Artwork by Jen Stark / Photograph by Harlan Erskine
No one doubts that our experience of phenomenal consciousness—the felt redness of fire, the felt sweetness of a peach, the felt pain of a bee sting—arises from the activity of our brains. Yet the problem of explaining how this can be so seems to many theorists to be staggeringly hard. How can the wine of consciousness, the weird, ineffable, immaterial qualia that give such richness to subjective experience, conceivably arise from the water of the brain? As the philosopher Colin McGinn has put it, it's like trying to explain how you can get "numbers from biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb." The philosopher Jerry Fodor recently claimed, "The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling."
If you smell theoretical panic, you're right. But are the scientific answers really so far out of reach? Have people been beguiled by the marvelous properties of consciousness into asking for the moon, while what is at issue is really much more down to earth? Everybody says they are waiting for the Big Idea. But perhaps the big idea should be that consciousness, which is of such significance to us subjectively, is scientifically not such a big deal.
It all depends on asking the right questions at the outset. I can show what I mean with the example of a well-known visual illusion. Consider what you might want to explain about the experience of looking at the object in the picture to the left (Fig. 1), a solid wooden version of the so-called impossible triangle. Since it is at first sight so surprising and impressive, any of us might very well innocently ask the (bad) question: "How can we explain the existence of this triangle as we perceive it?" Only later—indeed only once we have seen the object from a different viewpoint (Fig. 2), and realized that the "triangle as we perceive it" is an illusion—will it occur to us to ask the (good) question: "How can we explain the fact we have been tricked into perceiving it this way?"
Now, no one wants to think that consciousness is likewise some kind of trick. But let's nonetheless see where the analogy may lead. The standard philosopher's example is the case of what it's like to see red. So, suppose you were looking at a ripe tomato: What might you want to explain about the qualia-rich red sensation that you are experiencing?
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Since the qualia are indeed so up-front and remarkable, and since no one knows why this is, we are all, most probably, going to start off by asking what may be a bad question: "How can we explain the existence of these qualia as we experience them?" So here, again, it will only be if we undergo a radical shift in perspective and realize that the "qualia as we experience them" could be a mental fantasy, that we shall move on to asking what may be the good question: "How can we explain why we have the impression that such fantastic qualia exist even if they do not?" But, here is why it is likely to be so difficult to make this move: In the case of consciousness, we cannot simply change our perspective to see the solution. We are all stuck with the first-person point of view. So, the result is we persist with questing for the qualia as such.
Yet if consciousness is a trick, then of course this quest is a fool's errand. It will make no more sense to try to explain the existence of qualia than it would to explain the existence of the impossible triangle. What we should be doing instead is trying to explain just how we have been set up—and why.