UDC 159 . 947 . 5 : 17 . 024 Dan Zahavi , Copenhagen Intentionality and Experience

Since the publication of Chalmer’s influential work, The Conscious Mind (1996), it has been customary to divide the philosophical problems of consciousness into two groups. Whereas the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness concerns the nature of phenomenal awareness and the first-person perspective, the ‘easy problems of consciousness’ mainly concern the notion of intentionality. But is it really possible to investigate intentionality thoroughly without taking the experiential dimension into account? And vice versa, is it possible to understand the nature of subjectivity and experience if we ignore intentionality, or do we not run the risk of thereby reinstating a Cartesian subject-world dualism that ignores everything captured by the phrase »being-in-the-world«? In my article, I will inquire whether phenomenal consciousness and intentionality are two sides of the same coin that cannot be separated without committing a fallacy of division. In his book The Conscious Mind David Chalmers introduced a by now familiar distinction between the hard problem and the easy problems of consciousness. The easy problems are those concerned with the question of how the mind can process information, react to environmental stimuli, and exhibit such capacities as discrimination, categorization, and introspection (Chalmers, 1996, 4; 1995, 200). All of these abilities are impressive, but they are, according to Chalmers, not metaphysically baffling, since they can all be tackled by means of the standard repertoire of cognitive science and explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. This task might still be difficult, but it is within reach. In contrast, the hard problem – also known as the problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995, 201) – is the problem of explaining why mental states have phenomenal or experiential qualities. Why is it like something to ‘taste coffee’, to ‘touch an ice cube’, to ‘look at a sunset’ etc.? Why does it feel the way it does? Why does it at all feel like anything? Chalmers’s distinction confronts us with a version of the so-called ‘explanatory gap’. On the one hand, we have certain cognitive functions, which can apparently be explained reductively, and on the other hand, we have a number of experiential qualities, which seem to resist this reductive explanation. We can establish that a certain function is accompanied by a certain experience, but we have no idea why that happens, and regardless of how closely we scrutinize the neural mechanisms we don’t seem to be getting any closer at an answer. In his book, Chalmers also distinguished two concepts of mind: a phenomenal concept and a psychological concept. The first captures the conscious aspect of mind: Mind is understood in terms of conscious experience. The second concept understands mind in functional terms as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior. According to the phenomenal concept, a state is mental if it ‘feels’ a certain way; according to the psychological concept, a state is mental if it plays an appropriate causal role. The first concept characterizes mind by the way it feels, the second by what it does (Chalmers, 1996, 11–12), and according to Chalmers it is the first concept that is troublesome and which resists standard attempts at explanation. In a later article from 1997, Chalmers seems to have modified, or at least clarified, his position slightly. He now concedes that such notions as attention, memory, intentionality etc. contain both easy and hard aspects (Chalmers, 1997, 10). A full and comprehensive understanding of e.g. intentionality would consequently entail solving the hard problem, or to put it differently, an analysis of thoughts, beliefs, categorization etc. that ignored the experiential side would merely be an analysis of what could be called pseudo-thoughts or pseudo-beliefs (Chalmers, 1997, 20). This clarification fits well with an observation that Chalmers made already in The Conscious Mind, namely, that one could operate with a deflationary and an inflationary concept of belief, respectively. Whereas the first concept is a purely psychological (functional) concept that does not involve any reference to conscious experience, the second concept entails that conscious experience is required for true intentionality (Chalmers, 1996, 20). In 1997, Chalmers admits that he is torn on the issue, and that he over time has become increasingly sympathetic to the second concept, and to the idea that consciousness is the primary source of meaning, so that intentional content may in fact be grounded in phenomenal content, but he thinks the matter needs further examination (Chalmers, 1997, 21). I welcome this clarification, but I also find it slightly surprising that Chalmers is prepared to concede this much. As far as I can see, the very distinction between the easy problems and the hard problem of consciousness becomes questionable the moment one opts for the inflationary concept. Given this concept, it seems natural to conclude that there are in fact no easy problems of consciousness. The truly easy problems are all problems about pseudo-thoughts etc., that is, about non-conscious information processing, but a treatment of these issues should not be confused with an explanation of the kind of conscious intentionality that we encounter in human beings. In other words, we will not understand how human beings consciously intend, discriminate, categorize, react, report, and introspect etc. until we understand the role of subjective experience in those processes (cf. Hodgson, 1996). Chalmers’s discussion of the hard problem has identified and labeled an aspect of consciousness that cannot be ignored. However, his way of defining and distinguishing the hard problem from the easy problems seems in many ways indebted to the very reductionism that he is out to oppose. If one thinks that cognition and intentionality is basically a matter of information processing and causal co-variation that could in principle just as well go on in a mindless computer – or to use Chalmers’ own favored example, in an experienceless zombie – then one is left with the impression that all that is really distinctive about consciousness is its qualitative or phenomenal aspect. But this seems to suggest that with the exception of some evanescent qualia everything about consciousness including intentionality can be explained in reductive (computational or neural) terms; and in this case, epiphenomenalism threatens. To put it differently, Chalmers’s distinction between the hard and the easy problems of consciousness shares a common feature with many other re302 SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA D. Zahavi, Intentionality and Experience 40 (2/2005) pp. (299–318)