Been swotting up on “Consciousness Studies” in preparation for next week’s conference in Tucson. Hoo boy.

The third of Strawson’s leading theses is … that emergence isn’t possible. ‘For any feature Y of anything that is correctly considered to be emergent from X, there must be something about X and X alone in virtue of which Y emerges, and which is sufficient for Y.’ But Strawson holds that there isn’t anything about matter in virtue of which conscious experience could arise from it; or that if there is, we have literally no idea what it could be.

Hm. So what are we going to talk about for five days?

Strawson is strongly inclined to conclude [that] the subjects of the experiences that basic things have must be the experiences themselves … At the basic level, headaches have themselves.

I’m actually getting a bit of a headache, reading this review. Or the headache is getting a bit of me. Or of itself. Whatever.

If you have one experience and I have another, the total of our experiences comes to two; there isn’t a third experience of which the first two are the constituents. Well, if that’s true of you and me, why isn’t it also true of me and the little things I’m made of? How does their having their headaches help to explain my having mine?

Can we get away from the whole headache business, please?

Why not just say: some things are true about the world because that’s the kind of world it is; there’s nothing more to make of it.

Yes! Can we please say that? I’m totally for saying that.

Consciousness might emerge from matter because matter is the sort of stuff from which consciousness emerges.

You can get paid for writing stuff like this!

Anyhow, Strawson is right that the hard problem [i.e., the problem of how consciousness arises from matter] really is very hard; and I share his intuition that it isn’t going to get solved for free. Views that we cherish will be damaged in the process; the serious question is which ones and how badly. If you want an idea of just how hard the hard problem is, and just how strange things can look when you face its hardness without flinching, this is the right book to read.

Well, I got through this whole review (of Galen Strawson et al.’s Consciousness and Its Place in Nature in the 5/24/07 London Review of Books) without flinching. Not sure I want to double-or-quit by actually reading the book. Though perhaps I should. After all:

You can’t make metaphysics out of fudge.

I guess not. But out of a nice chewy caramel, perhaps?