metaphysically distinct from the physical and therefore in need of unifying with the physical in some way.

I develop an alternative approach to understanding consciousness, drawing on Noam Chomsky’s work and his argument that we cannot formulate a ‘mind-body’ problem because we have no adequate conception of ‘the body’ with which to formulate it. According to Chomsky, the only conception of ‘the body’ that the sciences have known was to be found in the Early Modern conception of the world as a large-scale mechanism or ‘machine’ . This was the concept of ‘the body’ taken for granted by the ‘mechanical philosophy’, a scientific framework that viewed the world as operating in causal terms, made up of nothing but inanimate matter, whose essence was fixed by the properties of shape, size, and motion.

To explain the world physically meant demonstrating that every phenomenon and event (thus, every body) in it is mechanistically conceived in this sense. Chomsky points out that Newton undermined this worldview when he explained motion by a theory that gave a central place to a force (‘gravity’) that the theory itself cannot explain. Gravity is a force that acts on bodies at (often great) distances from each other, thus transcending the mechanistic idea that direct contact must be the condition of influence.

When Newton transformed physics into a discipline that mathematically characterizes the world in terms of a system of laws that explain every seemingly contingent feature in it, he produced a deterministic theory of all events that occur in the career of bodies in nature, without telling us what the nature of body, matter, or the physical is, in the sense that earlier mechanical natural philosophy sought to do. I use this dissolution of the notion of mechanism to ground my claim that monist-versus-dualist approaches to consciousness are unnecessarily restrictive to understanding consciousness, and in particular, its relation to the unconscious. My argument, further, will crucially turn on my claiming that endemic to the traditional approach is the systematic reduction of our experiential (and more generally, mental) lives, to the parts of it that are consciously accessible to us from the first-person point of view.

Drawing on the literature in linguistics, neuroscience and in trauma theory, I argue that our experiential life is more complex than this traditional picture of the mind suggests. One’s experiences, for instance, are not always consciously accessible, and yet may not be ‘physical’ in the traditional philosophical sense. By developing this alternative Chomskyan framework, I move away from monist-versus-dualist frameworks to understand experience, pursuing instead normative frameworks and trauma-theoretic frameworks to understand it. I argue that these frameworks are more explanatorily powerful than the traditional paradigm in explaining the nature of our experiential life.